• 4,000 firms
  • Independent
  • Trusted
Save up to 70% on staff

Home » Glossary » Fully Managed Outsourcing

Fully Managed Outsourcing

Definition

What is fully managed outsourcing?

Fully Managed Outsourcing is one of the many services offered online by various outsourcing companies. It is a kind of laser-focused management that takes over the business process and tracking of the organization’s KPI metrics, training and development of employees, and quality assurance for the client.

When routine tasks and jobs are outsourced, the company will have more time to focus on the more essential aspects of the business.

What is fully managed outsourcing

Fully managed service

Working with a fully managed outsourcing can be beneficial to any specific organization. Despite working offshore, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies can still provide a fully managed service to their clients.

They ensure the best operational structure, competitive pricing structure, proven processes, and guaranteed results with their operational overseers.

They can build a team and hierarchy; they do well-prepared implementation and alignment; and are also aligned to their high-quality mission, objectives, and culture.

This kind of partnership promises a deliverable-based solution that can hit KPIs, targets, and metrics. Lastly, they can ensure continuous improvement as you go along with your business.

Outsource Accelerator provides you access to the best outsourcing companies in the Philippines, where you can save up to 70% on staffing cost. We have over 3,000 articles, 200+ podcast episodes, and a comprehensive directory with 700+ BPOs… all designed to make it easier for clients to learn about, and engage with fully managed outsourcing.

Outsourcing FAQ

What is a Customer Service?

Customer Service: Definition, Examples, and How It Works

Customer service is the support a business provides to buyers before, during, and after a purchase. It covers questions, complaints, returns, technical help, and account changes across phone, email, chat, social, and self-service channels. Done well, it turns one-off shoppers into repeat customers and quiet defectors into vocal fans.

The term sounds soft, but the work is operational. Teams measure response time, first-contact resolution, customer satisfaction (CSAT), and net promoter score (NPS). They tune scripts, staffing rosters, and AI assistants to hit those numbers without burning out agents.

Modern customer service sits at the intersection of people, process, and software. A 2017 Harvard Business Review piece showed 81% of customers try to solve problems themselves before calling a human, which is why self-service portals and chatbots now front the queue. Live agents handle the harder cases — refunds, escalations, anything emotional.

It also overlaps with customer experience, but the two are not identical. Customer experience covers every touchpoint with a brand; customer service is the slice where someone needs help.

How it works

A customer service operation runs on three layers: channels, people, and tooling. Channels are where customers reach you. People are the agents who answer. Tooling is the contact-center platform that routes tickets, surfaces context, and tracks outcomes.

Most mid-size businesses run a hub-and-spoke model. A central queue receives every inquiry, an automated system classifies it, and the ticket lands with an agent qualified for that issue. Tier 1 handles common questions, Tier 2 takes technical cases, and Tier 3 escalates to engineers or account managers.

The typical staffing and channel mix looks like this:

Channel Share of contacts Avg. handle time Best for Self-service / FAQ 30–40% seconds Password resets, order status Live chat 20–25% 4–8 min Pre-sales, quick fixes Email / ticket 20–25% 24–48 hr SLA Complex, written records Phone 15–20% 6–10 min Emotional or urgent issues Social / messaging 5–10% varies Public complaints, brand reach

Performance is read in three numbers most operations watch weekly: CSAT (how happy was the customer with this contact), first-contact resolution (did we fix it in one go), and average handle time (how long it took). Push handle time down without watching CSAT and your team starts cutting corners. Push CSAT up without watching handle time and your cost-per-contact balloons.

Outsourcing has reshaped the staffing layer. BPO providers — in the Philippines, India, and Latin America — run customer service for thousands of Western brands at 50–70% lower fully-loaded cost than in-house US teams. The trade-off is governance: you need clean scripts, sharp QA, and direct access to the agents to keep quality on spec.

Examples

Real customer service operations look very different depending on the industry.

Amazon (retail, global). Amazon's customer service runs a heavily automated front end (returns, refunds, and order tracking are self-serve through the app) backed by 24/7 agents for anything the bots can't close. The company built its reputation partly on no-questions-asked returns, a policy that has stayed roughly intact since 2010.

