Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Top 4 benefits of outsourcing

Most of the online businessmen have ran their businesses through outsourcing. But, what are the top benefits of outsourcing? Most of the start-up business owners that venture in online business feels that they have to do everything themselves. For those who would like to venture in outsourcing the top 4 benefits most of these businessmen get when they outsource includes:

More value for your time

As the owner, you would find repetitive tasks time consuming and at the end of the day, you realized you have wasted so much time on those minimal impact tasks. To avoid that, when you outsource these tasks, you get to focus on the more pressing matters with great impact to your business.

Savings on resources

When you outsource certain tasks, lets say graphic design, you will not have to purchase the necessary software and hardware requirements or even train you staff. Outsourcing certain tasks, means that the people, team, or company you hire, already has the necessary tools, equipment and skills to get the those tasks done for you.

Experts of their field

When you want certain tasks done, and with the current staff you have, you will have to spend for additional training, if not do some trial and errors. You may want to learn more for some of the tasks but remember you want to save and minimize cost. When you outsource, you hire the expert. It is their line of business and they do it everyday. Skills-wise and experience-wise, the people you outsource are the expert here.

Growth

When you outsource, you will realize you will be able to do more, grow more. When there is growth in business, you get to provide innovative products and better services, learn more, experience new things and increase profit.

If you would like to try outsourcing 1 person for a task, I suggest you hire a Filipino worker! Not only they are cheap, they are also experts on their field, loyal, very hardworking and easy to communicate with. I suggest you check this out and avail the lectures and training. This is highly dedicated on outsourcing Filipino workers.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Things you need to teach your outsourcer

As an entrepreneur, or a manager, or a business, you need to have all the required skills to be able to do great things for your business. One of them is to make sure things work according to plan. But, what if you have all the required skills but the people working for you lacks time management and the decisiveness of an entrepreneur? Don't get me wrong but between an employee-mindset manager versus entrepreneur-mindset manager, it is very clear that this entrepreneur-mindset manager could bring out the best of what you want for your company.

I have something here for you, a collection of tips to run an online business as well as time management skills. With this, you can build a very productive and profitable business. Learn these skills now and don't forget to share it to your people. They will help you reach your dreams!

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

The secrets of high performing call centers


Customer service is one of the keys to improve the number of repeat customers. As you gain more loyal customers, you will definitely gain more sales from them. But, in the case of call centers especially if you outsourced and off-shored them there will be a lot of issues you need to face as you are containing repeat customers and increasing them.

There are several criticisms that your customers would have on your outsourced and off-shored call center. these includes that the operators are working from a script, unable to properly screen the issues addressed, incompetence, accent problems, automated queuing systems, excessive waiting times, repetition of issues and  so on. On the other side of that the call center's staff have their own issues. They include high stress levels, rude and abusive customers, poor working conditions, restrictive working practices and many more.

If you are looking to outsource your customer service call centers, you need to know the secrets of high performing call centers. It's not only you that needs to know this, you need to implement this on the call center you are going to contract. Helping them will also help your business too. Learn the secrets here and make this a valuable investment for you and your business!

Monday, July 2, 2012

Detailed Outsourcing Information

As I have mentioned before, Outsourcing is availing services or hiring people to work for a product or provide services to your own business.

What do I need to know before I jump into outsourcing my products or services?

First and foremost, you need to have a checklist on whether or not you need to outsource. Then you will have to consider the risks that involves in outsourcing services or products. Know that there are great advantages on outsourcing but there are implications to that. There will be management processes issues, quality of service issues, not to mention the language barrier issues, as well as security. Whether you like it or not you still have to have a basis for qualifying your outsources. There are also the issues of diversification, in-sourcing output, and of course the standpoint of the labor and of the government.

Evaluation of your business

You need to evaluate your internal business processes. Get a list of items that has become the bottleneck of your supposedly smooth process. There are two types of bottlenecks the short-term and the long-term bottlenecks. These short-term bottlenecks are caused by temporary problems. This may indicate there may be personnel issues within your business. These can normally get fixed as soon as issues were addressed. Long-term bottlenecks are the ones that happens all the time. This usually happens when there are major tasks that needs several minor tasks completed first before it starts. This could also mean that you need to restructure your processes for a better one. Identifying these bottlenecks and fixing them first is one of the crucial keys of decision making before jumping in to outsourcing.

