Today I'll wade into the waters and talk about a hot topic these days, which is the future of the BPO industry. There's a lot of varying opinions and thoughts on it, from, "It's the end of the world; everything's gonna be automated," to, "Business as usual," and a whole lot in between.
I'm going to step back and look at it a little differently. First, I'm not distinguishing the difference between a BPO contact center and any other contact center that's in-house, because at the end of the day, we're all trying to accomplish the same thing: delivering compelling and excellent customer experience at the best price point possible. AI or no AI—that’s the end goal.
In BPOs, it's our job to lead the industry in how that gets done.
What I think about every day, when I sit down with my morning or afternoon coffee, is: How do we be the best at that? How do we deliver the best customer experience in the best-run contact center? That's the goal for BPOs on the planet. And that leads to an interesting set of questions. Notice I didn't ask, "How do we survive the AI apocalypse?" or "How do we deploy AI?" or anything like that.
The answer starts with just basic principles in economics and running and growing a business—or a service business, wherever you are.
The first operating principle is that we need to increase our capabilities—what we can bring to our customers and to the market, whether it's through products, services, or better execution of what we already do. We need to increase our capacity to deliver those things, and we need to do it in a way that consumes fewer resources. If you can bring those three things together, you're going to have a comparative advantage in the market.
Last year, we grew faster than we ever have. What we did was look at all of our constraints across the organization and ask: If we landed 1,000 seats, 10,000 seats, or even 100 seats today, where would things break down? Or where are things already breaking down with the business we have now?
Then, how do we leverage new tools and new ways of thinking with AI to solve for those and unlock new potentials? We started with training and recruiting, which is a pain point for every contact center on the planet. Attrition is a problem, no matter how good you are, how great your culture is, or how great your pay is.
You're constantly hiring. If you're growing, leaning into clients, you're hiring and training. And, frankly, our training program was a mess. We were throwing people at it, but finally, we stepped back, refactored the whole thing, and asked: How can we use AI to help us scale, improve the efficacy and outcomes of training, and then scale it so that we can do what I call "scaling in place"?
That means: How do we go from 1, 10, 100 seats, or 1,000 seats of new business without adding incremental headcount—except, really, at the agent level?
So we rebuilt the whole program from the ground up. What we have today is a set of great training modules and world-class content. Now, clients are coming to us asking, "Can you do the same thing for us? Can you build these modules or license yours to us?" That's created a new revenue stream for us and might even create a new business.
With recruiting, we've done the exact same thing. Again, recruiting is something every call center in the world has to do, and ours was painful. I strongly believe that if you can improve your talent acquisition strategy, you're going to improve retention, quality, and everything downstream.
We took a very data-driven and AI-driven approach. We've shrunk the time it takes to fill a new hire class, improved the quality of people in those classes, and improved the retention and quality coming out of that.
We're focusing on everything else before worrying about AI agent assists or any of that. We've unlocked new revenue, increased our capacity, and scaled as we add new logos and headcount.
The next piece is selecting and deploying technologies in production. Every CCaaS player has their AI. Tom Weird calls them "Whatchamacallit bots"—automation tools, voice automation, etc.
Not all BPOs are created equal. The industry isn’t monolithic or homogeneous. If you've rented thousands of seats offshore for simple phone calls, like minimum-wage workers checking order statuses, that’s a high-risk profile in the industry. We're not in that business.
For everyone else, it's about delivering these new capabilities better than yesterday without blowing your margins.
That's why we're big fans of Zoom. Their API documents let us build and deploy whatever we need, and their pricing is clear. They ship new code monthly, so we're constantly getting more for our dollar—and so are our customers.
If I look at Nice, Five9, Genesis, or Amazon Connect—most of the BPO world’s go-to tools—you're paying through the nose. Nice is like $250 per agent per month. Amazon Connect is in the same range. You're adding $1-$1.50 per agent hour just to get out of bed in the morning. No thanks.
With Zoom, we’re running a good piece of our business on their Essential licenses for $65/month. We get transcription, APIs, and analytics. Our analytics make the big kids cry themselves to sleep because we bring that to market.
When we move up the stack, we run on Elite licenses for higher-complexity calls. We wanted agent assist, better accuracy, workforce management, call quality, and screen capture—all in one.
This is how we show up fully loaded to any deal or opportunity. We're delivering capabilities, capacity, and results at a price point nobody else can match.
To me, that's how we're growing over the next 12 months—and forever. It’s an operating model: VXOS. Swap out Zoom or any tool, and you still follow the same principles.
AI is just a tool to eliminate constraints, unlock new capabilities, and scale. These are things everyone should be doing, whether you’re 5 seats or 50,000.
Our role in the industry is to help lead, deliver these capabilities to the market, and share what works. We've got scars from failed experiments—some we built and had to rebuild—but when we find things that work, we hit on all cylinders and scale.
That's our opportunity—even to partner with other BPOs. Some very large BPOs understand what we're doing with our sister company, Endeavor CX, around analytics and operational excellence.
Ultimately, if you’re competing for business, you're being measured on call quality, occupancy, and comparisons to everyone else. Your job is to become the best version of yourself. Stop worrying about competitors. Unlock your own potential and drive up your CX delivery expertise.
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