Provide 24×7 Coverage Through Outsourcing

In today’s highly competitive, dynamic, and fast-paced business environment, anyone leading a business is looking for smarter ways to operate. Reasons for this include, to better support customers, reduce costs, drive more sales, and create a sustainable advantage to set their business apart from the competition.

Providing 24×7 coverage through outsourcing has become a key business strategy for many businesses, due to the opportunity to not only reduce cost, but to extend business hours and leverage capability. In addition, many companies are taking advantage of this opportunity to transform business processes, and enhance service delivery.

24×7 Support and Outsourcing

From traditional Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) focused on customer service, the industry has now evolved into Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO). As a result, multi-disciplinary teams are being built across the value chain, with common functions including customer service, sales support, lead generation, administration support, and order processing, just to name a few. Here are just a few examples of how 24×7 coverage through outsourcing is being leveraged:

• Order Processing

  Many organisations struggle to get orders out the door in a timely and efficient manner and as a result, lose business opportunities. Leveraging an offshore team helps you respond to customer inquiries faster, to ensure that order is always placed in a timely manner, and feedback can be provided to your customer to provide confidence that their order is underway.

• Customer Service

  24 x 7 customer service is something that has become expected by clients. However, the cost for many smaller businesses make this prohibitive. Outsourcing provides the opportunity to do more with less, and increase the hours of support. This may not be 24 x 7 to begin with, but an extended span of support can often be achieved at the same cost of having a smaller team providing less hours onshore.

• Virtual Assistant

  Many companies turn to virtual assistants for numerous tasks and to improve turnaround time. Outsourcing virtual assistant is a great idea for many senior executives as it gives them the opportunity to have support 24 hours a day. When business hours are complete, someone is still managing calls, responding to emails, updating meeting invites, and completing all administrative tasks. VAs can accomplish lots of tasks overnight including research and documentation.

• Technical Support

  Outsourcing technical support such as drafting, engineering and IT development is becoming increasingly popular for businesses who want to provide high quality products and deliver on time. Outsourcing work will empower you to distribute your valuable time for other work. Onshore team can send the work to the offshore team who can then accomplish it overnight, and before they enter the office the next morning work will be sent to them for review.

Check the optiBPO offshoring value map for more types of roles that our clients are successfully growing in. The optiBPO value map will help you think about your growth drivers, and where and how an offshore team can help you provide 24 x 7 coverage.

Benefits of Outsourcing

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is a cost-effective solution that comes with a number of advantages. When using outsourcing to support 24 x 7 business operations, the following benefits can be realised:

• Highly skilled professionals

  The Philippines boasts a large population of highly skilled professionals, and every year over 400,000 university graduates join the workforce, expanding the talent pool. Many of these graduates are educated in software engineering, accounting, business administration, IT and customer-related services, making them ideal for companies looking to hire staff with specific skill set.

• Reduce costs and drive productivity

  Salaries of offshore resources are typically 30% of those onshore, representing a saving of around 70%. For many companies, offshoring is a business strategy to drive growth. They have found the practice has delivered effective cost and performance improvements, resulting in significant savings without sacrificing productivity.

• Capability and scale

  Talent shortages and financial pressures make offshore recruitment an attractive option. For some companies, this is often the only way to remain viable in the marketplace. In addition, many organisations are seeing the building of an offshore model as a way to increase customer engagement through enhanced services.

• Running business 24 x 7

  A benefit of outsourcing is being able to extend business hours. Hiring offshore resources to a country like the Philippines, which is on a different time zone, gives you the added advantage of making full use of 24-hour day. Offshore resources can continue work and complete critical tasks even after onshore employees go home, and have it ready for review the next morning.

• Focus on global expansion

  If you have plans on expanding globally, you have to make sure you are ready to connect with customers or clients whenever they need it. Setting up teams in different parts of the world helps you create a workforce that is ready for 24 x 7 operations and increases your chance of getting the attention of potential clients.

Conclusion

Many companies like to start small, see how the model works for them and increase engagement over time. Once they are happily established, and have seen for themselves how well it works, most adopting organisations accelerate their offshore expansion process and explore offshore innovation opportunities with more confidence.

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