Outsourcing back-office assistance can help employees focus on their primary responsibilities by eliminating tedious chores. Administrative and data entry work can impede your team’s and company’s development. Back office work can divert employees’ attention from more important activities and waste time. Back-office outsourcing might be helpful in this situation.
You will undoubtedly make mistakes when looking for an outsourcing partner that might cause the relationship to collapse. These errors might prevent the intended outcomes. Outsourcing may increase your company’s productivity and result in significant savings when done correctly. We will now discuss the misconceptions you should avoid while yououtsource back-office operations:
Brief overview of back office outsourcing
First, Let’s dispel some common misunderstandings about back-office outsourcing by defining what it means. Back-office outsourcing companies entail contracting with outside service providers to handle non-core corporate tasks, including accounting, payroll processing, data entry, and HR administration. This enables businesses to use the skills of experts to complete repetitive activities while concentrating their resources and attention on critical strengths.
Loss of Control
Many business owners are reluctant to outsource services because of worries about corporate control and data/information security. Though these are valid issues in and of themselves, the essential terms to remember here are worth and importance.
The importance of the work determines how much substantial control you want. To find this, map your company’s processes and tasks, marking the high-value ones (those that impact customers and business development) and low-value ones (those that are back office and administrative, such as payroll, marketing, finance, and accounting). Value-adding jobs should be retained in-house, whereas non-value-adding tasks should be delegated to outside service providers.
Offshore and back-office outsourcing frees up additional time and attention for you; it doesn’t take away your control.
Security Risks
One of the most significant worries when outsourcing is protecting the privacy of your clientele. When you outsource, you will be giving the third-party supplier access to certain sensitive information. Any business should follow established procedures to protect consumer information. Confidential information leaks and data breaches may have a significant negative effect on your business, resulting in lost sales, operational difficulties, fines from the authorities, reputational harm, and more.
As to the Cost of a Data Breach Report 20211https://newsroom.ibm.com/2021-07-28-IBM-Report-Cost-of-a-Data-Breach-Hits-Record-High-During-Pandemic by IBM and Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a data breach rose from $3.86 million to $4.24 million in that particular year. Finding an outsourced partner for back-office assistance requires you to ask about the frequency and duration of data backups for your financial records. Additionally, find out if they have a procedure and security mechanism in place to safeguard customer data.
The outsourcing supplier should prioritize protecting client information as your possible business partner. If you don’t collaborate with respectable businesses, you might lose your clientele. Be cautious while safeguarding private documents, and confirm that the outsourcing company you are thinking about respects data security and manages possible hazards.
Communication Challenges
When you opt for back-office outsource, another critical error you might make is not explicitly defining expectations. This may lead to problems with efficiency and production, which will thus impact the performance of your team as a whole. You must provide the supplier with the most significant information possible so that they can supply the best answer.
Talk about processes, tracking techniques, communication channels, deadlines, and desired quality. This will assist you in determining the range of services the contracted business will offer. Decide what is expected of them, the tasks that are necessary for the project, when the outputs must be delivered, and other details.
You may quickly provide precise instructions to your remote staff and assess whether the outsourced team is achieving your expectations by clearly defining your goals and objectives.
Cost-Effectiveness
Sure, outsourcing lowers operating expenses, but the benefits go beyond that! With the help of external service providers, you may have professionals on your side to do duties on your behalf. Due to overhead expenses, these specialists only sometimes work with small enterprises, but if you outsource, they will be at your disposal.
A more extensive worldwide talent pool is available to outsourcing service providers situated in different leading BPO nations. This facilitates the process by which these BPO providers may provide you with the resources you require while guaranteeing the security of your organization.
Conclusion
When you outsource back office operations it presents difficulties for service providers as well as business owners, but these are issues that a solid offshore strategy might anticipate and resolve. While some of the beliefs mentioned above are valid, when outsourcing is done correctly, they shouldn’t be.
Outsourcing can dispel the recent misinformation and erroneous opinions around it. Now that you have the statistical data points, you can make your own decision!