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3 Signs Your BPO Doesn’t Want Your Business 

It’s been a year of record-setting consolidation in the BPO industry.  

Concentrix acquired Paris-based Webhelp, creating a $9.8 billion behemoth that could bring in around a thousand new clients and boasting 440,000 employees. Majorel merged with Teleperformance for $3.3 billion and will become 500,000 people strong. And not too long ago, Sitel and Sykes merged as well; the combined company has $4 billion in revenue and 160,000 employees.  

And those are only the biggest deals.  

What does this mean for clients – the companies who are outsourcing their customer service teams to these gigantic BPOs? Studies show that industry consolidation leads to lower quality and higher prices. Smaller clients – even those with hundreds of customer service agents – may start to feel like they’re not getting the attention they need from their BPO partners.  

Clients with under 100 agents will fare even worse.  

If you outsource your customer service to these BPO giants, and you’ve only got a few hundred agents, you’ve probably noticed these things: 

  • Less flexibility 
  • Lack of attention to your feedback 
  • Training and quality issues 
  • Higher employee attrition 
  • A feeling like you just don’t matter to your BPO 

In some cases, these are signs of neglect. In other cases, the BPO might actively be trying to get rid of you. Large BPOs serve clients with tens of thousands of agents – they don’t have much use for smaller firms.

Here are a few real-life examples from Peak Support clients and prospective clients. If a BPO does one of these things, it’s a sign they don’t want your business and it’s time to check out a smaller BPO.

1. The BPO pressures you to move your team to a different location. 

This is most likely if you have a U.S. team; BPOs don’t like U.S. teams because they’re lower margin than offshore locations. They’ll ask you repeatedly if you want to move offshore, even if you’ve made it clear that you do not. 

2. The BPO tells you that at your team size, you should just hire temps. 

This example came from a SaaS company. Their team had 20 agents, but they were looking to outsource only 5 to start, and they were talking to a BPO with >15,000 employees. 

BPOs of this size and larger don’t like small clients. They may take them on; I’ve heard of BPOs with 400,000 employees taking on 5-person teams. But they don’t want them, and they’ll treat them accordingly. In this case, the BPO was taking on some other tech work for this client, but clearly wasn’t interested in the support team.

3. The BPO quotes you WAY above market rates. 

We talked to a company that had over 100 agents offshore at one of the biggest BPOs in the world. They wanted to test out a new 5-person line of business. The BPO quoted them almost 50% above market rates for this new, small LOB. 

The benefits of a boutique BPO 

Peak Support’s goal is to say “yes” to clients, even if the immediate opportunity is small. Taking on “small” and “unattractive” opportunities is how we’ve grown to 2,000 employees. 

One of our largest clients started as a two-person team at a tech startup. When the startup got acquired, the acquiring company asked us if we wanted to take on a really tough line of business that none of the other BPOs wanted.  

It was understaffed with unhappy customers, long wait times, and 99% agent utilization (read: agent burnout). We said yes. Fast forward, we now have hundreds of agents handling multiple highly complex LOBs. 

The lesson we learned: Keep saying yes.  

We’re a boutique BPO with enterprise capabilities. That means we’re small enough to care about smaller clients. But we can also be with you when you’re ready to scale. Our teams range from 1 team member to 500+ and we have the QA, training, and WFM capabilities to manage enterprise teams.

If your BPO is saying “no” too often, then NOW is the best time to get in touch with Peak Support.