BPO vendor swap
Your BPO knows what it does all day. Do you?
The contract says one thing. The work says another. Before you swap vendors, renew, or bring it home, Ace Work maps what your outsourced team actually does, and shows you how much of it a machine should be doing.
You're not paying for the SOW. You're paying for the drift.
The contract was scoped years ago. Since then, workarounds became process. Your vendor handles a hundred undocumented tasks, and when you swap vendors, the new one inherits the same mess. You aren't paying for the contract; you're paying for the drift.
Find the shadow SOW.
Ace Work surveys your team and the vendor's team to map the shadow SOW, the real scope of what you pay for. Every task lands in one of three buckets:
Automate it
Rule-based, high-volume work. Automations run this without quality drift.
Keep it human
Judgment calls and relationship work. A smaller team focused on what needs a person.
Kill it
Reports no one reads. Approvals that approve nothing. The map finds them, and they stop.
Seven vendors' worth of drift. One back office.
A PE firm rolls up seven businesses with undocumented BPO setups. Ace Work maps the shadow SOW, identifying identical rule-based tasks across all seven. Workflows are automated, processing drops 86%, and the remaining human work takes a fraction of the team.
“The problem was never the vendor. Nobody, including us, knew what the work actually was.”
COO, seven-company roll-up
What you walk away with.
- The shadow SOW: what your vendor actually does
- Every workflow split: automate, keep human, or kill
- SOPs you own, independent of any vendor
- A cost model with real numbers: swap vs. automate
Questions, answered.
Do we have to leave our BPO to do this?
No. Some clients automate the bulk and keep the vendor for the genuinely human work. Others use the map as leverage at renewal. Either way, you're negotiating with the facts for the first time.
How do you map work that only the vendor's team understands?
The surveys run with their team and yours. People describe their real work readily, especially the parts that were never written down. That's exactly the material the shadow SOW is made of.
What if the vendor won't cooperate?
Your side of the workflow usually reveals most of the picture: what goes to them, what comes back, and everything your team quietly fixes in between. A vendor who resists documentation is itself a data point.
What does automation cost against our BPO rates?
That's the cost model the diagnosis produces. Volume, complexity, and exception rates, priced against what you pay today. You see the numbers before you decide anything.
Who runs the automations after they're built?
You can, or we do. Managed Services runs the automations and the human layer as one operation, with the SOPs staying yours either way.
Where next
Different seat, same problem?
Before you swap vendors, find your shadow SOW.
Book 30 minutes. We'll show you how much of your outsourced scope a machine should be running.
Want us to build it for you? See how build work is priced