Call Centers in the Philippines: The Rise of KPO

As we all know, businesses are faced with the increasing levels of global competition and challenging customers and employees.  Cost competitiveness and time-to-market have become directly linked with outsourcing and even more so with off shoring. Many companies have embraced business process outsourcing by becoming fast, flexible, and integrative, focusing on customers, competition, teams, time and process management. Philippine BPO is not simply a new business operations strategy.  Rather, it emphasizes process as well as hierarchies with special emphasis on outcomes, particularly customer satisfaction. This growth and evolution of the BPO call centers sector has given rise to yet another wave in global outsourcing which is KPO or knowledge process outsourcing.

Even though KPO owes its existence to BPO, it is a completely different entity. BPO industry usually attracts low end work. This includes employee payroll, data entry, technical support, voice calling, and other back end support. Mostly, BPO requires firms to acquire simpler operational model as workers are only required to gain process expertise perform their tasks. In comparison, KPO industry involves outsourcing of high end knowledge work.

This includes research work on intellectual property, legal support, equity research, market research, business research data analysis, and financial analysis. To perform these duties, workers are required to have expertise like analytical skills, business or domain knowledge, legal skill set, drafting, and technical know-how along with knowledge of processes. These services are usually provided by comparatively higher-skilled workforce like MBAs, Doctors, Lawyers, Engineers, and other professionals having expertise in specific domain.

Overall, we see growing client interest in KPO. The sector is viable, vibrant and likely to grow. It also faces challenges, which are in some ways similar to those faced by the ITO and BPO industries. However, KPO will continue to hold client attention and will gain through a steady growth rate.