How Do You Know When to Start Outsourcing?

We live in a world that is connected in ways that we haven’t seen before which opens up a wide range of working possibilities. This is what makes the work from home culture possible and allows companies to remain operational even during lockdown restrictions. However, our connected work is opening even greater opportunities to grow your business, expedite processes, and take some of the burdens off your in-house employees. If you are considering outsourcing, but don’t know if now is the right time, consider the following clear signs that you should start outsourcing your business tasks. 

1. Your Multi-Tasking is Interfering With Your Core Business Functions 

At the early stages of a startup or a small business, the founders and other C-level executives are performing more than one function. For example, the CTO may be responsible for developing your product, but they also have to provide tech support assistance to the customers simply because there is nobody else who could do it. This problem also affects larger businesses but to a lesser degree. Instead of the C-level executives multi-tasking, the developers and other administrative employees have to take on additional roles and responsibilities. This causes burnout and is not an efficient use of your employees’ time. 

You can hire a dedicated team or simply another person to augment your in-house staff to help you out with the needed tasks. This is a win-win for everybody involved because everybody will be able to focus on their individual responsibilities and you will get an increase in efficiency at a fraction of the price. 

2. You are Not Providing the Needed Level of Customer Support 

In response to the current economic crisis, businesses are looking to lower costs and the customer support team is one of the first departments that gets cut. However, this is not a good idea because customer expectations have only increased in terms of the service they are expecting. For example, a recent survey shows that two-thirds of consumers said that they are willing to wait on hold for two minutes or less, while 13% said they are not willing to wait at all. If you are cutting your customer support team, you could be damaging your reputation with the customers who will not hesitate to give you a bad review and share their experiences with their friends and family. 

Outsourcing your customer support has never been easier, especially since it offers additional benefits. For example, you will be able to cover all of the needed time zones and provide support in many languages. 

3. You are Having Difficulties Developing Your Ideas

You may have a great idea for a new product, but actually creating it will require completing administrative tasks in addition to actual development. For example, AI projects require large datasets to train machine learning algorithms. This data needs to be annotated with a wide variety of methods depending on the nature and functionality of your product which is a very time-consuming process. A lot of companies ask their internal developers to perform this work, which is not an efficient use of their time and it presents the multitasking problem we mentioned in the very beginning. This is why a lot of companies choose to outsource their data annotation work to a service provider who will get the job done within the specified time period and lower the cost of the overall project. 

4. A Certain Business Area is Struggling 

If you notice that one or more of your departments are struggling to meet their goals and objectives, perhaps the issue could be that there are simply not enough people to keep up with the volume of work. If we return to our example of customer support teams mentioned above, if your customers are complaining about their call being transferred or the instant messaging service is not so instant, then consider hiring additional customer support agents to help you get the job done. Your offshore team will simply be an extension of the team you have in-house and they will have the same qualifications as your current employees. 

5. You are Forgetting to Do Certain Tasks

In addition to your main responsibilities, you also have to manage your calendar, answer emails, arrange meetings and travel plans, and a lot of other small day-to-day tasks that take up a lot of time. As a result, you forget to do something important which causes a domino effect throughout your organization. A virtual assistant can help you manage all of these tasks allowing you to focus on matters that are important to your business. 

Mindy Support is Your Reliable Outsourcing Partner 

If you are looking to outsource any of your business processes or data annotation work, Mindy Support can assemble a team for you quickly to help you meet deadlines. We are one of the largest BPO providers in Eastern Europe with more than 2,000 employees in six locations all over Ukraine. If you are having issues meeting deadlines, soaring budget costs and any other issues, contact us today to see how we can help. 

Posted by Il’ya Dudkin