Zappos (e-commerce, US). The Las Vegas shoe retailer, owned by Amazon since 2009, is famous for letting agents stay on calls as long as needed. One 2012 call lasted 10 hours and 29 minutes and ended with a sale of Ugg boots. The strategy isn't efficiency; it's lifetime value and word-of-mouth marketing.

JetBlue (airline, US). JetBlue runs much of its contact center from home-based agents and treats Twitter as a primary channel. The airline typically responds to public complaints within minutes, which contains reputational damage in real time.

Globe Telecom (telecom, Philippines). Globe uses a hybrid model: branded retail stores, a self-service app, and a large in-house contact center in Manila. It also outsources overflow to local BPO partners during peak billing cycles.

These four show the range: high-volume automation, deep human investment, channel specialisation, and hybrid in-house plus outsourced. There's no single right shape.

Related terms Customer experience: the full sum of brand touchpoints, of which customer service is one slice. Contact center: the facility (physical or virtual) where customer service work happens across phone, chat, email, and social. Call center: the older, voice-only ancestor of the contact center. BPO: the outsourcing model that powers a large share of global customer service capacity. Help desk: a customer service function focused on technical issues, usually for software or IT products. Customer support: a near-synonym, but typically narrower and post-sale in scope. CSAT: the most common metric for measuring a single customer service interaction. FAQ What's the difference between customer service and customer support?

Customer service is the broader function: anything from pre-sale questions to billing disputes. Customer support usually refers to the narrower, post-sale work of fixing problems with a product or service. In practice many companies use the terms interchangeably.

How is customer service measured?

The three most common metrics are CSAT (satisfaction with a specific contact), NPS (likelihood to recommend the brand), and first-contact resolution (the share of issues fixed in one interaction). Cost-per-contact and average handle time round out the operational view.

Why do companies outsource customer service?

Cost is the headline reason, but it's not the only one. Outsourcing also gives access to 24/7 multilingual coverage, faster scaling for seasonal spikes, and providers who already have the contact-center technology installed. The Philippines alone hosts hundreds of providers serving Fortune 500 brands.

Is AI replacing customer service agents?

AI is taking the repetitive top of the funnel (password resets, order status, simple FAQs) but not the emotional or complex middle. Research from 2014 onward, including HBR's quantification work on customer experience, shows human contact still drives the highest loyalty lift when the issue matters. Most operations now run AI-first triage with human-second escalation.

What makes customer service "good"?

Speed, accuracy, and tone — in that order, for most issues. The 2010 HBR study Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers found that reducing customer effort (making the fix easy) predicts loyalty better than over-the-top "delight" moments. Solve the problem cleanly and most customers stay.

How big is the customer service industry?

The global contact-center market alone was estimated at around US$340 billion in 2024, with the outsourced share growing fastest in Asia-Pacific. Customer service spend across in-house and outsourced operations is materially larger when you include in-house teams.

---

Need help building or outsourcing your customer service operation? Browse our directory of verified BPO providers and compare options against your in-house benchmark.

What is Gamification?

What is gamification?

Gamification is an effective concept in BPO companies wherein they build up excitement and engagement through games with employees and other members of the team. They usually give incentives to team players who have excellent performance and productivity in hitting specific targets. Rewards are given to those who make it on top.

One of the advantages of gamification is the collaborative success it brings, not just individually, but as a whole. It helps the company accomplish the goal through reward-boosting tactics, called gamification. It is not only being used in the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, but also in other corporate sectors.

Gamification in outsourcing

Your potential outsourcing partner has been exercising this kind of drive to empower team members to step up their game. One example of gamification is in sales. If a sales agent hits the quota, he or she will be rewarded with a travel incentive plus cash on hand, while others offer gadgets and devices.

Outsource Accelerator specializes in helping small & medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), with 2-500 employees, typically based in the high-cost English-speaking world. We are the experts in transforming these businesses with outsourcing.

What is a Call Center?

Call Center

A call center is a centralized operation where trained agents handle inbound or outbound voice calls on behalf of a business. Functions span customer service, technical support, telemarketing, collections, and lead generation. Modern call centers also blend voice with chat, email, and self-service automation to meet customers where they are.

