What is Shared Services Centre?
What Is a Shared Services Centre (SSC)?A shared services centre (SSC) is an internal unit that consolidates repeatable back-office work, including finance, HR, IT, procurement, and payroll, from across a company into one team, run like a service provider to the rest of the business. The goal is fewer duplicated roles, standard processes, and cleaner data across every business unit.
Think of it as one accounting team serving twelve divisions instead of twelve mini accounting teams. The SSC charges those divisions through internal recoveries or service-level agreements, and its performance is measured the same way an external vendor's would be.
That distinction matters. An SSC sits inside the company, but it's structured to behave like an outsourcer — with KPIs, billing logic, and customer-style governance.
Most large multinationals operate at least one SSC today, and the model has evolved into a broader Global Business Services (GBS) approach — a hybrid that mixes captive centres with outsourced partners across multiple geographies.
How it worksAn SSC works by lifting a function out of every business unit, standardising the process, and running it once from a central location. The "service" piece is literal: the SSC publishes a catalogue, signs SLAs, tracks throughput, and reports back to its internal customers.
A typical SSC build runs through four phases:
Scope. Pick the functions to consolidate, usually transactional work like accounts payable, payroll, or IT helpdesk. Standardise. Rewrite each process to one global template before any move happens. Lifting chaos doesn't help. Locate. Choose a site based on talent, cost, language coverage, and time-zone fit. Manila, Kraków, Bengaluru, and San José top most shortlists. Govern. Set SLAs, pricing, and escalation rules. Run the SSC against productivity benchmarks like invoices-per-FTE or first-time-resolution rates.The functions most commonly consolidated map closely to Deloitte's Global Business Services Survey, which has tracked the model since the 1990s.
Function
Typical scope in an SSC Finance & accounting
Accounts payable, receivables, general ledger, tax filings Human resources
Payroll, onboarding, benefits admin, employee helpdesk IT
Helpdesk, infrastructure, identity and access Procurement
Source-to-pay, vendor master, contract admin Customer service
Tier-1 support, billing queries, complaints intakeA mature SSC then layers automation on top: RPA for invoice processing, chatbots for tier-1 HR queries, and analytics for spend visibility. From there, it starts pushing into judgment-heavy work like FP&A and reporting.
ExamplesReal SSCs aren't a thought experiment. Some of the world's largest brands run them as core infrastructure.
Procter & Gamble has operated its Global Business Services network since 1999, with hubs in Manila, San José (Costa Rica), and Newcastle (UK). It handles finance, HR, IT, and facilities for the entire P&G group.
Unilever runs Enterprise & Technology Solutions hubs in Bengaluru and Mexico City, consolidating finance and IT for more than 190 markets.
Shell built its first SSC in Kuala Lumpur in 2003 and now operates five global centres covering finance, HR, contracting, and customer ops. The Manila and Chennai sites alone employ over 10,000 staff between them.
Microsoft opened a Manila operations hub in 2014 that handles licensing, billing, and partner support for the Asia-Pacific region.
Smaller mid-market firms typically skip the captive SSC and go straight to outsourcing — the fixed cost of running a centre rarely pays back below roughly 500 transactional FTEs.
Related terms Business process outsourcing: contracting an external vendor to run a function; an SSC keeps it in-house. Global business services: the broader operating model that blends SSCs with outsourced partners and centres of excellence. Captive centre: a wholly-owned offshore unit, often the foundation of a regional SSC. Centre of excellence: a specialist team focused on judgment-heavy work, often sitting alongside an SSC. Back office: the administrative functions an SSC typically consolidates. Offshoring: relocating work to a lower-cost country, the most common SSC location strategy. Service-level agreement: the contract that defines how the SSC delivers to its internal customers. FAQ What's the difference between a shared services centre and outsourcing?An SSC stays inside the company, with employees on the parent payroll. Outsourcing hands the same work to a third-party vendor. Both standardise and centralise work, but ownership, risk, and margins sit in different places.
Is an SSC the same as a BPO?No. A BPO provider sells shared services to many client companies. An SSC serves only one company, its parent, even when it sits in the same building as a BPO down the street.
Where do most shared services centres get built?Manila, Bengaluru, Kraków, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and San José (Costa Rica) host the bulk of global SSC capacity, according to the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network. Talent depth, English fluency, and time-zone reach drive location choice more than raw labour cost.
How big does a company need to be to run an SSC?A captive SSC typically needs at least 300 to 500 transactional roles to justify its setup costs. Below that threshold, hybrid models or pure outsourcing usually deliver better economics.
What are the biggest risks in running an SSC?Process variation across business units kills the savings case; weak governance creates silent service failures; and over-centralising judgment work can starve business units of finance and HR support. Strong SLAs and clear escalation paths usually fix all three.
Are shared services centres still relevant in the age of automation?Yes, but the shape is changing. Routine transactions are increasingly automated, so modern SSCs are pivoting toward analytics, controls, and advisory work — the things automation still can't do unsupervised.
Thinking about whether an SSC or an outsourcing partner fits your operation better? Talk to Outsource Accelerator for an independent take.
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 templateFor 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.
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Different forms of standard operating proceduresSOPs 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 instructionsAs 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 SOPsA 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 SOPFlowchart 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 proceduresAside from proper documentation of processes, SOPs are crucial in the business processes of a company in different ways.
Knowledge preservationBy 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 efficiencyAt 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 outcomesEmployees 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 complianceSOP 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 proceduresThere'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.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.
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.
Independent
