BPO Cases: Successful And Failed Examples To Learn

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) service is no longer a new work style, and in previous articles, we covered many benefits of BPO. During the covid-19 pandemic, BPO has become even more popular, and it’s the chosen one of many businesses.

According to Gartner, about 74% of CFOs plan to convert about 5% of their office-based employees into remote workers.

There are successful and failed cases among the countless companies that use BPO. Let’s look at a few ones to learn your lesson.

Successful BPO cases

Here are a few successful BPO cases from well-known companies.

CuriosityStream

CuriosityStream is an independent international media company and live-streaming video service on demand. Before applying BPO service, this company also witnessed other companies take the positive effects of outsourcing.

Therefore, to stay competitive in the market, in 2019, CuriosityStream hired a team of 6 programmers to develop new features for the Livestream service.

As a result, the wise decision helped CuriosityStream significantly reduce the excess money spending, according to Andre Silva, the CTO of CuriosityStream.

Outsourcing services is an excellent value for a business. And Andre Silva also advises firms to find ways to coordinate on-site and offshore teams to save costs and improve work efficiency.

StudyTube

StudyTube is an online education platform in the Netherlands, and it also utilizes nearshore programmers for software development. Initially, StudyTube hired part-time engineers to grow the business.

However, realizing that this is not the optimal way to create sustainable products, StudyTube resorted to BPO service nearshore from Ukraine. Their decision secured 3 rounds of investments totaling €1,500,000, while keeping to scale the business.

Slack

Slack is one of the typical successful cases of hiring BPO services. It hired a design team from Canada to develop the beta version into a hugely successful product.

By outsourcing creators to develop the website, logo, and mobile app, Slack increased its investment to $250, out of a total value of $5 billion in July 2017. Valuation as of August 2018 showed that it has $7.1 billion.

Thanks to outsourcing, this company attracted 15,000 users within 2 weeks of launch. By May 2018, it had more than 8+ million users with big names like IBM, BBC or Oracle.

In short, Slack is a great example worth learning for those wondering whether or not to use BPO services.

Oktopost

Oktopost is a social media management platform launched in 2013. It has only 22 employees operating in 3 countries, and they have 14 employees in Israel, 3 in Ukraine, and 5 in the US.

In 2018, Oktopost used BPO services to hire software developers and increase the available talent pool. Liad Guez, Oktopost co-founder and VP of product, was very optimistic about the results. He said that outsourcing helped Oktopost expand its roadmap, and develop things that Oktopost could not do earlier.

WhatsApp

WhatsApp is not new to all of us, and in the early days, when there was no initial capital, it must cut down on operation costs. This company outsourced tech talents from Russia to build and bring the product to market.

So, in-house workers will focus on supporting customers and running the company, while software development is outsourced.

Failed BPO cases

Besides successful BPO cases, we also have ones that need to be reconsidered. This failure comes from how managers arrange, and balance outsourcing and financial decisions.

JPay

JPay is a two-person company, then one left, forcing the other, Ryan, to decide whether to outsource a new partner, or find an in-house one.

Finally, Ryan chose to outsource, which can be said to be the worst decision he has ever made. Ryan has outsourced engineers from all over the world. He outsourced the engineering team to an existing one in Israel, the Q&A team to a group in India, and the hardware and firmware development team to a group in China.

Over-outsourcing boosted JPay’s growth quickly, but it led to Ryan losing control, and not being able to manage the entire company.

In short, the valuable lesson here is that, while outsourcing can make a business thrive, if you don’t know how to organize and manage the outsourced team, you will lose your control.

PatientDox’s failed BPO case

The second case comes from PatientDox, a cloud-based startup providing software as a Service (SaaS) to healthcare providers. Although the co-founders of PatientDox wanted to create a product to serve users, they still focused on developing software and technology solutions.

Because PatientDox co-founders have no software engineering and technical background, they hired the BPO service for most of the product development phase. It seemed practical, but this decision cost too much, killing the cash reserves to maintain the business.

Not only that, PatientDox cannot adapt and keep up with changes to tailor its product to the user’s demands. Ultimately, the lesson learned here is that businesses should have at least one in-house specialist, who can focus on growing the core business. It will save you from bankruptcy.

In addition to the case studies just shared, you can also come across many successes and failures of BPO cases. Although outsourcing services provide a convenient solution to many technical and workforce issues, they have some problems.

However, with the values ​​it brings and the affordable solutions, BPO is still an outstanding choice that many businesses prioritize.