What is a Call Center?
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 line to customers.
Call centers comprise 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 to the client's customers on its behalf.
In call centers, agents often do 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.
Call center outsourcingA call center employs agents who act as representatives on 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 with the best call center outsourcing companies in the Philippines, where you can save up to 70% on staffing costs.
Call center vs. Contact centerCall centers and contact centers have almost the same functions and processes. However, their distinction lies in various factors, such as communication channels, skillsets, and volume of handled data.
Call centers focus on offering customer service through phone calls. While many call centers now use non-voice options such as email and chat, their priority still lies in handling incoming or outgoing calls.
Contact centers, meanwhile, provide their services in a wider range of communication channels.
They create an omnichannel approach to their functions, giving clients more flexibility in how they can reach a business. This is why a contact center is also called a "modern call center."
Types of call centersBelow are some of the types of call centers today:
Inbound call centerInbound call centers focus on handling incoming calls daily. Each customer service agent is responsible for answering inquiries and concerns about a firm's products and services.
Outbound call centerOutbound call centers handle outgoing calls to leads and customers of a business.
Agents in this call center type reach out to people for lead generation, appointment confirmation, payment reminders, and other related functions.
Automated call centerIn an automated call center, agents use call center technology to handle some or all of their responsibilities.
Some of their functions include appointment setting, sending shipping updates, and automated transaction confirmation.
Virtual call centerLastly, virtual call centers handle inbound and outbound calls through the cloud. Compared to a traditional call center, virtual call centers don't need a physical space and in-house agents to accomplish their work.
What is Employee Satisfaction (ESAT)?
What is employee satisfaction (ESAT)?Employee satisfaction (ESAT) measures how content and happy employees are with their current positions. The computation is quite simple. Companies use ESAT surveys to compute this metric.
Although this metric is not an ultimate tool to determine employee satisfaction at the deeper level, it is enough as a start, especially if your business is experiencing fast turnover.
Many factors affect employee satisfaction. These factors may include compensation, team environment, workload, management perception, and among other things.
You can add all of these elements to the survey to determine your ESAT score. Alternatively, you can use an individual survey for each factor.
Aside from quantitative aspects, qualitative evaluation of the survey is also crucial in determining whether your employees are satisfied or not. For example, one employee scores a good to a perfect rating for all other factors except for management perception.
This exception should be a good indicator that something’s not good at the management level or maybe conflict is rising that you might want to investigate.
ESAT score Every team requires engaged members for the business’ high performance and stability. ESAT score is a great way to tell if your employees genuinely like the team that they are working with.
When employees do not feel involved with their jobs or their colleagues, happiness levels tend to decline. Often, it negatively affects the productivity of the whole company.
A 2020 Gallup poll found out that when workers felt actively engaged, productivity and profitability increased by 18% and 23% respectively.
Due to these, you and your team should always discuss the overall ESAT score regardless of the outcome. This can be treated as an opportunity for everyone to give their feedback, share their sentiments, and learn collectively from the insights of everyone.
Your team could also get to the root cause of the low ESAT ratings and share ideas on how to improve things in your team. This move could enhance employee relationships and improve everyone’s engagement within the team.
Employee satisfaction and outsourcingOutsource Accelerator has over 5,000 articles, 350+ podcast episodes, and a comprehensive directory with 2500 BPOs… all designed to make it easier for clients to learn more about managing an outsourcing team and ensuring that ESAT is consistently high.
What is Customer Satisfaction Rating (CSAT)?
What is customer satisfaction (CSAT)?Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a popular key performance indicator that measures customer satisfaction.
The process involves a survey question or a set of questions. Customers answer by indicating their level of satisfaction. The most popular scale is one to ten, with one being the least satisfied and ten as the most satisfying level.
The result gives a business the necessary output whether or not to improve customer service right then and there.
However, the possible ambiguity might be a disadvantage, especially if a customer is dissatisfied with the service.