Key takeaways A call center handles phone-led customer interactions, while a contact center adds chat, email, and social channels. Global contact center spending is forecast to keep climbing as firms layer AI on top of human agents. The Philippines and India remain the two largest outsourcing destinations, with Manila agents costing roughly 70% less than US equivalents. Inbound, outbound, automated, and virtual are the four operating models you'll see most often. Picking the right partner hinges on channel mix, agent quality, security posture, and pricing model — not headcount alone.

Outsource Accelerator has tracked the call center sector since 2017, and the shape of the industry has shifted hard. Cloud platforms killed the on-premise PBX. Remote work normalized work-from-home agents, and generative AI now drafts agent responses in real time. The fundamentals still hold though — a voice on the line resolving a customer problem.

The call center label sticks even as the work expands. Most operations that still call themselves call centers actually run blended voice, chat, and email queues out of the same agent desktop. The phone is the anchor channel because it's the one customers reach for when they are frustrated, confused, or spending real money.

How it works

A call center routes incoming or outgoing voice traffic through a telephony platform — typically a cloud contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) stack — into a queue and on to an available agent. Workforce management software forecasts call volume. Automatic call distribution (ACD) matches callers to skill groups, and quality assurance teams score calls against rubrics for tone, accuracy, and compliance.

Three layers do the heavy lifting:

Layer What it does Typical tools Telephony / CCaaS Routes calls, records audio, surfaces caller data Genesys, Five9, NICE CXone, Amazon Connect Workforce management Forecasts volume, schedules agents, tracks adherence NICE WFM, Verint, Calabrio Analytics & QA Scores calls, mines transcripts, flags coaching moments CallMiner, Observe.AI, Cresta

According to Gartner, the contact center market is one of the fastest-growing slices of enterprise software, driven mostly by AI augmentation rather than headcount growth. The agent isn't going away; the tooling around the agent is just getting smarter. Expect copilots that surface knowledge-base answers mid-call, real-time sentiment scoring, and auto-summarized wrap-up notes to be table stakes by 2026.

Examples

Real call center work looks nothing like the stereotype. A handful of representative operations in 2024:

Concentrix runs more than 440,000 agents across 70 countries, supporting brands like Airbnb and Samsung from delivery centers in Manila, Bogotá, and Cairo. Teleperformance, headquartered in France, posted EUR 8.3 billion in 2023 revenue serving Apple, Uber, and dozens of fintech clients out of Philippine and Indian hubs. TaskUs scaled trust-and-safety and content-moderation lines for Meta, DoorDash, and Netflix from sites in Manila, San Antonio, and Athens. SP Madrid, a mid-market Philippine BPO, runs sub-100-seat campaigns for SaaS and ecommerce clients who can't justify a tier-one provider.

The Philippines passed India as the world's largest English-language voice destination around 2011 and hasn't ceded the lead since. The IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines tracks roughly 1.7 million sector workers, with call center agents the single biggest cohort. India still dominates non-voice and tech-support work, while Latin American hubs like Bogotá and Guadalajara grew fast through 2023 on the back of nearshore demand from US clients.

Related terms

A call center sits inside a wider cluster of related concepts you'll bump into when scoping a partner:

Contact center: the omnichannel successor that adds chat, email, social, and messaging to voice. BPO: business process outsourcing, the umbrella under which call centers operate. Inbound call center: receives customer-initiated calls for service or support. Outbound call center: places agent-initiated calls for sales, retention, or collections. Customer service: the work category most voice agents are paid to deliver. Telemarketing: outbound sales via phone, a regulated subset of outbound work. Virtual assistant: a one-to-one outsourced role that sometimes overlaps with low-volume support. FAQ What does a call center actually do?

A call center handles voice interactions between a business and its customers. Agents take inbound calls for support, billing, or orders, or place outbound calls for sales, surveys, and collections.

Is a call center the same as a contact center?

No. Call centers are voice-only or voice-led. Contact centers handle voice plus digital channels (chat, email, SMS, social) through a single agent desktop. Most modern operations are technically contact centers, even when people still call them call centers.

How much does call center outsourcing cost?

