BPO Interview Questions and Answers 2023

BPO stands for Business process outsourcing. BPO is a contract of a company to an outside provider of services or business processes. It is a cost-saving measure that allows companies to outsource the non-core tasks. The services may include accounting, payroll, Human resource (HR), data recording, IT services, telemarketing, social media marketing and more.

•          Call Center Outsourcing
•          Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO)
•          IT Services Outsourcing
•          Data Entry Outsourcing
•         Healthcare BPO Outsourcing
•          Financial Services Outsourcing
•          Engineering Services Outsourcing

Legal Process Outsourcing is when a legal firm outsources a part of their legal work to another legal firm.

Knowledge Process Outsourcing is a part of Business Process Outsourcing itself but only referred to assignments that have high technical, analytical, or subject-oriented knowledge.

Customer service representatives help customers with complaints and questions, give customers information about products and services, take orders, and process returns. By helping customers understand the product and answering questions about their reservations, they are sometimes seen as having a role in sales.

SOP stands for Standard Operating Procedure. It 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 create a safe work environment for the company.

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a type of measure that is used to evaluate the performance of an organization against its strategic objectives. In dashboards, KPIs necessarily will have a position to display visually where a person / department / organization stands currently compared to where it is supposed to be.

•         Actionable indicators are sufficiently in an organization’s control to effect change.
•          Financial indicators used in performance measurement and when looking at an operating index.
• ·        Input indicators that measure the amount of resources consumed during the generation of the outcome
•          Output indicators that reflect the outcome or results of the process activities
•          Quantitative indicators that can be presented with a number.
•          Qualitative indicators that can’t be presented as a number.
•          Leading indicators that can predict the outcome of a process
•          Lagging indicators that present the success or failure post hoc
•          Process indicators that represent the efficiency or the productivity of the process
•         Practical indicators that interface with existing company processes.
•         Directional indicators specifying whether or not an organization is getting better.

A call center is a standalone business or part of a larger business that specializes in answering phone calls from customers. A call center usually has two or more employees answering calls and handles calls regarding sales and technical support for products and services.

Inbound Call center: An inbound call center is one where the agents (known as call center executives) receive incoming telephone calls from people, and provide solutions to their problems.The most common type of inbound call centers are the 24-hour customer support numbers that we all know about. Our banks have that toll-free number which we can call anytime for support, as also our telecom service providers provide such toll-free numbers for support.

• ·         Customer Service/Support
• ·         Inbound Sales
• ·         Help Desk Services/Technical Support Services
• ·         Order Booking/Order Processing

Outbound Call Center:  An outbound call center is one in which the call center agents make outgoing calls to people.These outbound calls can be made for many reasons. Some of them could be with the purpose of making sales to prospective buyers, or they could be collection calls to remind a customer of overdue payments, and still others could be welcome calls or service calls that a company makes to its existing customers.

• Lead Generation
• Customer Retention
• Customer Survey
• Appointment Scheduling

A predictive dialer is an automated outbound dialer software that is used in outbound call centers. This software program automatically dials numbers from a list of numbers that has been uploaded to it as input data. When a dialed call is answered (picked up) and gets a human response (not an answering machine), then the dialer immediately connects that call to a free agent who can then speak to the person.

In a BPO, the complete business process gets transferred from an external service provider to a third party. Sometimes, parts of a business function or the entire piece get contracted out. Such a third party helps improve the service provider’s customer experience as well as render an excellent customer service.

Reshoring is the reverse of offshoring. it involves a business returning production or operations to the host country that had previously been moved to a different international location.

Non-Voice process does not require to receive or make a phone call to the customers. This process requires the skill for writing or typing and the ability to understand the type of query for making the right processing. This is a very important process for handling customer issues through emails and chat support. Some services are Chat Support Services, Data Entry Services and Email Support Services.

Some of the services popularly outsourced are,

• Financial Services
• Advertising Services
• Courier Services
• Customer Support Services 

Automatic Call Distribution is a random process which is used in call centers to allocate incoming calls of customers to free agents on the floor.

In an outsourcing, ISO:9000 is a standard of mapping quality for the company.  Most of the BPO companies have accepted ISO:9000 as the benchmark for the quality of service they offer

Companies outsource because it is cost saving and focus on core activities leading ahead to get quality work done by the expertise in that domain.

IT and Communication, Medical and health services, Insurance, Finance, Law and Jurisdiction are some of the sectors where majority of outsourcing works get done.

Onsite, or onsite outsourcing, defined as the outsourcing of services to a provider who will send skilled professionals to work in your office for a fixed period of time.

Onshoring, or onshore outsourcing, defined as the outsourcing of services to a provider within your same country — but outside of your company.

Professional outsourcing (PO) refers to specialized services such as accounting, legal, purchasing, information technology (IT), IT or administrative support etc. It is a very common area of outsourcing as a service. Professional outsourcing leads to substantial cost savings as core businesses only need to pay for services actually provided while accessing high quality resources. This reduces overhead costs significantly.

BPO services are

Horizontal BPO: It is function centric outsourcing. The outsourcing partner or vendor specializes in specific functions across industry domains. Examples include procurement, payroll processing, HR, facilities management and ERP software maintenance.

Vertical BPO: It is all about functional services within core industry domains. These include healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and retail.