.png)
Build a better business with outsourcing
Innovation
For the small business man outsourcing is a great way to help a business as it progresses through its various growth stages. In fact, some of the largest companies in the world outsource some of the work they do. In order to maintain steady growth and productivity, you should find a happy balance of in-house employees and outsourced resources. In this post, we’ll discuss how outsourcing can benefit a small business.
In order to understand why outsourcing could be the right decision for a business, we need to understand why other companies choose to do it. What advantages does it bring and what value does it add? Let’s look at some of the top reasons companies of all sizes look outside their company for their staffing needs.
Grow more rapidly.
During growth, companies will often find that they would benefit from having more staff on hand, but can’t afford the expenses that go into hiring and supporting more full-time employees. This limits the potential for growth and slows any momentum that a company has built. Some companies may take a gamble and hire new staff, only to find that gambling doesn’t always pay off. Rather than growing slowly, they’ve reversed their growth.
Because it's more affordable to outsource the work than it is to build your own in-house team, and because you can cancel an outsourcing contract without having to put people out of work, it's a great way to ensure that a company maintains a steady growth while keeping the core of your team focused on internal tasks.
Retain flexibility.
The truth is your business may not need the same level of staffing year-round. At the very least, outsourcing provides flexibility. A business can staff up before a busy season without the financial commitment of hiring in-house employees, the cost of which can take years to break even on. After you’ve made it through a busy season, you can easily switch back to an entirely in-house team. An experienced outsourcing agency can allow you to scale your outsourcing needs.
Benefit from top talent.
The world's largest companies can offer pay and benefits far beyond what you can likely offer, so the top talent goes to the largest firms. This can limit a company's ability to achieve the best results. It could even put a company at risk of having the best employees poached by larger companies offering better incentives. Outsourcing agencies are capable of attracting top talent to ensure customer satisfaction and competitive results.
Maintain company focus.
Another benefit of outsourcing is the ability to stay focused on the important internal tasks of a business. For example, customer service is an important part of any business. That being said, it can be time-consuming and distracting for key members of your own team. Outsourcing for customer service has two benefits. First, you provide customers with consistent customer service. Second, you allow your internal team members to focus on their own tasks, helping the business run more efficiently and ultimately increasing ROI.
Outsourcing firms are a tool that should be utilized. A secondary benefit of outsourcing is the image it gives a company. Gone are the days where outsourcing firms were unreliable and lacking quality control. You can expect modern outsourcing firms to represent a business with the highest of standards. Small businesses often lack the ability to provide mass customer service. Outsourcing this aspect of a business will give a company a more professional image.
Increase brand loyalty.
A highly trained customer support staff, backed by management with years of experience, will give customers the type of service that keeps them coming back. Going from no support staff to an industry-leading support staff is nearly impossible to do internally. The financial strain and experience required to put together such a team are simply too overwhelming for most businesses. The professional services that an outsourcing company provides will leave customers feeling cared for and appreciated.
Fulfill compliance requirements.
Even large companies can feel the financial impacts of new regulations. Several industries have strict privacy and security requirements that can add costs to maintaining a staff.
More importantly, they add severe consequences. Having a poorly trained staff that doesn’t properly follow regulations could cost a company big. Without the resources of a large corporation, it’s hard to put together such an experienced staff.
Look to hire an outsourcing firm that is PCI level 4 and HIPAA & GDPR compliant. This prevents your team and company from facing the risk of potential lawsuits and other hardships that come with noncompliance.
As you can see, outsourcing has a lot of potential benefits from flexibility to professional representation and businesses small and large are wise to consider scaling their outsourcing needs throughout the year.
Outsourcing applications
One of the biggest challenges most small businesses face is designing, commissioning a competitive high performing website and gaining a prominent position on search engine results.
There are a number of vital core elements that require essential metrics for a healthy site detailed knowledge, training and skills like, SEO planning (SEO), Web performance, Indexing, user experience (UX) page speed insights, accessibility, GDPR compliance and more.
A small business would find these elements daunting, challenging and difficult to keep up with or have no knowledge on how to impliment them. In this example its an ideal case for a small business to outsource the task to an expert in the field.
SEO (search engine optimization)
The question is why do you need a website? ‘Just because’ can’t be an answer here. One of the most important steps of setting up a website is to think about the end goal. What do you want the website to achieve for the business?
Identifying business goals and objectives will helps make better decisions when it comes to building and running a website. This process may seem challenging at first, but if you start with setting a company mission, the path becomes clear. From there, you can figure out marketing objectives and, more specifically, what you want a website to achieve.
A small business would find SEO a challenging proposition and almost impossible to allocate enough time to the task. In this example its an ideal case for a small business to outsource the SEO task to an expert in the field even if it only produces a basic plan to follow.
Web Design
You know a professional website when you see it—that clean and modern design that makes a strong first impression. Modern website design elements are trendy, sophisticated and adapt to today's users. This means including features that facilitate a clean, good looking website experience.
Whether you’re starting a business, re-branding or simply planning to freshen up your site, optimizing your site with the sleek, trendy and professional traits of a modern website design will help you reap these benefits:
We live in a visual world that is becoming more immune to reading lengthy text. By including engaging images in your web design, you will capture the attention of modern audiences and let your products speak for themselves.
What's considered an incredible image? A high-quality photo shot in good lighting that tells an interesting story. Even a product image with no people in it can communicate a message to visitors based on where it's placed, how it's captured and the content surrounding it.
Small businesses are enticed by online web builder programmes that explain how easy it is to design a website, don't be fooled its not if you want to achieve results, get traffic and performance. Web designers are highly trained and up to speed with all the latest technology available and work at speed. In this example its an ideal case for a small business to outsource the services of a reliable web designer ask there advice or to carry out the critical tasks.
Acknowledgement:
Article by Sam Darwish Forbes Technical Council Member
Nexdesign Agency
Comments