The BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) digital transformation is booming. In fact, the global call center AI market is expected to grow from $1.6 billion in 2022 to $4.1 billion by 2027—that’s a 21.3% annual growth rate.
But with growth comes more competition. Smaller BPO contact centers are struggling to keep up with pricing and service quality.
Why?
Because they’re missing the tech that powers top-tier support teams.
Lucky for you, there are solutions that can help your BPO contact center land more clients by speeding up your customer service, resolving more tickets, and cutting costs.
Enter: AI for BPOs. This technology gives BPOs the tools they need to compete with the biggest names in the industry—and win.
In this article, you’ll learn:
- How leading BPOs use AI in their processes
- What companies look for in contact center outsourcing
- Ways to benefit from using AI in your business
Let’s dive in!
How BPOs are using AI
From instant replies to voice bots that sound just like a real person, AI is transforming BPO call centers and driving business growth. Let’s look at how BPOs—whether startups or global enterprises—are using AI to streamline their workflows.
- Agent Assist: Wouldn’t it be great to have an assistant who tells your agents how to process returns, reminds them of company policies, and speeds up support? AI tools provide real-time suggestions to call center agents during live calls and chats. Your team can get quick answers, relevant knowledge base articles, or notifications in case of compliance issues.
- Agent coaching: Coach your agents in real-time to speed up onboarding, improve performance, and reduce mistakes. AI analyzes call recordings and transcripts to identify patterns, track performance, and highlight areas for improvement. Agents can quickly learn how to best support your clients’ customers.
- Conversational AI: Many businesses incorporate Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVRs) as part of their support stack to handle routine calls. AI-powered chatbots and voice bots use natural language processing (NLP) to manage common customer support questions, reducing the need for human agents. They can handle bookings, answer FAQs, or escalate issues when necessary—just like your human staff would.
- Sentiment analysis: Many customers avoid AI self-service, believing it’s too robotic to understand their needs. Ultimately, they don’t think their problem will get resolved accurately. But modern AI can analyze speech patterns, word choice, and tone to detect emotions like frustration or satisfaction in real time—helping de-escalate tense moments or route issues to the right team.
- Self-service: AI enhances self-service portals with smarter search functions, virtual assistants, and predictive help. Customers can resolve issues on their own using interactive FAQs, chatbots, and relevant documentation. They don’t need to scroll through countless irrelevant blog posts—AI suggests exactly what they need.
How AI helps smaller BPO contact centers outperform the competition
In 2024, in the U.S. alone, private AI investment grew to $109.1 billion, with countries like China and the UK also gaining momentum. Nowadays, most clients, investors, and stakeholders want to see how your business integrates AI into your processes. However, many companies still use one-time solutions that don’t deliver sustainable or measurable results.
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These one-time solutions don’t:
- Seamlessly integrate with existing workflows
- Leverage enough data to drive meaningful insights or relevant suggestions (across activities like agent coaching or AI-powered chat)
- Adapt to each of your clients’ specific business needs or customer behaviors and expectations
The biggest BPO contact centers have the luxury of building their own AI systems and training them on large amounts of data to work at the same calibre as their human teams. However, growing BPOs don’t have enough resources to build such large and integrated systems. That’s where outsourcing solutions come in handy.
Not one-off tools, but AI solutions that you can fully integrate into your workflows and showcase to your clients as efficient technology that delivers tangible results.
Let’s see how you can use a white-labeled BPO AI tool to offer your clients enterprise-grade solutions that match top-tier brands.
1. Lower costs
Traditionally, BPO clients are billed by the hour per agent—say, $15/hour for a team based in the Philippines. In this model, clients are essentially paying for:
- The number of interactions an agent handles per hour
- Adherence to call and response time SLAs
- Resolution speed
But agent productivity isn’t always consistent—one hour, they might resolve eight cases, the next, only two.
By putting AI on the frontline, you can shift from time-based billing to a performance-based model.
Instead of charging per hour, you can charge based on:
- Resolved tickets
- Customer satisfaction scores
- Interaction quality and outcomes
This approach gives your clients clearer value—and you get rewarded for results, not just time spent.
2. Employee turnover management
How often do you need to replace your contact center representatives? Most call centers experience around 60% annual employee turnover. It usually happens because people in call centers work seasonally, part-time, or they can’t handle the fast-paced environment.
However, high employee turnover can be pricey for a company and hinder your contact center management. Research shows that replacing existing workers costs between half to twice the employee’s annual salary. It eats into the budget you present to your clients. Not to mention the time spent looking for new hires and onboarding them.
AI solutions help in two ways:
First, you can use AI tools to automate many routine tasks, meaning you need to hire fewer agents.
Secondly, AI tools—like Capacity—act as always-on coaches, helping support agents from day one. Instead of spending days on traditional training, new hires can ramp up faster with real-time, in-the-moment guidance. Not sure if they can issue a refund? They simply ask their AI assistant, which pulls the answer instantly—based on company policies, past cases, and customer data.
