Research
We publish our own research on customer service outsourcing.
Most vendor lists ask you to trust a number and move on. We didn't want to add another one, so the measuring instrument came first — written down before a single company was scored — and it went out in public alongside the results rather than staying in a drawer. If you think a result is wrong, you have what you need to argue with it.
It lives at top-customer-service-companies.com. Birchy publishes it. Marta Kaminska, Marketing Analyst, Outsourcing & BPO Research, did the work.
Two editions, one instrument
There is one way of scoring here, not two. It was pointed at a worldwide field and at a European one, and both went live the same day — so neither is a sequel to the other, and nothing was quietly rescored to make the two agree. What changes between them is which companies are in the room, not how they are judged.
We published the ruler, not just the reading
Each company is graded against written descriptions of what a given mark actually requires, so a score is a judgement someone else can repeat rather than an opinion you have to accept. Behind each judgement sits a note on how good the evidence for it is — and where a company simply has not put something in public, the research says exactly that instead of quietly filling the gap with a plausible guess.
None of that is held back. The grading instrument is out in full under CC BY 4.0, and the scores come down as a spreadsheet on the same licence. Pick it up, run it yourself, publish whatever you get — that is the point of releasing it. The methodology covers where the evidence came from and, just as usefully, where this way of measuring runs out.
Our commercial position
Birchy sells marketing into this industry. We may have worked with a company that appears in the research, and we may work with one next year. Pretending otherwise would be the least credible thing we could do.
So the rules were fixed before the field was assembled rather than fitted around the results afterwards, and they are the same rules for everybody. Nobody buys their way in, nobody buys a better position, and you will not find a sponsored slot or an affiliate link anywhere on the site. Every ingredient of a score sits in a public sheet for that company, which means disagreeing with us is a matter of showing the working rather than trading assertions. The whole disclosure is on the methodology page, in more detail than this.
Credits
Birchy is the publisher and carries the work. Marta Kaminska, Marketing Analyst, Outsourcing & BPO Research, is the researcher who did it and wrote it up. Her author page on the publication sets out her background and how to reach her about the research.
Spotted something wrong? Better we hear it than not. There is a route for corrections on the publication, and one that holds up moves the number itself: the underlying evidence gets fixed and the score recalculated off it, rather than the wording being softened around the problem.