Glossary

Outsourcing glossary

Plain, accurate definitions of the outsourcing terms that matter, written for UK and Irish businesses.

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)

Contracting a specialist provider to run a business process, such as customer support or finance, on your behalf.

Outsourcing of higher-skill, judgement-based work such as research, analysis or compliance.

Outsourcing to a nearby or time-aligned country, keeping working-hours overlap and easier collaboration.

Outsourcing to a distant, usually lower-cost country, often with a significant time difference.

Outsourcing to a provider in the same country, at the highest cost and closest alignment.

Outsourcing internal support functions such as finance, data processing and administration.

Outsourcing customer support and service across voice, email, chat and social channels.

Customer service delivered in the customer's own language across multiple markets.

Labelling data such as images, text or audio so machine learning models can be trained on it.

Using an external partner to build, run or support artificial intelligence work, from data to deployment.

A contractual commitment to defined service standards, such as response and resolution times.

The UK's data protection regime, retained after Brexit and read with the Data Protection Act 2018.

Share your requirement and model your savings. We reply within six hours with a clear next step.

Six-hour response. UK GDPR compliant. Named UK accountability.