Executive Company Profile: Accenture’s BPO Business

Accenture has very effectively evolved its 20-year-old BPO business to become a market leader in terms of market share and vision. Accenture’s sophisticated and collaborative approach to BPO fits well with the needs and demands of many of today’s ambitious globalizing enterprises seeking to improve their business outcomes and performance.

Accenture believes many organizations today are leaving a huge amount of value – and money – on the table by failing to take a more holistic approach to BPO. This involves much greater collaboration between provider and customer, prioritization of change management, a concerted focus on achieving business outcomes as opposed merely to more efficient transactions, contextualization of data through domain expertise and analytics, and use of the benefits of technology to enable the company’s vision of “High-performance” BPO. Most of Accenture’s BPO clients today are high-end global enterprises that have had long, multi-year relationships with Accenture and keenly follow the company’s vision.

Accenture has distinguished itself with its compelling “BPO Generations” framework (Exhibit 1) that describes the increasing business value available from BPO, and the building blocks (e.g., scale, operational excellence, industry insight, analytics and technology) that are necessary as a provider to differentiate itself in a commoditized marketplace.