Pricing varies by geography and model. Philippine agents typically bill at USD 8–15 per hour fully loaded; US onshore runs USD 25–45. Per-minute and per-call pricing remains common for high-volume inbound work.

Will AI replace call center agents?

Not entirely, and not soon. According to McKinsey, AI is automating routine queries and assisting human agents on complex calls, shifting the agent role toward higher-value problem solving rather than wiping it out.

Which countries lead in call center outsourcing?

The Philippines and India lead in voice volume, followed by South Africa, Colombia, and Egypt for English-language work, plus Poland and Romania for European-language coverage.

How do I pick the right call center partner?

Match the provider's vertical experience to your industry, audit their security certifications (PCI DSS, ISO 27001, SOC 2), pilot a small campaign before scaling, and insist on transparent pricing and live agent dashboards.

Want a shortlist of vetted partners by country, size, and specialty? Browse the Outsource Accelerator BPO directory to compare providers side by side.

What is What is business process outsourcing??

What is business process outsourcing (BPO)?

Business process outsourcing (BPO) is the practice of contracting a third-party provider to run a defined business function such as customer support, payroll, accounting, or IT helpdesk. The provider takes ownership of the people, process, and technology, and bills you on a per-seat, per-transaction, or fixed-fee basis.

BPO sits at the intersection of labour arbitrage and operational focus. You hand off a non-core function to a specialist that can run it cheaper, faster, or better, and your in-house team gets to concentrate on what actually moves the business.

The category covers everything from a 4-seat phone team in Cebu answering after-hours calls for a US plumbing firm, to a 5,000-seat captive in Manila handling global claims processing for a Fortune 500 insurer. Same idea, very different scale.

If you've used Apple support, ordered from Amazon, or paid with Wells Fargo, you've talked to a BPO provider — you just didn't know it.

How it works

A BPO engagement runs in three layers: contract, transition, and steady state. You scope the function, sign a service level agreement that locks in response times, quality thresholds, and pricing, then transition the work through documented playbooks and parallel runs before the provider takes the keys.

Pricing usually falls into one of four shapes:

Model How you pay Best for Per FTE (seat) Fixed monthly rate per agent Steady-volume work like inbound support Per transaction Set fee per call, ticket, or invoice Variable-volume back-office tasks Outcome-based Tied to a KPI like CSAT or collections Mature processes with clean metrics Hybrid Base FTE rate plus variable bonus Long-term partnerships

Location choice drives most of the savings. Sending work to the Philippines or India (offshoring) typically cuts loaded labour cost by 50–70% versus a US in-house team. Sending it to Mexico or Colombia (nearshoring) trims 30–50% while keeping you in roughly the same timezone. Keeping it domestic (onshoring) protects timezone and language fit but barely moves the cost needle.

The provider absorbs the recruiting, training, real estate, tech stack, and compliance burden. You absorb the vendor-management overhead and the risk that comes with handing a function to an outsider.

Examples

The global BPO market hit roughly USD 347.95 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow at a 10.05% CAGR through 2035, according to Precedence Research. That growth is concentrated in a handful of hubs and a handful of named buyers.

Google has used Philippine and Indian BPO partners since 2016 for content moderation, ads review, and customer support — a quiet workforce that scales with each product launch. Meta contracts Accenture and TaskUs in Manila for content moderation; the work pulled enough scrutiny in the early 2020s that Meta eventually broadened its provider base across multiple regions. Wells Fargo has operated a Manila back-office hub since 2011, handling mortgage processing, AML checks, and treasury operations for the US parent. JPMorgan Chase runs large captive and outsourced operations in India and the Philippines for KYC, trade settlement, and analytics.

The Philippines remains the standout English-language hub. According to the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines, the country's IT-BPM sector generates roughly USD 40 billion in revenue and employs about 1.9 million people, with growth targets pushing past 2.5 million by 2028.

