Cloud BPO – Why Should Bpos Look at Cloud Shift as a Growth Strategy?

I recently spoke with a friend who ventured into entrepreneurship six months ago. As a seasoned professional and thought leader, it seemed natural for him to start his own venture.

When discussing operational challenges, I asked if he had systems in place to manage operations. He surprised me by saying he had everything set from day one—HR, recruitment, talent and performance management, IT, finance, payroll, project management, CRM, marketing automation, customer support, and knowledge management.

Curious, I asked how he managed it. His response: “It’s easy now. Everything is on the cloud. We just subscribed and got started immediately. Plus, these systems integrate seamlessly and offer plenty of configuration options, simplifying our work.

Cloud makes your life really easy.

Additionally, most enterprise software providers have moved their offerings to the cloud. Not because it is a fancy thing to do but because customers today want everything as a service, and the cloud allows you to provide them with that.

Considering that the ecosystem is moving towards the cloud, what stops BPOs from moving to the cloud?

Let us flip this and ask this question: Why should BPOs look at cloud-shift? Is it going to make them grow faster? Is it going to make them efficient? Is it going to help them save on costs?

I would say it does all of these and much more.

Let us look at some of the reasons for BPOs to shift to the cloud.

Four Top Reasons to Move Your BPO to the Cloud

Reason No. 1: Ease of Access

As a BPO, you are handling customers across verticals and geographies.

Let us assume you have a platform on-premise, and your clients want you to provide 24×7 support. You need to ensure that you manage your staff in multiple shifts, which will shoot your costs up drastically.

Imagine if you were on the cloud; you could have your resources work from home or, for that matter, from anywhere. They can access the platform with an active Internet and a browser. You don’t need anything else to support.

This brings down the operational costs considerably while ensuring your people are also comfortable providing services from anywhere.

Now, let us flip this and look at it from a reporting perspective. How do you send your reports to your clients today?

You access the reports on your platform, download them, fit them into a reporting template, and send them to your clients. Can you provide them access directly to your on-premise systems? You can, but that would mean you will have to get your clients to connect through VPNs and the like.

With the cloud, you can provide direct access to your clients to your reporting and dashboard. This will allow your clients to access them in real time. This would also set the benchmark for your transparency levels with your customers.

Reason No. 2: Lower Costs

This has been a debate for a long time. Cloud adds up costs over three years, and it is far more expensive than on-premise solutions, which is the normal refrain.

However, this debate has been put to rest by addressing the tangible and intangible costs of on-premise and cloud solutions.

Let us look at some of the costs of operating an on-premise platform:

• Hardware to host your platform and to create redundancy and failover
• Software licenses
• Customizations during implementations and addressing client-specific needs
• Installation and maintenance
• Technical support

Besides, you will have to upgrade the software and change the hardware every two to three years. The high-ticket line item in your costing of on-premise platforms is the human resource cost for maintenance and security.

With the cloud, you are avoiding the cost of hardware, software licenses, installation, maintenance, and the costs associated with human resources to maintain and keep your platform secure.

Besides, you don’t have to pay for integrations, analytics, intelligence, and infrastructural needs like availability, security, scalability, redundancy, and failover.

The cloud provider would handle all of these, and you would pay for what you use.

Now, you can set up and run the technology with a different Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model.

Reason No. 3: Scalability

Let us assume you run a BPO operation for a customer in the e-commerce space.

The customer says, I am expecting a spike during the festive season, and so I would like you to increase the number of people handling my customer support.

What do you do?

You will have to procure additional licenses from your platform provider and ensure they are activated for your resources to handle customer support during the peak festive season. After the festive season, you will have to reduce the number of licenses.

How many on-premise platform providers offer this flexibility of scaling up and down easily?

They would ask you for a minimum commitment besides the license and activation fee. So, it is not a very viable model with on-premise platforms.

With the cloud, you can scale up and down your operations at the click of a button. After all, you only pay for what you use, and this gives you the flexibility to address your client’s needs with ease.

There are no long-term contracts or minimum commitments with your cloud solution providers.

Reason No. 4: Compliance

As a BPO, you have to be compliant with various standards and regulations if you have to handle customers across geographies and verticals.

Getting yourself compliant with standards and regulations can be prohibitively expensive – limiting your chances of winning new business.

With cloud platforms, most of your compliance needs are addressed. Be it HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR, CCPA, TCPA, FDCPA, Reg-F, SOC2, ISO 27001, FedRamp, DoT & TRAI regulations, and ISAE 3402 Type II specifications.

You can be as compliant as your client expects you to be.

As a BPO, it is a no-brainer for you to look at a cloud offering. After all, it offers you everything that you need as a platform – flexibility, scalability, security, and compliance, and all of these at a fraction of the cost that you would otherwise spend.

Besides, it makes it easier for you to offer the transparency and trust that your clients expect of you by providing them with direct access to everything in real-time.

You don’t have to look beyond the number of BPO success stories driven by cloud platforms.