One of my colleagues was on the road in Europe recently and he had enough downtime in the airport to formulate some thoughts on what things might look like for the BPO industry in the coming years. Outsourcers have some significant changes to contend with if they’re going to meet customer needs over the next decade.

I thought I should share the most significant developments he sees with you:

1.) Leading global, multi-functional service centers: it’s a fairly recent phenomenon, but Shared Service Centers (SSC) increasingly include combinations of two or more functional areas with high-transactional activities like HR, IT support, customer service, and finance back office. In fact, these multi-functional centers now make up close to half of all SSCs. Management and leadership of these multi-functional centers requires a new skill set—and this will be a test of both outsourcing capacity and leadership.

2.) Sustainability: it’s truly an issue of global proportions, and many businesses see environmental sustainability as a challenge they cannot compete with alone. The good news for outsourcers is that sustainability can be a built-in part of our product—if we do it right. Well-run SSCs inherently create efficiency in transactional activities and require less power, energy, and natural resources to complete the same tasks. Clustered labor translates to reduced consumption of other resources and a lighter overall carbon footprint. Increasingly, solutions must be designed at the outset to achieve these results, as this is why business cannot do without us.

3.) Outsourcing value-add activities: typically, value-add functions have been off-limits to outsourcing. But now, outsourcing is starting to move up the value chain to include talent-centric capabilities. This is risky territory, and the right controls are pivotal. However, it can be done, and it can be done well. Moving outsourcing up the chain requires less focus on cost as the major driver for change, and more focus on ‘value’.

4.) Change management must not be an after-thought: managing change is still rarely at the center of BPO shifts—customers themselves are saying so. Businesses are failing to focus on the fact that change management gives them control in BPO. If this is going to be fixed, outsourcers need to support businesses far more with the vast and complex nature of change management. Has a compelling business case validated the benefits? Has sufficient (or the right) sponsorship been allocated to communicate and lead the change? Is there a formalized and communicated governance team? Making the change is only part of the job—helping businesses to manage the change is just as important.

5.) Talent management is a growing issue: as companies move towards BPO, the need to retain talent, knowledge and skills is about as critical as it gets. How outsourcers do this will increasingly be the difference between a great BPO experience, and a complex, stressful one. Particularly for companies looking to scale down operations, retaining the right skills will be key to getting the right outcomes.

Across the globe, there is a significant move towards the harmonization of existing operations. The need to create globalized business centers will most certainly see growth in BPO, particularly in the EU, but unless these five trends are factored into an outsourcers’ delivery model, the results will fall short of their promises.