Return On Outsourcing: Setting The Right Expectations And Measures

 

Return On Outsourcing

 

The reason businesses use outsourced services is pretty simple: to save money.

But there are also many other benefits to using such a service, like streamlining your business to ensure it runs more efficiently, and allowing you to concentrate on growing your company.

However, there are several things to consider before outsourcing parts of your business. First, you must identify how you would benefit from business process outsourcing to ensure cost savings for your company.

This article looks at areas you need to consider before embarking on an outsourcing project to fully understand the returns you can expect.

Understand The Costs Of Outsourcing

While using an outsourcing company may be seen as the way forward for your business, there are still many costs to consider.

First, you have to calculate how much it will cost you hourly to hire someone to produce your product or provide a service for you.

If you decide to outsource work to freelance staff, you will have to pay them hourly, but there will also be additional costs like sourcing the worker, training them to your required standard, and managing them.

Make sure you fully know the all-in price before committing to any operating agreement.

Once you sign an agreement with a freelance worker or an outsourced services company, there will be existing processes to understand.

For example, if you are working on an outsourcing project and things don’t go according to plan, and you want to exit the agreement early, there may be an additional cost you incur for exiting early.

Performing Cost Benefit Analysis

To fully understand the cost savings of outsourcing work, you must conduct a thorough cost-benefit analysis to determine if outsourcing will benefit your company.

You must ensure that you use accurate and complete data; otherwise, you won’t get a precise picture of all the costs involved. As a result, this could lead to your company losing money instead of saving money.

Business process outsourcing only truly works if all the qualitative factors regarding finance are assessed before you begin tendering.

There are six steps you need to follow.

Step 1: You must understand the cost of staying in-house and not using outsourcing.

Step 2: Identify the costs of using outsourcing.

Step 3: Do a pros and cons financial assessment of outsourcing.

Step 3: Attach the value of all the financial benefits to the costs and benefits of outsourcing.

Step 4: Devise a timeline for expected costs and revenue.

Step 6: Compare costs and expected benefits.

Accounting For Quality Improvements

When making any investment business decision, you have to do specific tasks to ensure that the investment will provide clear benefits to the overall quality of your product or service.

So will outsourcing improve the quality and end-to-end process of your product or service?

In reality, you will only honestly know this when you start the outsourcing process and are given feedback on customer satisfaction.

However, using the correct outsourcing programme for your business while making sure the service levels meet your high standards is vital.

Quality of service to your customers must not dip just because you decide to outsource. On the contrary, it should improve because this is the only area of the business the outsourcing company is concentrating on.

An excellent and open outsourcing relationship will benefit both you and your customers.

Focusing On The Right Tasks To Outsource

It is often that mundane and repetitive admin task that requires considerable attention but provides little financial benefits for your company.

Specific tasks, such as inputting data, can prove time-consuming and stop you from focusing on your core business. Still, unfortunately, they are essential to the everyday running of your company.

Administration tasks are where most businesses start to outsource, and they soon see the expected financial savings delivered as they concentrate on dealing with potential new clients.

Company outsourcing strategies evolve as their business grows, and so do the tasks they want their virtual assistant to perform.

A company may start hiring a virtual assistant for essential admin work, but then they want to hire another virtual assistant to deal with all their social media channels.

It may be the case that your existing virtual assistant can handle both roles, but you need to increase their working hours.

Knowing what tasks you need outsourced is always a revolving process that changes over time as your business works on different projects and grows.

Maximise ROI With A Virtual Assistant

All businesses want to maximise their return on investment (ROI), which is how they should approach outsourcing.

When you enter an outsourcing arrangement with a virtual assistant, you should have the expected benefits for your business needs.

Knowing the expected ROI and the fixed and variable costs will help you get the most out of your virtual assistant.

For example, you may pay for HR outsourcing by the hour in your outsourcing arrangement. Still, your virtual assistant is willing to do an extra 10-minutes each day because they know it helps the company and may lead to additional work on future projects.

This helps build trust as long as you are open and transparent with your virtual assistant.

All companies need to undertake a regular ROI audit to know that they are calculating ROI in the right way.

There is little point in hiring a virtual assistant if the cost of engaging is higher than your ROI. Therefore, ROI auditing is vital to your company’s long-term growth to maintain a competitive advantage.

Get The Most From Outsourced Services

As you can tell from what you have read in this article, there is far more to outsourcing than many business owners first expect.

It can be tempting just to dive in and hire a virtual assistant and think you are saving time and money without looking at all the factors.

You have to consider many qualitative factors, such as dealing with legal compliance, contractual obligations, etc.

You must weigh all the pros and cons of hiring a virtual assistant — the quality of service, the actual cost, and ROI.

Many businesses don’t like spending time sourcing, hiring, training, and managing their outsourced workers. And that’s where our expertise will come into play.

Give us a call, and you can have a free consultation to discuss how we can help with all your cost savings when hiring a virtual assistant.

Take your business to the next level today! ENQUIRE NOW

Click to access the login or register cheese