Sales

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation aims to get the attention of inbound, or outbound, prospective customers and turn them into leads - creating interest to avail a product or service. Lead generation mostly uses digital means and has been undergoing increasing changes in the past years to due the advancement of more sophisticated online systems.

Some examples of lead generators include live events, online content, online advertisements, email marketing, and social media. With the trend, the buying process has dramatically changed; thus, industries need to find new tactics to reach buyers and create clamor to entice them. With lead generation, enterprises focus on being found instead of finding customers through advertising and email blasts. Industries have now learned to build continuous relationships with customers.

Generating leads is essential in transitioning the buying journey of a site visitor to becoming a delighted customer. Lead generation is considered to be an inbound marketing strategy which involves a wide range of campaigns, strategies, and tactics, aiming for a significant number of attracted audience to be sales-qualified leads. As a visitor starts to show interest in your company's product and service with the provision of valuable content, the conversion is more organic. Lead generation then stands as to what it is made to be: a natural way of initiating and warming up potential prospects of the business to be key buyers.

Outsource Accelerator provides you access to great lead generation experts that you can outsource from the Philippines starting from $6 per hour, 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 outsourcing lead generation.

What is a Call Center?

A Call center may refer to a physical center where an outsourcing company conducts various customer contact services that act as a front liner to customers. Call centers comprise of a team of agents who are trained for the product or service being offered. A call center may also refer to a type of BPO setup where a client gets a remote team to handle its customer service hotlines and attend the client’s customers in its behalf.

In call centers, agents often does inbound or outbound call handling. The former talks about customer service, order processing or technical support. The latter focuses more on telemarketing, promotions or selling. In this setup, it is the call center agent who initiates the call to potential customers.

A call center employs agents who act as representatives of their client’s behalf to deal with questions, concerns, and complaints of the customers. Aside from that, call centers can also function as sales hotlines and telemarketing teams. Outsource Accelerator provides you the best call center outsourcing companies in the Philippines, where you can save up-to 70% on staffing cost.

What is an Agent?

In the outsourcing industry, the definition of agents is a team of individuals who are tasked to provide customer services via different communication channels available in order to continuously provide a positive customer experience. Agents are deployed to do inbound and outbound functions; both are essential in keeping the relationship between the business and its customers healthy and productive. Processes may involve customer service support, back-office job support, advisory services, email management, virtual assistance services, website maintenance, marketing and promotional services, and the likes.

Agents are trained to render customer support that revolves around the company’s product or service. Ranging from office support to advisory services, agents are expected to provide the best possible alternative course of action for every problem and increase customer satisfaction by attending to their concerns being raised via different communication channels.

An agent of a BPO company earns an average of USD 4,000 per year in the Philippines, which is roughly USD 345 per month. Aside from that, agents can receive more through overtime pays and holiday pays. Labor laws in the Philippines require higher pay rates during these situations. In some cases, agents can work even with just a high school diploma, but applicants with college degrees have an advantage.

What is Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)?

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is the engagement of services from a third-party provider. BPO uses various technology-enabled services to hasten the delivery of services. The business activities could be back-office such as, but not limited to, payroll, accounting, human resources, or front office jobs like customer service, sales, and marketing, etc. In the case of content providers, these business activities could mean hiring writers, remote editors, or virtual assistants.

BPO speeds up processes and enhances efficiency. Companies that outsource some of their business activities use their time on core services and competencies. With this shift in focus, companies improve their current processes that may result in improved customer satisfaction. BPO helps companies divert their resources to more critical business strategies. Often, companies find it impractical to hire a full-time position in-house because of the cost associated with doing so.

When a business engages an external specialist to manage and operate some of its internal processes, it's referred to as business process outsourcing. Such ‘processes’ include customer service, accounting and finance, or sales. It is different from hiring an agency to do specific tasks, as the outsourcing provider (BPO) is more concerned with the ongoing production of labour-intensive tasks, instead of the higher-level strategy and guidance.

Now, business process outsourcing has broadened and is more akin to staff augmentation, or staff leasing.

There are many benefits to outsourcing, as well as some downsides and risks. The common benefits include:

The business process outsourcing sector is a vast industry, generating over $200bn annually, and employing many millions of people worldwide. Some examples include:

Facebook and Uber outsource many of their operational functions, including content moderation for Facebook, and customer service for Uber

A medium business with 50-500 staff might outsource the labour-intensive accounting and finance functions to a team in the Philippines.

It is common for small business owners to have a Virtual Assistant (VA) working for hem full time, remotely from the Philippines.

The type of business process outsourcing can be characterised by their specialisation, location, and size.

Business process outsourcing is in the human resources and professional services sector. However, their services extend across all industries. The majority of BPOs are generalist, in that they offer a full range of professional services, although some specialise in certain verticals (ie accounting, or animation).

Business process outsourcing typically operates form developing nations such as the Philippines, India, and Colombia. They typically have cheaper cost-of-living and bigger populations. Different locations offer different advantages.

The bigger BPOs employ more than 250,000 people. They are huge, global operations. Medium-sized BPOs range from 500-5,000 staff and offer a full range of services. The smaller BPOs might have 1-500 people.

Collectively, business process outsourcing provides any kind of staffing solution. Common functions of BPO include:

A wide range of BPO companies in different parts of the world provide utmost services to their Western and local clients. Many of them have even earned awards and recognitions by award-giving bodies due to their performance on both the roles they take and on their way of taking care of the employees.

Check out the top BPO companies in several outsourcing destinations below:

Outsource Accelerator is the most trusted source for independent information & advisory for Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). We have over 4,000 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, business process outsourcing.