The CX/BPO Advisors Who Actually Get This Industry

Every BPO and CX leader eventually hits the same wall. Inside the companies (small or big) the strategy seems right, the operation usually is solid, but something between "we have a good story" and "the market believes it" keeps not closing. That gap is where a small group of people live (me included)!

Not consultants who parachute in with a template deck, but operators and analysts who spent their careers inside this industry before they started advising it.

Over the years I've come to rely on a handful of names when a client needs something I can't build for them myself. Here they are, and what each one is actually good for.

Donald Berryman built ProfectusCX Consulting Advisors after decades running BPO and contact center operations at scale, including time as an advisor at Bain&Co. What makes him useful isn't just the resume, it's that he's still writing publicly about the exact tension enterprises and BPOs are living through right now, the shift from headcount pricing to outcome pricing, and what AI is doing to the old RFP playbook. If a client is trying to figure out how to reposition itself for that shift, Don is whom I point them to.

Robert Davis and his team at RCDA Consulting - Robert C. Davis and Associates come from the operational side of the business, nearly five decades of it. What sets them apart from a lot of consulting shops is that they don't stop at the strategy deck. They sit on live calls, calibrate coaching in real time, and tie behavior change directly to EBITDA. For clients weighing an outsourcing decision, going through an M&A transaction, or trying to fix a contact center that isn't performing the way the numbers say it should, RCDA is built for exactly that kind of hands-on work.

Amanda Quinn runs the company Evostr, and has built a reputation around one uncomfortable truth most BPOs don't want to hear: trying to be everything to everyone is why the sales pipeline is unpredictable. She pushes BPOs toward specialization, toward pricing for value instead of competing on headcount, and toward building demand instead of chasing it. She was named to ICMI's Top 25 Thought Leaders in Customer Experience for 2026, and if you follow her on LinkedIn, you'll notice she practices what she preaches. Anyone building or fixing a BPO's growth engine should have a conversation with her.

Rachel Rybicki, who I already had the pleasure to work with in one project, is the name I point people to when the problem is the account itself. 20+ years leading strategic accounts, managed services organizations and global client success teams for more than 35 Fortune 500 companies across tech, healthcare, financial services, retail, manufacturing and business services, and she's now working independently instead of inside one org's structure. What she does sits right at the intersection of client strategy, operational excellence and commercial growth, redesigning operating models, building the account management frameworks that make retention and profitability something a team can actually repeat rather than something that happens to get lucky one quarter. Any BPO that keeps winning logos and then quietly losing them a year later needs someone like Rachel looking at how the account is actually run.

Now for the two names that matter for a different reason.

Most of the advisors above help BPOs get stronger. David Neale and Victor Manzanera sit on the buyer's side of the table, and that distinction matters more than people give it credit for.

David Neale founded GBPO Solutions after years on both sides of the BPO sales process, as a buyer and as a provider representative. What he built is the industry's first independent accreditation for BPOs, a way to validate people, process, policy and technology without taking commission from the providers being reviewed. His own research found that 94% of companies are more likely to choose an accredited provider, and that trust in commission-driven brokers is falling fast. For enterprises trying to select a BPO without relying on the sales pitch, this is the layer of independent verification that didn't exist before.

Victor Manzanera spent 15+ years running CX and BPO operations for the likes of Google, Apple and Bose before starting his advisory work at Scale Edge™ Group . He doesn't sell packages, he builds the model with the people who have to live with it, right structure, real governance, contracts and SLAs that actually hold up, and cost-to-serve that doesn't quietly creep back up six months later. If a company needs someone to help them choose, structure and govern a BPO relationship from the buyer's chair, Victor is the person who has done it from inside the biggest accounts in the industry.

And since every list like this conveniently forgets that none of it matters if nobody outside the industry ever hears about it, I'll put myself on here too :D

Not out of false modesty, just because it happens to be true. Ana Marvulle and I built Pleffken & Marvulle - Marketing for BPO and CX after years inside BPOs, like Transcom and Teleperformance, precisely because we kept watching BPOs with genuinely good operations get out- marketed by companies with a better logo and worse delivery. Positioning, content, and the kind of visibility that makes a BPO show up in the conversation before the RFP even goes out, that's the piece we handle, and it belongs on this list next to everyone above.

None of these people do the same job. That's the point.

The BPOs and enterprises that get this right aren't looking for one advisor to solve everything, they're building the right combination for the stage they're at, operational fixer, growth strategist, account custodian, buyer- side advocate, or the ones making sure the market actually knows the story. Know which one you need before you pick up the phone.