Birchy
Outsourcing & BPO
Research
What do customer service outsourcing companies publish about pricing?
Almost none. Of 29 providers scored on public evidence, two publish a figure a buyer can compare — HGS and iSON Xperiences — and five publish how they charge without saying what it costs. The other 24 publish neither. These are the providers whose published materials this research found stating terms; a provider absent from this count may publish something we did not find.
How they charge, and what it costs, are different questions
A buyer needs two things before a procurement conversation, and providers treat them very differently.
How they charge is the shape of the bill: per-FTE, per-transaction, outcome-linked, a retainer, an hourly rate. 5 of 29 publish this.
What it costs is a number. 2 publish one.
The gap between those two counts is the finding. A published commercial model without a published rate tells a buyer the mechanism and nothing about the magnitude, and it is the more common of the two by a factor of more than two.
Which providers publish what
| Provider | Publishes a structure | Publishes a figure | What is published |
|---|---|---|---|
| HGS | Yes | Yes | An actual price on a public procurement registry, with stated termination terms |
| iSON Xperiences | Yes | Yes | A minimum project size and an hourly band, on its own directory profile |
| Sutherland | Yes | No | Scaling bands, outcome-based and shared-risk models, priced against agreed volumes |
| Infosys BPM | Yes | No | FTE-based, transaction-based and outcome-linked pricing, with no inclusions or exit terms |
| Alorica | Yes | No | All-in pricing with no hidden fees, on a productised entry offering |
Every other provider in the field publishes neither.
Why a directory profile counts
Two of the five publish through a third-party directory rather than their own site. That still counts, because the commercial fields on those profiles are supplied by the provider: the platform hosts them, the provider writes them. The test this publication applies throughout is who authored a claim, not who hosts it.
It also cuts the other way. A directory profile that leaves those fields blank is a provider choosing not to publish, and that is scored as such.
What this does not say
It does not say 24 providers refuse to discuss price. Every one of them will quote on request. It says the information is not available before a conversation, which means a buyer cannot shortlist on cost without entering a sales process with each provider first.
It also does not say the two who publish figures are cheaper. Publishing a rate is a transparency behaviour, and this framework scores transparency because a buyer must verify everything anyway — but a published price is not a low price.
How this was established
Each flag is set from a claim in that provider's own evidence ledger, and the phrase that sets it is recorded there. A build check fails the deploy if the phrase ever leaves the ledger, so the count cannot drift from the evidence behind it.
The full method is on the methodology page, and the criterion that scores commercial transparency is B5.3. Every provider record carries its own claims with an evidence grade against each: the 29 data sheets.