Why is CSAT important?CSAT scores allow companies to look into how their customer feels in each interaction with sales agents. CSAT provides business leaders with two important pieces of information:
A detailed insight into customer success at every touchpoint of the journey
Overall customer experienceCustomer satisfaction scores enable businesses to determine the pain points in their service that impact the customer journey.
Addressing all these pain points and correcting them helps identify unhappy customers and turn them into happy customers, which increases the customer's lifetime value over time.
Buyers are also more likely to become repeat customers — and eventually, become loyal clients — if they have experienced an excellent customer experience in a particular business.
Moreover, because CSAT is measured through doing a customer satisfaction survey, as well as gathering feedback and online reviews, sales agents can do a deep dive into their customer base.
This means that they now have access and the capacity to understand what their clients need and want from any business.
What can you measure with CSAT survey scores?CSAT survey scores can provide valuable insights into various aspects of your business's performance and customer satisfaction levels.
Here are some key metrics and areas you can measure using CSAT survey scores:
Overall customer satisfactionCSAT survey scores provide a direct measure of customers' satisfaction levels with your product, service, or interaction. This overarching metric reflects the general sentiment of your customer base.
Product or service performanceCSAT scores can help assess how well your products or services meet customer expectations.
By analyzing CSAT scores for specific products or services, you can identify areas for improvement or areas of strength.
Customer support effectivenessCSAT scores for customer support interactions indicate how satisfied customers are with the assistance they received.
This metric helps evaluate the performance of your support team and the effectiveness of your support processes.
Transaction experienceCSAT scores can measure customer satisfaction with specific transactional experiences, such as online purchases, in-store visits, or service appointments.
Understanding transactional CSAT scores helps optimize the customer journey and streamline processes.
Feature satisfactionFor products or services with multiple features or functionalities, CSAT survey scores can assess satisfaction levels with individual features.
This information guides product development and feature prioritization efforts.
Example of a customer satisfaction surveyA customer satisfaction survey is designed to measure how satisfied customers is with a product, service, or experience.
Here's an example of a CSAT survey:
Dear [Customer's Name],
Thank you for choosing [Your Company]! We value your feedback and would like to know about your experience with our [product/service/event].
Please rate your overall satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 5: Very Dissatisfied
Dissatisfied
Neutral
Satisfied
Very Satisfied Product/Service/Event: [Specify the product, service, or event] How satisfied are you with the quality of our [product/service/event]?[ ] 1 [ ] 2 [ ] 3 [ ] 4 [ ] 5
Did the [product/service/event] meet your expectations?[ ] Yes [ ] No
How likely are you to recommend our [product/service/event] to others?[ ] Not likely at all [ ] Not very likely [ ] Neutral [ ] Somewhat likely [ ] Very likely
Please share any specific comments or suggestions you have about your experience:[Open-ended text box]
Demographic Information (optional): Gender:[ ] Male [ ] Female [ ] Prefer not to say [ ] Other: _______
Age group:[ ] 18-24 [ ] 25-34 [ ] 35-44 [ ] 45-54 [ ] 55-64 [ ] 65+
How did you first hear about [Your Company]? How to calculate customer satisfaction score?Measuring CSAT is pretty straightforward.
To calculate customer satisfaction score, you have to add the positive responses together, divide them by the total number of responses collected, and multiply by 100.
The outcome will give you the overall percentage of customer satisfaction in your business.
For example, if 50 people took part in your customer survey and 30 of them gave positive feedback — your CSAT score would then be 60%.
See here:
(30 positive responses / 50 total responses = .60 x 100 = 60%)
This indicates that while the majority of your clients are satisfied with your service, you can still improve it to better serve your customers.
The best time for measuring customer satisfaction is post-sales.
These times are especially crucial for repeat and new customers as the experience is still fresh in their minds.
What is a good CSAT score?Now that you have your customer satisfaction score, the next thing to do is determine whether it is good enough to guarantee excellent customer service.
Is your numerical score enough to gain new customers and improve customer retention rate across the overall customer lifecycle?