Related terms Outsourcing: the umbrella term; BPO is the back-office and front-office slice that runs whole processes rather than one-off projects. Offshoring: moving work to a distant country (e.g. US to Philippines). A location choice, not a contracting choice. Nearshoring: moving work to a nearby country (e.g. US to Mexico) to keep timezone and culture closer. Knowledge process outsourcing: KPO handles judgment-heavy work like legal research or equity analysis, not transactional tasks. Call center: one delivery format inside BPO, focused on inbound or outbound voice. Back office: the non-customer-facing operations layer that BPO most commonly absorbs. Service level agreement: the contract clause that defines what "good" looks like in a BPO deal. FAQ What is business process outsourcing in simple terms?

BPO is paying another company to run a piece of your business for you, usually a repeatable function like answering support calls, processing invoices, or managing payroll. You keep the brand and the strategy; they run the operation.

What is the difference between BPO and outsourcing?

Outsourcing is the broad category — anything you contract out, including one-off projects. BPO is the subset where a provider runs an ongoing, defined business process end-to-end, typically with its own staff, systems, and SLAs.

Is BPO only about cost savings?

No. Cost is the entry argument, but mature buyers cite access to specialist talent, 24/7 coverage, faster scaling, and freeing in-house leaders to focus on growth as bigger long-term wins. See the directory of vetted providers on Clutch for how the market positions itself today.

What functions do companies outsource most often?

Customer support, IT helpdesk, finance and accounting, payroll, HR administration, content moderation, and data entry top the list. Higher-judgment work like legal research, equity analysis, and medical coding has shifted to KPO providers over the last decade.

Which countries dominate the BPO industry?

The Philippines leads voice and customer experience, India leads IT and analytics, and Latin America (Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica) leads nearshore work for North American buyers. Eastern Europe serves Western European clients on similar terms.

How do I choose a BPO provider?

Match scale to your volume, check for relevant compliance (ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 2), ask for two reference clients in your industry, and pilot a small scope before committing to a multi-year contract. Walk away from any provider that won't share agent attrition data.

Ready to scope a BPO partner? Outsource Accelerator lists 4,000+ vetted providers across the top global hubs — use the directory to shortlist, compare pricing, and book intro calls without paying a referral fee.

What is Key Performance Indicator (KPI)?

Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

A key performance indicator (KPI) is a quantifiable measure that tracks how well a business, team, or process is hitting a defined goal. KPIs translate strategy into numbers you can review weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Used well, they tell you what's working, what's drifting, and where to spend the next dollar.

KPIs sit one rung above raw metrics. Every KPI is a metric, but not every metric is a KPI. A metric counts something; a KPI ties that count to a target tied to strategy.

Page views are a metric. Page views from buyers in your top three markets, measured against a quarterly target, are a KPI.

According to KPI.org, the discipline's industry body, effective KPIs are "critical, quantifiable measures of progress toward a desired result." That word critical is doing real work. A scorecard with 40 KPIs has no KPIs. Most teams need five to nine.

The term sits at the centre of modern performance management, alongside service-level agreements, balanced scorecards, and OKR frameworks. Each one tries to answer the same question from a different angle: how do you know the strategy is actually working?

How it works

A KPI has four moving parts — the metric, the target, the time window, and the owner. Strip out any one of those and you're back to a vanity number. A revenue KPI isn't "revenue" but "$2.4M new ARR by 31 December, owned by the VP of Sales."

KPIs split along two axes that most operators mix up. Leading indicators predict outcomes. They include pipeline coverage, training hours logged, and sales calls booked.

Lagging indicators confirm them. They include quarterly revenue, churn, and profit margin. A healthy dashboard runs both, because lagging KPIs alone tell you the race is already lost.

KPI type What it measures Example When to use Input Resources committed Training hours per agent Capacity planning Process Operational efficiency Tickets handled per hour Workflow tuning Output Immediate results Calls resolved Daily ops review Outcome Strategic impact Customer retention rate Quarterly board reports Leading Future performance Pipeline coverage ratio Early warning Lagging Past performance Quarterly revenue Verification

Most teams build KPIs using the SMART framework — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. The 2025 Bersin "High-Impact People Analytics" research found organisations that tie KPIs to a written strategy are 3.1x more likely to hit financial targets than those running ad-hoc dashboards. The takeaway is brutal: KPIs without strategy are just statistics.

