Why small businesses should leverage BPO
Small and medium-sized business owners who understand their target market, expertise, costs, and workflows are suited to succeed using Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). The benefits of outsourcing, particularly from English-speaking countries like the Philippines, which has a highly skilled workforce, include cost savings and vast improvements in productivity and customer service. Outsourcing enables startups and small and medium businesses to build up their own skills and capabilities by leveraging the services provided by their suppliers at a lower cost. Here are five ways small and medium-sized businesses can effectively leverage BPO.
Key takeaways:
BPO is a strategic process that helps small and medium-sized businesses shift their focus from peripheral activities (such as payroll and IT) toward important deliverables, which better serves their customer base and core business goals.
Small and medium businesses that focus on improving key elements like staffing, technology, systems and processes, and use BPO to reduce their costs and drive productivity, are more likely to succeed when competing with larger players in the marketplace.
The key to leveraging business process outsourcing is selecting the best BPO partner for your needs.
1. Finding the right BPO partner for your business
Small and medium business owners seeking the right BPO provider for their needs should look to a BPO staffing agency that offers personalized service to match their business needs. A BPO partner designed to meet the needs of startups and which is built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs is better suited to smaller companies. Before engaging your BPO partner, do your due diligence and ask the following questions:
What is your brand story?
Who are your major clients?
What are your core values? Do they align with mine?
Can you help me scale my business?
Where are you located? Can you access staffing and resources in the locations I require at short notice?
What are your pricing structures? Do these suit my budget?
BPO firms such as DOXA have user-friendly terms with no seat minimums, long-term contracts, or hidden fees and they give their clients full visibility into the work they deliver and the price they pay for services rendered. During the COVID-19 pandemic, DOXA saw an opportunity to create a better offshoring solution for small and medium businesses struggling to stay afloat.
Businesses that can strategically leverage their outsourcing activities can remain focused on their core business goals. They will compete more effectively in the rapidly changing global marketplace.
2. Leveraging with staffing and people
Business process outsourcing allows companies to grow their business without adding unnecessary overhead costs. Hiring skilled professionals offshore and from locations like the Philippines will not only reduce labour costs but can increase your company’s cash flow long term.
A McKinsey survey of 100 executives during the COVID-19 pandemic found that 90 percent of them expected to see hybrid workplaces with some combination of remote and on-site work and expected that remote working arrangements (both onshore and outsourced from other countries) could lead to increased productivity and customer satisfaction.
Finding the right BPO partner for your hiring needs means that you don’t need to worry about hiring, vetting, or training and managing staff. The time you save can help you focus on your core business. The right BPO partner will take care of sick days, benefits, employee insurance, and other human resources details on your behalf including performance management and payroll. They will offer you a point of contact to manage your external team and paying a flat fee every month means that you can better plan your company budget well in advance.
3. Leveraging through cost reduction
Outsourcing allows firms to focus on their core business by delegating tangential processes which can effectively be performed remotely (either onshore or offshore). When choosing your BPO partner you should be seeking to save up to 70% of your labour costs by engaging specialists from places like the Philippines where there are pools of talented staff available.
Effective outsourcing allows businesses to convert some of their fixed costs such as a full-time equivalent employee (FTE) into a variable expense, delivering more control over financial costs longer-term. Outsourcing turns your fixed labour costs into variable costs meaning you have more funds to funnel into other parts of your business to help it grow. This in turn attracts investors.
Deloitte’s 2020 review of the benefits of outsourcing found that cost reduction remains a top priority for firms when outsourcing and further cost reductions can be achieved with clever use of emerging technologies.
4. Leveraging with technology
Effective outsourcing where firms can maximize intelligent workflows (using AI and robotic process automation (RPA)) are better able to scale quickly and ensure network security. The market for RPA is growing by an extraordinary 20 percent per year and is expected to reach USD $5 billion by 2024 according to a survey by Deloitte. The same survey found that the use of RPA can increase a firm’s workforce capacity by approximately 27 percent without the need to hire additional staff.
RPA is when the software will perform tasks based on a series of rules and examples include voice recognition, digital dictation software, and Chatbots (used by e-commerce platforms). These rules-based processes interact with the user interface to complete workflows that would otherwise have been completed by humans and can be used either on or off the cloud. They produce significant cost savings not just in terms of money but also in time saved and they will streamline your workflows, producing dramatic improvements in systems and processes.
5.Leveraging productivity by combining BPO with smart processes
The best place to start leveraging your business is in streamlining your systems and processes. Systems describe the way your business operates and they include a collection of processes or logical instructions which create certainty and reliability within your organization.
Agile entrepreneurs who partner with the most suitable BPO outsourcing partners for their business model and link this with intelligent RPA and AI to streamline their business processes will see the most visible improvements. In this way, information is collected at one point, processed by the technological interface, automatically producing instant results for the customers. The technological processes can be overseen by staffing teams offshore and this combination of people and technology can significantly leverage a small businesses’ operations, delivering more productivity and efficiency.
Businesses can improve the turnaround time on the delivery of products and services if they outsource intelligently. They can prioritize projects based on urgency and have them completed well before deadlines. Automated workflow processes managed by AI and RPA can help with this.
Find the right BPO partner
Finding the right BPO partner is the first step to leveraging your business’ operations and firms who use business process outsourcing enjoy significant cost savings and greater access to specialized resources, giving them time to focus on their core business.
At Doxa7, we are a global business services firm driven to help small and medium-sized businesses find high-performing teams to enable them to remain agile and compete with larger corporations. We help firms find the best talent to fill pivotal roles in their organizations. Contact us today for a free consultation to get you started on this process.