While every industry has different standards for CSAT scores, high customer satisfaction scores usually fall between 75% and 80%.
Reaching this customer satisfaction rate means that three out of every four buyers had a positive experience with your brand.
While most companies would love to see 100% satisfaction in their services, that is rarely the case.
Additionally, the pandemic has certainly affected a customer's experience and happiness when purchasing a product or service.
Each buyer has his or her own opinions and standards.
Having customer conversations, hearing their responses, and gauging customer happiness regarding a product or service can help companies create new strategies that could improve customer satisfaction.
CSAT in outsourcingCustomer satisfaction score might be the simplest metric, but it’s a powerful tool for all businesses. It encompasses the whole customer journey and helps businesses determine the things that they should improve on to gain customer loyalty.
Measuring customer satisfaction is quick and easy. You add up all the ratings and divide the total score by the number of respondents. Most likely, you’ll get a percentage.
Get your customer satisfaction score a notch higher by outsourcing your customer service team. Check out Outsource Accelerator’s extensive list of outsourcing companies in the Philippines.
Strengthening customer loyalty with CSATCustomer loyalty refers to buyers who always return to your brand for repeat business.
It is usually triggered by customer satisfaction, positive customer experiences, and the overall value of the goods or services a customer receives from a business.
A company's CSAT score evaluates the services of different brands and determines if your company is able to retain customers instead of losing them to competitors.
It also brings customer insights and user feedback so that businesses can strengthen their services.
It could be hard for business owners or sales representatives to identify unhappy customers from satisfied customers.
CSAT surveys assist in detecting customer satisfaction at the earliest stage of the customer lifecycle.
They allow companies to amend poor customer service and improve it before experiencing the worst-case scenario — an increase in customer churn rate.
Remember, customer expectations for a possible repeat business rather than losing them to competing brands.
Trust is a critical part of any business relationship, but finding the right strategies to improve it — along with your customer satisfaction — can be challenging.
There is more than one side to the customer satisfaction equation. The key to improving customer satisfaction is a healthy balance between understanding and improving performance internally while doing the same with customers externally.
Tips to improve your CSAT scoresThere are a couple of tricks that you can use to improve your CSAT score and ensure excellent customer interaction all the time. Here are some of them:
Request customer feedbackThe easiest way to gauge your market's reaction to your products or services is to ask them to rate their customer experience.
This can be done by handing out customer satisfaction surveys to post-calls or asking them for an online review.
A collected customer feedback will help you identify service issues and address them quickly so that you won't lose your clients' trust.
Meet customer expectationsCustomers usually expect to gain whatever good things you have said about your business.
So, to keep them satisfied, it is important for your whole team to work hard to meet those expectations.
For example, if you say that your customer support call center is open 24 hours, then you have to put some of your staff on standby at all times for any inbound calls.
If you advertise a promo for a specific product, then you have to uphold it for every buyer.
Additionally, it is important to remain transparent with your consumers. From the time that they are still prospective buyers, you have to make sure that they already know what to expect from your brand and the policies that they will be agreeing with as paying customers.
Provide proactive customer serviceIf you want to boost customer satisfaction, you have to make sure first that you have a dedicated contact center for your clients. This contact must be personal, timely, and always pertinent to the user.
Reduce inbound calls in call centers as they increase agent effectiveness.
By offering customer service proactively, you can show the customer that good support does not only benefit the business.
CSAT vs. NPS vs. CESCSAT is not the only key performance indicator that measures customer satisfaction.
Businesses also look into their net promoter score (NPS) and customer effort score (CES) to capture customer feedback and measure customer loyalty.
The net promoter score determines the likelihood of customers recommending your business to other consumers.
The higher your NPS score is, the bigger the chance there is for brand recognition.
NPS scores are usually measured using a one to ten rating system.
CES, meanwhile, measures customer sentiment on how well they have used your products or services.
The CES surveys aim to determine the ease or difficulty of customers deciding on purchasing your products.
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 worksA 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 partnershipsLocation 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.
ExamplesThe 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.
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