WNS SA becomes end-to-end BPO service provider

WNS Global Services SA has grown from a customer care BPO provider to an end-to-end BPO provider, offering new services such as finance and accounting, research and analytics, legal process outsourcing and a number of other BPO services. This puts WNS SA in a unique position to cater for businesses that require BPO services across multiple horizontals and industries, locally in South Africa, or globally.

The current world economic outlook and an increasing competitive business landscape have fuelled growth in the BPO industry. One benefit of this growth is that decision-makers are becoming more comfortable with BPO services and solutions. This confidence results in more sophisticated deal structures that focus on value creation across the business, focusing on various pressure points such as cost, customer journey, system standardisation or the integration of acquisitions.

The emerging trend is to choose a partner that understands the client's business and strategy end-to-end, and to implement BPO services across the organisation's operations and support functions. For example, BPO services may include finance and accounting services supporting the full financial cycle, from procurement to collections, asset management, or treasury. Research and analytics services are also available, supporting new product launches or interpreting customer behaviour, providing customer support through customer care solutions and even enhancing operations by implementing various transformation, logistics, back-office and information technology (IT) solutions. There are many more horizontal and vertical BPO solutions available to support any business. This approach can be taken to the next level, where these solutions are provided by industry-focused business units with the necessary skills, experience and industry-specific IT platforms and solutions. These solutions are typically built around mainstream industries such as travel and logistics, finance, medical, legal, mining and telecommunications.

The benefit of this new approach is that organisations will then have one strategic BPO partner that not only understands the business end-to-end, but also understands the interdependencies of the various processes and can add value through industry-specific resources and solutions.

The BPO industry in South Africa, and in the Western Cape in particular, has seen significant growth in the last 12 months, leading to wealth creation, skills development, and new job opportunities. This has led to South African businesses becoming consumers of broader BPO solutions, whereas traditionally South Africa was seen as a BPO provider specifically for customer care (contact centre services). This growth has also resulted in international expertise, models and best practices being imported for the first time for the benefit of the local customer. Local customers now also have access to global expertise and infrastructure across all BPO services locally and internationally.