If you believe those advocating the widespread use of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), you might think that it has dramatically and comprehensively changed the way the world does business. To an extent, perhaps, such a viewpoint may be right but only in the sense that call centres have become intermediaries between companies and their customers – and not always with positive results.

It’s a moot point whether those call centres are always outsourced and the most recent edition of the Dimension Data annual Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report seems to indicate that they’re not. On page fi ve of the summarised version of the report – freely available from the company’s website – is a chart depicting the answer to a deceptively simple question: “Is your contact centre captive or outsourced?”