Ownership is the part most decks skip. A KPI nobody owns drifts. A KPI two people own gets argued about, not improved. Assign one name per number, and bake the assignment into the quarterly review cadence.

Examples

KPIs look different in every department. The shape that matters is the link from one daily number to a quarterly outcome the CEO actually cares about. Here's how that plays out across the four functions most outsourced to BPOs in 2025.

Contact centres lean heavily on first call resolution (FCR), average handle time, customer satisfaction (CSAT), and net promoter score (NPS). ContactBabel's 2024 UK Contact Centre Decision-Makers' Guide put the median FCR for top-quartile centres at 78%, with the bottom quartile below 60%. The 28-second average speed of answer benchmark still holds for inbound voice in 2025, though chat and email carry their own response-time targets.

Finance and accounting teams watch days sales outstanding (DSO), gross margin, operating cash flow, and budget variance. A Manila-based finance and accounting BPO typically reports DSO weekly to the client controller. Concentrix and TaskUs publish quarterly DSO targets for clients inside their managed-services contracts, so the number becomes the contract, not a side report.

Software engineering uses DORA metrics — deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recovery, and change failure rate. Google's 2024 DORA report ranked deployment frequency as the strongest predictor of organisational performance among 39,000 surveyed engineers. The four DORA KPIs are now standard in BPO dev-ops contracts.

HR teams track employee turnover, time-to-fill, training cost per head, and employee net promoter score. SHRM's 2024 Talent Benchmarking Report pegged voluntary turnover for US white-collar roles at 17.3%, useful context when an outsourcing partner quotes 12% as a competitive number.

Related terms Service level agreement (SLA): the contract that binds KPIs between client and provider. First contact resolution: a flagship contact centre KPI. Average handle time: the productivity KPI for voice operations. Customer retention: the outcome KPI most BPOs are ultimately judged on. Net promoter score: the loyalty KPI most contact centres report monthly. Business process outsourcing: the delivery model KPIs govern. Call centre: where many of the most cited KPIs originated. FAQ What's the difference between a KPI and a metric?

Every KPI is a metric, but a metric only becomes a KPI when it's tied to a target, a time window, and an owner. A metric counts. A KPI judges.

How many KPIs should a business track?

Five to nine for any single team or executive. Beyond that the dashboard becomes noise and ownership blurs. Pick the few that actually drive decisions, and retire the rest.

What does SMART stand for in KPI design?

Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. The framework forces each KPI to name what's measured, by when, and against what target, which is the four conditions a vague KPI usually fails.

What's a leading versus a lagging KPI?

Leading KPIs predict future outcomes — sales calls booked, training hours logged, and pipeline coverage are typical. Lagging KPIs confirm past results, such as quarterly revenue, churn, and profit margin. Run both, or you'll only learn you missed targets after the quarter closes.

How often should KPIs be reviewed?

Operational KPIs weekly, departmental KPIs monthly, and strategic KPIs quarterly. Most BPO contracts also bake quarterly business reviews (QBRs) into the SLA so client and provider read the same numbers on the same day.

Can KPIs be qualitative?

Yes. Customer sentiment, brand health, and culture surveys all translate qualitative signal into a measurable score. The trick is converting impressions into a number that holds up across reviewers and across time.

Outsource Accelerator's BPO directory lists 4,000+ outsourcing providers vetted on the KPIs that matter most to scaling teams.

What is Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)?

What is a standard operating procedure?

A standard operating procedure (SOP) is a set of instructions that explains how to do a critical process or workflow. Its purpose is to follow processes according to the standards of a company, organization, or industry.

This helps to protect the employees, processes, and customers from errors throughout a normal workflow and creates a safe work environment for the company.

SOPs are sometimes required to comply with the industry regulations while some institutions suggest them as a company’s best practice. This is mostly used to maintain safety and efficiency in different departments such as production, sales and marketing, customer support, finance, and legal.

Standard operating procedure template

For small teams and solopreneurs, SOPs are made by writing a checklist of routines that should be done. For bigger enterprises, thorough planning and taking note of processes are needed to ensure proper carrying of procedures.

The integral parts of an SOP are the roles that will do the task, the frequency or how often will they do it, and the expected outcome or the deliverables in finishing the task.

