There is no stopping you from outsourcing your customer service and technical support to an inbound call center in the Philippines. You have already pointed out the benefits to your partners or investors. You have determined the activities to be outsourced and even finalized a budget. However, you have yet to sit with business development managers from the Philippine-based call centers in your list, and you foresee no difficulties in identifying what call center you want to work with. It seems like everything is going according to plan.

Hope so, because if done wrong, outsourcing can doom you to an early bankruptcy, and you would never allow that, would you? So you are carefully exerting every effort to make sure the venture is worth the risk and the investment. During the planning or reviewing stages, did you:

1. Think of the benefits, not just the costs

Outsourcing sure saves you a lot of money, but it will take some time before you will see a return of investment, so you will need to invest more before your projected and actual savings start to match. But think not of the costs, but the benefits that you can gain: Increased operational efficiency, more space (to set up more equipment or accommodate more guests or concessionaires), more time and resources (to work on new projects), flexibility (to adjust to economic challenges), and stress-free management.

2. Find ways to achieve balance

Achieving balance should be the most important goal when outsourcing, but sadly many businesses have not been doing this. They sacrifice their most loyal and hard-working in-house employees – the people vital to the success of outsourcing. You must learn how to create a balance between working with an offshore call center and with your in-house employees, who are likely to be more loyal and have a deeper understanding of your business and customers.

3. Learn to maintain control

Does outsourcing mean giving up control of the outsourced tasks? It shouldn’t be. Though you give your outsourced staff some level of control so they can perform to your standards, don’t rely too much on them, lest you lose control of your own business. Maintain control by getting your in-house staff involved in the outsourcing process. Train them to manage the outsourced staff (but not to be bossy towards them).

4. Talk to your in-house employees

Where do your in-house employees fit in once your Philippine-based inbound call center enters the picture? Before you even meet with representatives from call centers, make sure you talk to your in-house employees first and hear them out.

You will want to keep the best, the most loyal, and all those who manage your core activities. You will need them to help make the outsourcing partnership work. You will need to help them adjust to the changes that will take place once the partnership comes into effect.

If you’ve done all four of these, then you are all set to outsource. Success lies ahead in your outsourcing efforts.

Outsourcing your firm’s non-core components like tax planning, bookkeeping, accounts payable, and lead generation can bring you a lot of benefits. But some may think outsourcing finance functions deemed critical and difficult is a bad idea due to hidden costs and less control, but that has been proven wrong many times. In reality, there are greater benefits to outsourcing some or most of your functions than by doing the work by yourself or creating your own in-house team.

1. Save time – If time is gold, then insurers would do better to focus on projects that will help their firm grow rather than waste time on non-critical functions that are better left to insurance outsourcing providers. Strike gold by concentrating your focus on activities or projects that contribute to business growth.

2. Save money – It hurts your struggling company’s budget if you leave positions vacant for days, hire a single in-house employee to perform all functions (yet not up to standards), or acquire expensive tools and technologies. So as not to add to your growing financial woes, turn to a trusted third party service provider that can perform some or most of your finance functions at a more reasonable rate than in-house.

3. Access to world-class talents – Admit it; your employees don’t have all the necessary skills and expertise to perform all finance functions, from transaction processing to internal auditing, at a higher level. And if they do, they might not perform to industry standards. To keep up with the best practices in your industry, partner with a trustworthy finance and insurance outsourcing provider that has top-notch talents, the best work tools and systems, and quality training programs.

4. Simplify and standardize processes – Being complex industries, finance and insurance firms can achieve a better outcome by simplifying their processes to develop better performance benchmarks and meet regulatory requirements – functions that are more important than just closing books. Of course, they are doing these for clients whose confidence in the financial markets is diminishing.

5. Shift to strategic functions – Does your firm take a long and difficult path to close a book? Perhaps it’s time to review your strategies and determine if they rhyme with the finance services industry’s current mindset or people’s perception of the industry – or else tweak strategies to cater to people who are uncertain about their financial future. Ditch the process, and bring in the strategies.

6. Build partnership and strategic alliance – To grow your business amid an economic downturn, it helps to partner, not just network, with service providers who understand your business. The relationship that your firm can develop with a finance outsourcing company can be a great resource to help improve your service offerings and upgrade client support systems.

7. Leverage the power of data –The finance services industry would do better to infuse data with strategies and combine them than render data irrelevant in the transactional process, buried amid countless reports. Your finance and insurance outsourcing provider can gather relevant data to assist you with writing new business, creating budgets, analyzing forecasts, conducting internal audits, and supporting new projects.

Most finance and insurance firms know that in order to give their industry a boost, they must explore new ideas and seek new answers to streamline their finance functions. The answer lies in outsourcing, and outsourcing providers have the ideas, plus the tools, to help them hurdle the numerous challenges that their industry is currently facing.

source: www.revenueconsultant.com

For many businesses, making sales is one of the hardest things to do. It’s time-consuming, stressful, and expensive. Success in sales today doesn’t rely on your vast in-house resources, but on practicality, coupled with smarts. Sure, you can afford to maintain a sales team, but there perhaps is a better way to have sales even without having an in-house sales team. That is possible with outsourcing.

If sales is your weakest department, then you must outsource it. Consider the reasons to outsource your sales to an outbound call center:

2. Reduce and control costs – It’s no longer a good investment to keep a traditional in-house sales team and spend considerable time and resources when they under perform or no longer perform. It’s more expensive to keep an in-house sales team than outsourcing sales to an outbound call center. Outsourcing lowers the costs of sales while helping you close more sales.

3. Gain access to resources that you can’t afford – Your lack of certain resources can put a damper on your sales. Even if you can afford the technologies, you’ll still need to hire the experts who can operate them. Why not leverage the solutions honed by an outsourcing provider? You can benefit from the use of a call center’s tools and technologies even without owning them.

4. Spread the risks – You can’t outsource problems brought upon your business by a decline in profitability but you can at least ease your burden and even share the risks with an outsourcing provider.

5. Leverage existing clients – Why build an in-house sales team when you can have your existing clients sell for you? If you find it hard to make a sale and keep customers at the same time, why not let go of one and keep the other? Outsource your sales to an outbound sales expert and maximize resources to make customers happier. Let go of the process and keep the customers.

6. Expand into new territories – The more you focus on sales, the less time you have for pursuing new leads and new opportunities. Don’t let declining sales hold you back from testing the waters in new markets. An outbound call center can help you test your products in new markets, generate news leads, spread brand awareness, and try new approaches to sales.

7. Save time – Time is gold, and by saving time, you also save resources and money, which you could have used to develop and test new products, explore new markets, and more importantly, make customers happier and more satisfied.