The Top Three Benefits of Outsourcing Operations
An operations department is responsible for making sure the customer journey runs smoothly. From the moment a customer enters your ecosystem until they are successfully using your product, you want to deliver a smooth and easy customer experience.
Operational outsourcing is a way to achieve that goal.
Indeed.com defines operational outsourcing as employing “a third-party company to help perform standard company operations like producing inventory or completing services on the company’s behalf.”
“Standard company operations” means different things for different businesses, but the gist of it is that you’re finding an outside vendor to help complete key business tasks.
Benefits of outsourcing your operations
Since the operations team involves managing the customer journey from beginning to end, it’s important to consider three key parts to your operations. You need:
- Sales operations bringing in leads for your sales team to convert
- Back-office operations fulfilling orders and receiving payments
- An operational support team supporting your product, internal teams, and customers
This is where outsourcing really shines. You can outsource just one or all three parts of your operations team.
Here are three benefits you get when you outsource operations and what they can do for each of the three areas listed above.
Increased operational efficiencies
Bain & Company found that “customers increasingly expect a convenient, easy, and possibly special experience surrounding products and services” and that “companies that excel at the customer experience grow revenues 4%-8% above their market.”
Efficiently operating is clearly good for your bottom line, but it’s also good for your customers and your employees. By outsourcing your operations, you can realize operational efficiencies in many parts of your business.
The best part is there is little need to train employees. As soon as your outsourcing company starts—in as little as three weeks with Peak Support—you immediately have a team of experts at your disposal.
How this benefits sales operations
With increased efficiencies in your sales operations, your sales team can close more deals, faster. That means more revenue in less time.
Outsourcing your sales operations can help with lead generation, sales processes, and market research—all so your sales team can focus on selling. You can even outsource the prescreening of leads, which helps your sales reps waste less time and close more deals.
How this benefits back-office operations
When your back office operates efficiently, you’ll see quicker turnaround times and less human error. You can outsource anything from data entry to marketing to invoicing your customers.
Outsourcing your back-office operations will take the mundane, repetitive tasks off your employees’ plates, freeing them to focus on more high-value tasks. Your internal back-office team will be able to focus on the critical things that will move the business forward.
An efficient back-office invoicing process also helps prevent bottlenecks in your system that could prevent billables from hitting the books.
How this benefits support teams
Having a more efficient support team allows your support staff to serve your customers better and in less time.
By outsourcing, you can easily make sure you’re staffed for the volume of tickets that come in—even if your ticket volume ebbs and flows throughout the year.
You may choose to outsource just one support channel—such as chat or email–and let your internal support team focus on supporting your customers in other ways. You could also choose to use your internal support reps as escalation points and use an outsourcing partner to triage and resolve simpler customer issues. Lastly, you might just choose to outsource your entire support operation.
Your customers will appreciate the shortened hold times and quicker resolution that an efficient support operation can provide.
Reduced costs
Deloitte’s 2021 Global Shared Services and Outsourcing Survey Report found that 88% of respondents saw a cost reduction due to outsourcing.
When you hire in-house, you don’t just pay salaries and benefits. You also have costs like training, HR, equipment, and infrastructure. Operational outsourcing means the company you hire takes on many of these costs, reducing your expenses.
How this benefits sales operations
When you outsource your sales operations, the outsourcing company takes on much of the costs like hiring, training, salaries, management costs, benefits, and potential bonuses, which reduces your overhead. When you cut your overhead costs, every sale has more of a direct impact on the bottom line.
Outsourcing time-consuming tasks like lead gen and market research to an offshore team where cost of living is lower results in a cheaper cost for the same level of service.
Another example is training resources. By outsourcing, you don’t need as many trainers since you’re no longer training every position needed within your sales organization.
And without all that extra training, your trainers can focus on providing your sales team with top-notch training. This saves time further reducing costs and gets your sales reps out there selling faster. Win-win.
How this benefits back-office operations and support teams
Dialpad says, “Outsourcing to a provider that specializes in high-quality customer service operations is an excellent way to enhance your brand image and service capabilities—and minimize costs at the same time.”
We have to agree. Since many back-office and support teams are internal and sitting at a desk, these areas of the business benefit from across-the-board savings.
You’ll see a cost reduction from outsourced operations by allowing you to reduce in-house headcount. This eliminates the cost of salaries, training, and equipment for that reduced headcount. It’s a broad way to save money, applying to training, HR representatives, support reps, and employees handling any specific tasks you’re outsourcing.
For infrastructure, we’ve found that office space for just one customer service agent could run you more than $7,000 per year. The more headcount you can outsource, the less office space you need and the more money you save.
Renewed focus
As businesses grow they tend to take on more and more tasks that are a necessity but aren’t a core part of the business. The number of customers you have grows so you need to start or increase your support team. You diversify your target market so you increase the size of your sales team and operations. All good things, but they can each take the focus away from your core business.
Abdo Riani, founder of startup development company VisionX Partners, says that focus is the shortest cut to business growth. Outsourcing operations lets your business focus on what it does best.
How this benefits sales operations
Your sales operations team has one goal—to turn prospective customers into paying clients. It’s possible that everything else is getting in the way.
Tasks like admin work, maintaining your CRM, and market research take time. If you have sales reps doing any of that, you’re distracting them from selling and acquiring new customers.
These activities are necessary, but distracting for sales reps. Outsourcing them solves that problem. Imagine if your sales team came in each morning to a queue full of hot leads that were prescreened. What impact would that have on your business? What about if a sales rep needed to call a new customer and didn’t have to worry about tracking down their number, because they knew the one in your CRM was accurate?
Outsourcing your sales ops team can deliver that kind of focus.
How this benefits back-office operations
You may have a killer marketing team. But are they spending hours each week on manual data entry work?
Do you know if your talent acquisition team is spending too much time combing through resumes?
Is your finance team spending dozens of hours each month auditing your books?
Outsourcing back-office operations allows your team to focus on what they do best, whatever that means for your business.
Outsourcing can benefit teams like these ones by allowing them to focus on their key responsibilities. Simple or repetitive tasks are easy to outsource, and working with a dependable operations outsourcing partner means you can trust they’ll get done.
Again, it allows your team to focus on what they do best.
How this benefits support teams
Like your sales team, your support team has one purpose. They are there to support your customers in the best, most efficient way possible. Anything that takes time away from that is a distraction.
Outsourcing can help improve the foundational KPIs of customer support, such as handle times, response time, and customer satisfaction. By leveraging an experienced partner, you can deliver a better customer experience and free up your internal team members to focus on other tasks.
What kind of impact would a support team that is a well-oiled machine and a true partner make on your business?
Outsourcing operations leads to scaling quickly
These three big benefits have one massive implication. The primary advantage of outsourcing is the ability to scale quickly. If you’re operating efficiently, reducing your operating costs, and focusing on the core aspects of your business, you can grow your business at a far faster rate.
If you’re looking to get started with a great outsourcing partner, contact Peak Support today to explore what outsourcing your business operations could look like.