SOPs in BPO companies have different standards. Their SOPs need to include compliance with administrative policies, metrics on performance management, and training and coaching sessions.

Outsource Accelerator provides you with the best outsourcing companies in the Philippines, where you can save up to 70% on staffing costs. We have over 3,000 articles, 200+ podcast episodes, and a comprehensive directory with 700+ BPOs… all designed to make it easier for clients to learn about, and engage with, outsourcing.

Different forms of standard operating procedures

SOPs can be written in different formats, depending on compliance standards or specific functions that need them. Companies should choose the SOP formats that can work best with their team or the entire organization.

The most common SOP formats are the following.

Step-by-step instructions

As its name suggests, step-by-step SOPs are used to simply list down how to do a process according to its order. This format is used when the process is straightforward and can be completed easily.

A step-by-step SOP works best with processes such as:

Digital logins Routine tasks Safety guidelines

Hierarchical SOPs

A hierarchical SOP, meanwhile, contains more detailed instructions compared to step-by-step SOPs. It elaborates each step and includes all the necessary tasks in a process. For instance, instead of listing a process in 1, 2, 3..., hierarchical steps will include substeps listed as 1a, 1b, 1c...

Flowchart SOP

Flowchart SOP documents are best used when writing complex processes that have more than one desired outcome possible.

Flowchart SOPs give insights on what outcome a team can get should they take a certain step. This format helps in the decision-making process of a team or an organization in general, making them more careful in approaching a process.

Importance of standard operating procedures

Aside from proper documentation of processes, SOPs are crucial in the business processes of a company in different ways.

Knowledge preservation

By creating SOPs, the prior knowledge in a process can be easily stored and updated. Team leaders can also pass them to their members, use this to train new employees, and store them for reference.

Improved efficiency

At the same time, employees perform more efficiently with an SOP document. This can help streamline workflows better and save time in passing organizational knowledge long-term.

Consistent outcomes

Employees perform better and will produce consistent outcomes with the help of an SOP document. This is since they will have an idea of how to do a certain task according to company standards.

Ensuring compliance

SOP documentation is also crucial in following compliances for certifications such as ISO. It makes sure that employees comply with related laws, regulations, and standards imposed by an organization to avoid litigation risks.

Steps to create standard operating procedures

There's no single way to create SOPs for all business processes and organizations. However, firms can take note of the following steps on how they can create an effective SOP for their business.

Define objectives in SOP creation. Define the objectives in creating an SOP, whether it's for documenting a new process or improving an existing one. List down each business process. List every process and function that needs an SOP document and find which process will be prioritized. Choose a format for each SOP document. Choose which SOP formats will be most suitable for each process. Outline the entire process. Starting with the title page, outline the entire process according to how they are made.

Companies you might be interested in

Get Inside Outsourcing

An insider's view on why remote and offshore staffing is radically changing the future of work.

Order now

Start your
journey today

  • Independent
  • Secure
  • Transparent

About OA

Outsource Accelerator is the trusted source of independent information, advisory and expert implementation of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO).

The #1 outsourcing authority

Outsource Accelerator offers the world’s leading aggregator marketplace for outsourcing. It specifically provides the conduit between world-leading outsourcing suppliers and the businesses – clients – across the globe.

The Outsource Accelerator website has over 5,000 articles, 450+ podcast episodes, and a comprehensive directory with 4,700+ BPO companies… all designed to make it easier for clients to learn about – and engage with – outsourcing.

About Derek Gallimore

Derek Gallimore has been in business for 20 years, outsourcing for over eight years, and has been living in Manila (the heart of global outsourcing) since 2014. Derek is the founder and CEO of Outsource Accelerator, and is regarded as a leading expert on all things outsourcing.

“Excellent service for outsourcing advice and expertise for my business.”

Learn more
Banner Image
Get 3 Free Quotes Verified Outsourcing Suppliers
4,000 firms.Just 2 minutes to complete.
SAVE UP TO
70% ON STAFF COSTS
Learn more

Connect with over 4,000 outsourcing services providers.

Banner Image

Transform your business with skilled offshore talent.

  • 4,000 firms
  • Simple
  • Transparent
Banner Image