A decade ago, back-office support outsourcing is still an unfamiliar concept to the majority of businesses around the world. Companies got used to housing almost all of their operations and managing them in one office.
Nowadays, especially with the ongoing pandemic, outsourcing back-office support has become mandatory. This became one of their efficient ways to cut costs while maintaining their businesses afloat. Regardless if you intend to save on resources or grow your market, delegating these tasks can help you improve and adapt to the times.
This article tackles back-office support and how you can hire an outsourced team.
How important back-office support is to a business
Back office support refers to roles that do not necessarily relate to customer support. Though, these are crucial in making sure the entire operations run smoothly. Unlike the front office, the back office does not require interaction with external clients of a business. They focus more on administrative and logistic tasks such as:
- Human resource management
- Document verification
- Application and claims processing
- Data entry and transcription
- Content creation
- Writing
- Research
- Other related tasks
Back-office serves as the backbone of a company. It helps the business grow by ensuring that its operation functions efficiently and without interruption.
It helps your employees work efficiently
Your back-office team will work on everything your team needs, from the equipment, cloud storage, phone, to document capturing devices, including maintenance and troubleshooting. This is to assure that they will work smoothly and more efficiently.
Efficient back-office affects customer experience
When you have proper, streamlined operations, it can affect customer experience and satisfaction easily. Nowadays, customer experience is one of the keys to retaining them into your business, and your back-office support team will help you with this.
Hiring offshore back-office helps you take care of your employees better
You can also delegate your human resource tasks to BPOs and PEOs offshore. This helps you manage your workforce better, avoid having a high turnover rate, and give them more benefits in the long run.
An offshore back-office team helps you save on costs
Lastly, an offshore back-office team helps you save on costs in labor and resources. You don’t need to hire an in-house team and spend on additional office space and equipment. Instead, you can have a remote team that can serve as an extension of your current in-house team.
Top back-office roles you can delegate offshore
Basically, you can delegate any or all administrative services to a virtual assistant or a BPO company. They will serve as your secretary that will prepare documents, schedule appointment, and prepare other tasks for you.
Aside from this, here are some of the top back-office roles you can outsource to third-party providers.
Accounting
Accounting may be a crucial and complex job you might want to do in-house. But, it is costly to maintain one if you don’t have that much demand for them. Alternatively, you can hire an Accounting VA or a firm for short-term needs such as tax and documentary compliance.
Data entry and transcription
Data entry is a wide and elaborate field. It requires time, focus, and attention to detail since you have to input customer information accurately. This is why you should outsource this work to a third-party provider who can make do this.
Human resources
A growing business requires a better human resources team that can handle their employees better over time. Many professional employer organizations (PEOs) handle every aspect of HR management, from recruitment, onboarding, training, to benefits management.
Payroll
You can’t always handle payroll on your own. As your teams grow, you will have to increase your effort in updating their information, salaries, and benefits. A VA, staffing firm or PEO can help you in this task so you can minimize errors in handling payroll and make sure that your employees get their salaries on time.
Creatives
Even when you can handle writing, design, or other creative tasks for your campaigns, it’s still best if you outsource these. Creative professionals such as graphic designers, writers, and content strategists can handle this better so you can focus on planning better campaigns to attract customers.
IT support
Lastly, IT support is one of the most crucial tasks and should be one of the main focuses of a business, whether for their customers or employees. You can establish your IT and network services in-house, but your support, troubleshooting, and maintenance can be outsourced to offshore professionals who can handle this better.
Things to consider when hiring back-office support offshore
You can’t just outsource your back office support and expect a high-yielding result without knowing the whole ordeal. To become successful, you have to plan and strategize your way into hiring and managing your offshore workforce.
Define your objectives in outsourcing
Whether you want to save on costs, improve your services, or diversify your workforce, you should properly define your objectives in outsourcing and how it will help your business in the long run.
Find out what to outsource
Then, you should determine which tasks you should outsource and which you should retain in the office. Remember that you can’t just outsource everything without determining the need and demand for it.
Learn about where you want to outsource
A bit of research helps in getting to know the company and location you’re outsourcing. Get to know the company, its services, and the reviews they get from their clients and employees. There, you’ll know what kind of company you will enter a partnership with. Choose established outsourcing providers like MVP Asia Pacific to ensure a positive outsourcing experience.
Start from small tasks
Lastly, it’s best if you will start outsourcing from small tasks. This is important especially when you’ve just started hiring your offshore team. Start with a few tasks they can do easily but are a part of your usual operations. With this, you can determine whether their services will fit your needs and their actual performance.
Keep in mind that offshoring isn’t an end-all, be-all solution for your business. Some companies may transition better than others. As mentioned above, you can start out small and build your way up from there. You could also try halving the responsibilities, half your staff could be offshore and half of your team can be onsite.
Offshoring is a major business decision that cannot be done—or undone—overnight. It will take months or even years to decide to push through a major shift in the business. Especially in times like these, where uncertainty is mixed with a dip in the economy.
Why you should offshore your back office support
Always remember that the back office and its roles exist to give support to the client- and customer-facing departments. Without back-office roles, the front office would have to double down on their efforts on the job.
Back office roles like compliance management, bookkeeping, and accounting serve different purposes to provide support to most, if not all, departments in your organization. That being said, it’s not impossible to offshore these functions to an external firm. If the roles are small enough, you can even opt to offload them to individual contractors and freelancers.
The gig economy has brought up hundreds upon thousands of opportunities for freelancers and independent contractors. From short-term contracts to permanent ones, these virtual workers are never going to run out of chances to start anew.
Having the opportunity to hire freelancers is great practice. More and more salaried employees are leaning towards the freedom of not having to work 9-5. Although freelancing is still a tough nut to crack, for some people, spending less time working is worth the effort.
That being said, efficiency lies in the company for the most part. It has been established that offshoring isn’t a one-stop solution for any of the existing problems in the organization. Don’t treat these business models as band-aids for underlying issues. Ensure that managers and higher-ups are doing their best to keep the departments and their workflow smooth.
So, yes, the efficacy of offshoring still relies on how the companies operate on both sides. Making sure that your company operates on the same page with your external firm is important. Given that you both are on the same principles and vision is pertinent and key to a successful partnership. In today’s world, a company’s culture is everything. From how the hierarchy is laid out to how you treat your employees, it will say everything there is to know about.
As a decision-maker, you have to make sure that company operations are going smooth on both ends. If you choose to offshore to be more efficient while cutting down on costs, make sure that your goals and expectations are being met.
Offshoring is a good way to save resources—monetary or else—but it only does its job when the environment and the culture are right. This is why you must do your research. Study the cause and effect of offshoring (to your business and your employees) and the impact of the practice on the economy as a whole. By doing such, you can find studies regarding the ethical implications of the practice, practice rational thinking and apply the knowledge that you have.
