Before Your Company Decides to Outsource, Consider These Questions

Whether you're a small or large business, before your company decides to outsource any business function, consider these important factors.

Over 37% of companies outsource a business process.

The primary reason stated behind outsourcing a business function is to increase work efficiency and available expertise. In fact, twenty-four percent of businesses outsource with the main intention of improving their efficiency.

If you run a company and are considering doing business process outsourcing (BPO), there are several important considerations to go over. You'll want to set clear goals for the tasks you plan to outsource. This will help to avoid any issues with communications and quality.

This article will explore various factors to go over while looking into outsourcing, and will also deal with call center outsourcing in specific.

What Is Outsourcing?

Outsourcing is when a business obtains goods and services from a third-party supplier. Companies outsource for a variety of reasons, such as a shortage of labor for a specific position.

Should You Do Small Business Outsourcing?

To determine whether you should outsource certain business functions, such as customer service to a call center, you need to ask a few questions.

For example, will outsourcing help to improve the overall performance of your business? Outsourcing should provide improvements on par or better than if an internal team did the task.

Before you outsource, you want to be sure you genuinely need to do so. Many factors may drive a need for outsourcing, including employee unavailability, reduce costs, improve customer focus, and speed up a company's reorganization.

What Type of Call Center to Outsource

Before you can outsource to a call center, you need to understand there are several different types of call centers out there. The one you need will depend upon your company's unique needs.

The different types of call centers are:

• Inbound Call Center - An inbound call center answers incoming phone calls and not much else.

• Outbound Call Center - The opposite of an inbound call center, outbound means they deal with telemarketing, cold calls, customer follow-ups, lead generation, and anything else that involves their end being active in calling customers.

• Multichannel Contact Center - A contact center specializes in offering a variety of services, and is able to do both inbound and outbound work. They also communicate across multiple channels, such as websites, emails, online chats, and social media.

• Omni-channel Contact Center - This is a more advanced version of a multichannel contact center. 

Solutions Provider vs Staff Outsourcing

A solution provider is a vendor or service provider that helps to handle a project. They will often help from every stage of the project, from conceptualizing to installing to support.

When you outsource a solutions provider, they can help with:

• workforce management

• quality monitoring

• continuous training

• providing CRMs

Solutions providers focus on value add solutions to achieve client goals and exceed the service level agreement (SLA). Solutions come from the outsourced solutions provider and the client is not expected to brainstorm these.

A good solutions provider will be proactive at laying out solutions, rather than reacting to a problem late. They should have a performance management system that helps to monitor performance measured in statistics and will keep track of business trends that could affect the strategies of the call center management.

Staff outsourcing is when you hire a group outside of your company to help perform services the company itself is struggling to do.

The client lays out the task that needs to be done and the outsourced staff handles it from there. The role of a staff outsourcing provider is to make sure that the outsourced staff are reliable, show up on time to do the work, and deliver quality services.

Whichever you prefer to go with, SiBs offers both outsourcing models.

Matching Needs With Call Center Solutions

While you search for a call center to outsource to, you'll want to make sure that the call center matches the specific needs of your business. 

For example, if you're needing help with cold-calling potential customers, then an inbound call center won't be of much help to you. You'll instead want to hire an outbound call center.

Get the Help You Need Outsourcing a Business Function

If you need to outsource a business function, consider using the call center services of SiBs. We’ve been in operation since 2011, helping clients across a variety of industry types.

Contact us today.