KPO - building on BPO as a foundation?

Clients actually have this continuous complaint that their vendors are mere 'vendors' and not 'partners' - reason being that sourcing vendors provide good answers to the questions client ask them, but they do not ask questions! Gone are the days when cost arbitrage was something that excited people. Couple of things have changed fundamentally - cost arbitrage is given and client expect vendors to influence their business on an ongoing basis; secondly, they want vendors to influence their top line and not just concentrate on the cost. How can vendors start asking 'questions' or in other words provide insights to the client into their own business thereby providing ongoing value.

Standard BPO processes provide a good platform for sourcing companies to start providing these Business Insights. BPO vendors by virtue of providing standard services to organizations have access to a wealth of information which is, more often that not, ignored or should I say, not exploited to the maximum. Just by looking at the information that the teams process on a daily basis, you can come up with trends, root causes, early warnings etc and in the process positively impact the end customer experience. Some of the questions might serve as an input for the client to fix the larger process internally, and thereby impact revenue/cost positively.

Not to mention that by providing these insights, you automatically create Exit Barriers for the client organizations which would be much harder to overcome. The reason being that you start moving from a Vendor relationship to a Partner Relationship.