BPO services
How do you know if it's the right decision to hire a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Firm?
Every year thousands of businesses whether small or large outsource part of their projects to offshore BPO firms. But understanding whether it's the right time or correct decision to hire an outsourcing firm is critical to the success of the business.
Usually, there could be several reasons why a business outsources. It could be for cost-efficiency, to hire an outside workforce, or for the lack of tools, technology, and expertise in-house.
If your business needs to outsource, there will be several factors such as the aforementioned that you need to look into in order to make the decision.
Below are some of the factors that, if true for your business might indicate that its the right time for you to hire a BPO service provider:
Indications that your business should use BPO services
High Operation Cost
Your business is running at higher operating costs than intended and you want to increase your cost efficiency.
Say you are an eCommerce business and you need a dedicated customer care department that handles queries from your customers and resolves them. But hiring one in-house will increase your cost manyfold.
Hiring a BPO service provider that specializes in providing customer care support might be your solution in such a predicament.
Whenever the cost of running a department outweighs is high and there are cost-effective alternate solutions through outsourcing, then it is better to outsource as the advantages of outsourcing would outweigh any benefits you may have had in keeping it in-house.
Inefficient Operation
Suppose you own a restaurant business, and you need to do digital marketing to increase your sales and create more brand awareness of your restaurant in your locality.
Now would you create a digital marketing team of your own or hire a digital marketing agency for your work?
The answer is obviously the latter because creating a team of your own would be just so much inefficient since as a restaurant owner you have zero expertise in this field. It's just so much more efficient to hire an outside agency instead
Sometimes it's just not efficient to have every part of your operation in-house. Especially those that are not a core part of what your business does.
If it's more efficient to hire an outside BPO service provider for some of your business needs that is exactly what you should do.
Staffing for customer support
As with our first example with the eCommerce business, you would always never want to have your customer support center in-house. This is more true the bigger your business is.
The sheer cost of staffing, equipment, and software that you would have to incur and not to mention the expertise needed makes it absolutely worthwhile to outsource instead of having it done in-house.
A BPO service provider that specializes in providing customer care support services would help out immensely in staffing your customer support center and not to mention the expertise they possess would help you out more in running it smoothly.
This is one of the main reasons why most tech businesses today, and large corporations like Google, Microsoft, and Apple have their customer support center outsourced to countries in South-East Asia and South America.
And you should too if you are looking to set up a customer care team for your business.
Social Media Management
If I ask you about a name of a shoe brand, what's the first name that comes to your mind? Probably Nike Adidas or Skechers maybe?
The reason behind this is behind is because these companies have created a very strong social identity and brand awareness so that whenever you think of a shoe company you think of them.
Creating strong brand awareness is tantamount to success, if everyone knows about your competitor and no one knows about you, chances are no one will buy your product either.
And one of the main ways through which you create brand awareness is through social media platforms.
Going back to that example with the restaurant, it doesn't make sense to hire an in-house person to handle your social media, because you are a restaurant owner and you have no expertise in social media management!
Poor social media management can sometimes result in a huge loss of revenue and in some cases, the business has to shut down.
That is why it's always better to hire BPO firms or digital marketing agencies that specialize in social media management instead of doing it on your own.
Poor integration of Remote work
Many companies are starting to hire remote workers. Especially after the covid-19 epidemic, we have started to redefine what the work environment entails.
But when you are hiring remote workers who work from home, there is always a chance of poor integration of the team and not to mention it may be hard to monitor them.
In some cases, it may be better to hire a BPO service provider for your remote staffing solutions. Since they will be the ones to monitor and supervise the team and ensure that the team is integrated properly.
Conclusion
Ultimately, it's your call whether you want to outsource to a BPO service provider or not. Having a good understanding of what your business needs and taking decisive actions to meet those needs are what's important.