Identifying the shortages of your employee's skill or expertise to areas of your core business processes. Identify them if they are long-term needs or just short-term. When you think it's a long-term need, consider training them more for the lack of skill or expertise. If your current employees does not need to work with the areas of expertise you need, then consider this one as a reason to outsource or just simply hire a new personnel with the require skill or expertise. When the need is short-term it is another reason to outsource.

If your company is in need to cut costs, then this is one of the things you need to learn before jumping in to Outsourcing. If you want to reduce expenses, focus more on the increased profits and an access to vast knowledgeable, talented and highly experienced professionals, then you just got the need to outsource.

Risk management

Now that you have securely identified that your business needs to outsource, there are other things you still need to know about outsourcing. You need to identify the risks that you will face in those processes that you need to outsource.  You have to prepare a risk management system before actually availing an outsource service or product. When you avail services or products from other businesses may it be core parts of your business or not, it will face confidentiality issues as well as privacy and security issues.

Implications to outsourcing

With outsourcing you need to adjust you management style when it comes to overlooking the quality of the service or product that you paid for. It will take a lot of communication methods to gain access on the progress of the service and especially on the products. Time management methods and issues management tracking systems as well as time tracking software and cost estimation software are the ones you need to invest on.

When outsourcing offshore you need to check on the language skills and compare them from one country to another. You need to understand that people who can read, write and speak a language does not mean that they understand some instructions completely. Language barriers may complicate processes as well as confuse things. 

One of the popular security issues that businesses face when they outsource services or products is the security risks. This may be legal, security and compliance issues between the your business and your outsourcer. You have to remember that they may be working for you now but they are not held responsible to your business. You also have to check up on these outsourcers whether they are fraud or not.

When outsourcing the core areas of your business, you need to evaluate the capabilities of your providers. When you outsource consider limiting the power of your outsource provider and give some processes to another provider. In this way, you limit your providers too much access in your business. However when you give too much power of your outsource provider, you also have the risk of insourcing this provider.

Another consideration is for you to know the standpoint of the labor. Outsourcing represents a new threat to them and would contribute to their insecurity that might reflect on their output. Also, when you outsource you will also have to face the government. You have to know your local and national laws about outsourcing.

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Outsourcing in a nutshell

What is Outsourcing?

Outsourcing is basically hiring people or availing services that is outside of your own and the end product or service can still be named under your own.

Wait, what?

See it this way, you are a hotel that does laundry to your guests' clothes and even your own bed sheets and stuff like that. Yet, somehow the loading capacity of your own laundry facility can no longer hold the pending laundry jobs. So you, as the hotel or hotel manager, will go out and search for available laundry shops that can facilitate the laundry jobs that your own laundry facility can't. In that simple illustration, you see that with the emerging day to day cleanliness standards and guests laundry cleaning jobs, you can not have the other laundry tasks go to pending status. You need to find other facilities or services that can deliver the growing demands of your hotel business. So, that is what we call Outsourcing.

Why would some businesses do that?

In most cases, these businesses need not to hire a full-time employee to do small tasks. Hiring one would require them to pay the medical fees, insurances, and other benefits offered to a regular full-time employee. In which case, it could mean that they are paying this personnel more than they actually get from them. Example for this is hiring a computer technician. Computer technicians can work mainly on computer hardware repairs, but if there are no damaged computers in the company, all they do mainly in their free time is just sit around and probably play some games on their desktop. Most businesses are trying to avoid these instances so what they do is that they only hire these people when they need it, like for computer repairs, maintenance, configurations, installations.

But maintenance means regularly or at least monthly, right?

Yes, exactly! As I have mentioned earlier this applies to businesses that does not need a full-time employee. Some business have their own in-house computer experts but in general goods and services type of businesses especially the small enterprises these are the ones that does and would most-likely get, if they are lucky enough, a break-even on their investment with computer systems and the full-time computer expert. But also, there are medium to large scale businesses who are cutting off expenses to save more for their operations and this is where they Outsource such services.

So, does outsourcing have to be from my country to the other poorer countries?

Of course not! As you have read from the above two basic examples of services, these can be done in same country. It is more like a business-to-business transaction.

But I can get services to the other poorer countries right?

Of course you can! There are great opportunities in getting services or products from those countries! For one, it is cheaper and you could probably cut at least 1/8th to 1/16th of what you pay to your local contracts. Second, the quality is great! Not to mention the quantity of their output too! You could send these countries a job order for during the morning and as you sleep in your home, these people are working hard to perfect your job order and the next morning you get what you paid for! That is the power of Outsourcing!