What business processes can be outsourced and which ones to keep in-house?
Outsourcing is a factor that many businesses face at least once in their evolution, especially when it’s time to scale a small business to accommodate growth. Once you decide to outsource, the next question becomes which business processes will you give away, and which will you keep doing in-house?
Determining which business processes to outsource
Determining which business process to outsource has many factors, but one factor trumps the rest when deciding which will help your company properly maximize your business operations: strengths and weaknesses. Identifying your company’s strengths and weaknesses can be the difference between a successful outsource and a loss of valuable time, money, and effort.
If your sales team is efficient at handling their current client load but doesn’t have the bandwidth to reach out to new business leads or follow up with current clients regularly, outsourcing lead generation and sales follow-ups may be a solution. This gives your sales team the capacity to capitalize on their strengths while allowing their weaknesses to be tasked to others.
With the variety of departments that a company handles, the most common ones are fairly simple to outsource. Here are a few:
Accounting Services and Bookkeeping:
As a company grows, so does its financial responsibility. What once may have been manageable in-house can quickly grow past capacity. Outsourcing these services can help ease the overwhelming load of this important task.
Sales and Lead Generation:
A sale is an integral part of many businesses that helps companies grow. Unfortunately, in today’s age, sales is a high turnover job. Some companies are unable to keep their sales staff on board, making it more difficult to keep their business growing.
Call Centers and Customer Service:
In the United States, customer service and call center jobs are easy to come by, but many employees only stay until something better comes along, creating high turnover rates. By outsourcing your customer service departments, a higher quality of attention and retention can be put on those services. Outsourcing is cheaper and makes it easy to find higher quality employees, which makes for happy customers. It can also free up the time which would otherwise be spent hiring and training again and again.
- Tier 1 Support – Most service companies that have a support desk or ticketing system struggle to handle all requests that are simple, easy, and often a low skill. Most of your technicians that businesses want to invest in prefer to handle more complex, challenging, and out-of-the-box solutions. The entry-level Tier 1 support employees often have high turnover, lack of skill, and suffer the daily grind of repetitive and non-stimulating. These tasks are perfect for an outsourced model as many of these actions are currently being avoided by more seasoned technicians.
What Shouldn’t Be Outsourced?
While successful outsourcing can bring your company financial success, a poor decision can result in problems. The most important thing to remember is quality and company strengths when deciding what to outsource.
Here are some common services that should never be outsourced:
- Hiring and Layoffs: Personal investments in employees, whether regarding the future or termination, should never be outsourced. Employees invest their livelihoods in your company, so it’s important to keep those services in-house to properly develop a personal connection and employee satisfaction.
- Localization: If your company is localized in its products and staff, outsourcing services can be detrimental to the company, which functions within a certain community. That personal connection is unlikely to be created elsewhere, and outsourcing could hurt the company. A potential solution to this would be bringing on more team members or even interns for a more cost-effective option.
- Administration: The administration team of any company is its core group of support staff. They can include the C-Suite executives, such as the CEO and CFO, as well as upper-level management. These core staff members are integral to the functioning of a company and should not be outsourced, as they have a first-hand investment in the company, its services, and employees.
If you’re still struggling to decide which services to outsource, there are a variety of matrixes and trees that can help you with the evaluation process, including The Outsourcing Decision Matrix.
Unity Communications is a Business Process Outsourcing company that helps companies focus on their employees’ strengths. To outsource your business processes today, contact Unity Communications at 480-550-8700.