3. Level the playing field with larger BPOs
When companies evaluate BPO partners, they care most about:
- Cost-efficiency
- Operational speed
- Modern tech capabilities
- Ability to scale quickly (especially if demand changes cyclically)
- Quality of support
AI helps smaller BPOs check every box. By integrating AI tools into your operations, you can deliver enterprise-level performance—without enterprise-level overhead—giving you a competitive edge, even against the industry giants.
How AI helps you outperform the competition:
- Automate repetitive tasks: AI handles routine work like call routing, data entry, and FAQs—reducing your reliance on large teams. This means you can offer competitive pricing without compromising on quality.
- Scale support: Conversational AI chat agents and voicebots can manage high volumes of customer interactions across channels, delivering enterprise-level efficiency without enterprise-level headcount. Focusing on omnichannel conversational bots is key, especially as the use of AI-powered voice assistants continues to rise. In 2024, there were over 8 billion voice assistants in active use worldwide, which is twice as many as in 2020.
- Deliver real-time analytics: AI-driven contact center analytics provide deep insights into customer behavior, agent performance, and operational trends. This allows your BPO to make faster, data-informed decisions—insights that once required full analytics teams to uncover.
- Automate post-call documentation: Instead of spending minutes after each call writing summaries, agents can rely on AI to transcribe, summarize, and log key details directly into your CRM—freeing them up to assist more customers. Take Capacity, for example. It helps BPOs stand out by becoming the AI-powered front line of their support teams, boosting performance across key metrics. Plus, being able to showcase an AI-driven solution in RFPs gives you a serious edge when competing for new clients.
4. Omnichannel customer engagement
Customer expectations for BPOs are higher than ever. Today’s buyers want fast, consistent support—no matter the channel—and BPOs need to help their clients deliver on those expectations. Clients expect your agents to have full context, including purchase history and past issues, whether they’re communicating via email, chatbot, phone, or SMS.
That’s why the omnichannel customer engagement market is expected to keep growing by about 13% each year, reaching nearly $18 billion in revenue by 2030.
AI tools help you achieve this by unifying customer experience across all your communication channels. They ensure that customer context and history are preserved no matter where the conversation happens:
- Chatbot
- Call
- SMS
If it were up to your human agents, you’d probably have different people responsible for different channels. It takes time to pull relevant information or transfer customers to other departments. With unified and historical data living in one system, everything happens instantly. This means no interruptions, long wait times, or frustrated customers.
A great example is the Daily Harvest meal delivery service. They offer AI-powered assistance across multiple communication channels. In this case, they used automation to speed up customer support across their web and social media platforms.
This is a perfect illustration of how AI-powered omnichannel tools allow smaller BPOs to deliver a cohesive, responsive, and personalized customer journey without needing massive infrastructure or headcount.
Win more contracts and stand out from the competition
With investments in AI-powered solutions and businesses growing, you can’t wait and see – you need to act now. Modern and accessible automation tools allow BPO contact centers of all sizes to compete with the biggest brands in the market and offer their clients exceptional service with a strong price-to-quality ratio.
Modern AI solutions:
- Automate repetitive tasks
- Reduce customer wait times
- Are easy to scale
Combined with results-oriented pricing, you can offer your clients versatile outsourced contact center services at the best price.
These are just a few of the ways AI helps BPOs like yours grow and thrive. If you want to attract more customers and provide exceptional service, we invite you to try Capacity’s AI solution for BPO contact centers. We tailor our technology to meet the needs of your team, your clients, and their customers. Sounds good?
FAQs
The key difference is in the channels used. A BPO call center handles only inbound or outbound voice calls, such as customer support, telemarketing, or collections. A BPO contact center manages multiple communication channels like calls, emails, live chat, social media, and messaging apps.
AI is used in BPO to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance customer experience by:
– Automating repetitive tasks like data entry and call summaries
– Using conversational AI across multiple channels
– Deploying agent assist tools that provide real-time support during calls
– Using sentiment analysis to gauge customer emotions
– Forecasting demand and customer behavior
– Coaching teams to improve agent performance
AI won’t replace BPOs entirely, but it’ll transform them. Routine, repetitive tasks will be automated, but human agents will still be essential for:
– Complex problem-solving
– Empathy-driven interactions
– Managing escalations
The best tool for your BPO business is the one that can be tailored to your clients and their customers. Omnichannel tools that can handle different requests, coach your team, and handle routine requests are usually preferred by BPOs.
BPOs operate in different models. For example, there can be:
– Offshore BPOs that outsource support to other countries
– Nearshore BPOs that outsource to a nearby country
– Domestic BPOs that outsource within the same country
– Front-office BPOs that focus on customer-facing services like support, sales, and marketing
– Back-office BPOs that focus on internal processes like accounting, HR, and procurement BPO services