BPO & outsourcing glossary

Average Handle Time (AHT) is the average duration an agent spends on a customer interaction, including talk time, hold time, and after-call work.

Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) is a model where a vendor sets up and runs an offshore or nearshore team, then transfers full ownership to the buyer.

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) means contracting a third-party vendor to run a defined business process on your behalf.

A captive center is a company-owned offshore or nearshore delivery facility, fully controlled by the parent organization, not a third-party vendor.

A contact center is a centralized operation that handles customer interactions across voice, chat, email, and social, managed in-house or outsourced.

CSAT measures how satisfied customers are with a specific interaction, rated on a short scale and expressed as a percentage of positive responses.

A dedicated team is a group of agents assigned exclusively to one client, rather than shared across multiple accounts.

First Call Resolution (FCR) measures the share of customer contacts resolved on the first interaction, without a callback or follow-up.

Follow-the-sun is a multi-timezone BPO delivery model where work or support coverage passes between geographically distributed teams so operations run 24 hours a day without requiring any single team to work overnight shifts.

KPO is outsourcing that involves skilled, judgment-based work, research, analysis, legal, or financial tasks, not just repeatable process execution.

Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) is the practice of sending legal work to an external provider, offshore or nearshore, to reduce cost or access specialist capacity.

Managed Services: a model where a vendor takes ongoing ownership of a defined process or function, not just labor.

Nearshoring means outsourcing business processes to a provider in a nearby country, typically sharing your timezone or close to it.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer loyalty by asking how likely customers are to recommend a business, scored on a 0 to 10 scale.

Offshoring means relocating business processes or functions to a team or vendor in another country, typically to reduce costs or access specialized talent.

Omnichannel means handling customer interactions across multiple channels, voice, chat, email, social, with a unified view of each customer.

Onshoring means hiring a service provider or relocating work within your own country, avoiding offshore or nearshore delivery.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is when a company transfers part or all of its internal recruiting function to an external provider.

A Shared Services Center (SSC) consolidates common business functions into one internal unit serving multiple parts of an organization.

Staff augmentation is a model where you hire external talent to work within your team and processes, rather than handing work to a vendor to manage.

Time zone overlap is the number of shared working hours per day between a buyer's team and their outsourced provider's team.