Top 7 Benefits of Business Process Outsourcing

October 11, 2019
min to read
The Invisible Team

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There is an increasing curiosity - and demand - for business process outsourcing. And with good reason. The average knowledge worker makes $67K/yr but spends 41% of their time doing repetitive digital work. With business process outsourcing, you can ensure your staff are focusing on their core competencies, while delegating out repetitive tasks and administration at a fraction of the cost. So what really is business process outsourcing, and what are all the ways your business can benefit from it?

What is business process outsourcing?

business process outsourcing

There are likely countless activities that your employees execute every day to make your business run smoothly, and hopefully, grow. But which of these activities are actually utilizing your staff’s core knowledge competencies and skill sets? 

With any job or role often comes menial tasks, repetitive activities, and administration that must be done in order to execute the main duties. Business process outsourcing can remove these tasks from the to-do lists of your staff, and through a third party like Invisible Technologies, give them to competent, vetted, low-cost offshore workers. 

But BPO shouldn’t be conflated with traditional outsourcing. While outsourcing isn’t a new concept, it generally refers to when a job is taken offsite, such as when hiring a Virtual Assistant. But with BPO, an entire business function such as email marketing, is given to a contracted worker.


Examples of tasks that can be outsourced

Typically you can place tasks in one of two categories: back office and front office. Back office tasks are ones such as inventory ordering, head hunting and recruitment, legal agreements and contract creation. Front office tasks that can be outsourced are activities such as lead generation and call list building.

What are the benefits of business process outsourcing?

1. Saving time

As you can imagine, business process outsourcing can allow your organization to immediately free up more hours in the day. When you outsource repetitive tasks, the hours typically spent consistently on those activities can now be opened up for other things.

What this can mean is that your knowledge workers in business operations, marketing and sales, or HR, can complete projects within an expedited timeline, or take on more responsibilities. Not to mention that employees who utilize their skills and have variety in their jobs tend to be more happy and fulfilled. Employee satisfaction leads to better productivity which can also result in greater workplace efficiency. 

benefits of business process outsourcing

2. Saving money

One of the greatest benefits and main reasons for companies using business process outsourcing is the cost savings. Typically in business, a large portion of overhead cost is manpower, and the process for hiring, training, and onboarding can also be timely and expensive. But companies often find themselves in a catch-22: their current employees are stretched too thin to be their most productive, but there may not be quite enough work (or budget) to justify a new hire. 

Business process outsourcing can be a great solution for any size company needing to allocate resources wisely when it comes to employees. Since the outsourced third party workers live and work in places where cost of living is typically much lower, their compensation generally reflects that. Since they are offsite, you also don’t need to be concerned with ensuring you have enough office space or materials, equipment, and resources for an on-location employee.

3.Flexibility and scalability

When companies are able to effectively use outsourcing and do more with less time and money, it can lead to better growth potential and flexibility in the overall business. When scaling a company, often leadership looks to hire new people as a way to bolster sales, business development, and customer support. But sometimes the move can be premature, or there is uncertainty about expenditures versus guaranteed revenue that can make robust hiring a financial risk. 

Business process outsourcing can significantly reduce this risk, and allow for a company to ramp up activities quickly, or scale back as need be. BPO can be a great intermediary stepping stone for companies who want to scale fast, but want to be cautious about hiring full time employees. This flexibility that BPO offers can be extremely valuable for all types of companies, but especially those in the growth phase. 

outsourcing work

4. Time zone advantage

With scaling often comes the potential opportunity to enter new markets. But companies that have customers or business partners around the globe are often faced with one common problem: time zones. If your headquarters are in San Francisco, it can be difficult to expand to new markets, especially in far reaching places like Asia and Australia, when you don’t have employees on the clock 24 hours a day. 

Instead of needing to open satellite offices abroad, business process outsourcing can allow you greater coverage of international working hours, since contracted workers typically live in countries that are ahead of US time zones. 

This also allows for another key advantage: when workers are located in forward time zones, it can almost feel as if you have more hours in the day. For example, if you send a task request in the afternoon in your time zone, the task may even be completed at night while you’re still sleeping, meaning turnaround is less than one of your actual working days. Again, this can be a great opportunity for companies to expedite work and get more activities done in less time.

5. Better use of hours (focus on competencies)

When it comes to your full-time employees, you want to be utilizing their knowledge, experience, and skills as much as possible (it is why you hired them after all). But remember that statistic from before? On average your employees may be spending 41% of their time on repetitive digital tasks that can be automated or delegated out. 41% of time roughly translates to almost 16.5 hours a week (for a 40 hour work week)! With that much extra time, your employees can truly focus on their particular competencies, take on more responsibilities, or partake in training and upskilling in order to improve on the job quickly. 

Greater productivity in knowledge areas translates to increased profitability and oftentimes a competitive work environment that attracts top talent. On the flip side, business process outsourcing also gives great opportunities to skilled workers in developing countries so that they may improve their own understanding and competencies in digital fields. When working with BPO providers like Invisible Technologies, they can receive competitive compensation and build their portfolios with companies they may not otherwise have access to.

bpo business process outsourcing

6. Project-based manpower

There will be a time for almost every business when a short-term project needs additional manpower. Often, it is unlikely for a company to hire new team members for one project, unless they are contracted temp workers or outside consultants. But this approach can also be costly, and can take time with recruitment, selection, and on-boarding. 

When the project only needs to capitalize on the main duties of your knowledge workers, but gets bogged down by menial tasks, it’s the perfect opportunity to utilize BPO. Business process outsourcing solutions often mean that you can set a specific timeline and workflow for your outsourced contractors on a project base. This way, executing a short-term project is as seamless as running your daily operations.


7. Compete with larger companies

Importantly for small and medium sized businesses, business process outsourcing services can give you a leg up on competitors. Especially when it comes to crowded markets with big players, BPO can allow SMBs to run as if they were larger, without the overhead of employee costs. 

When saving resources, better utilizing your existing staff, having time zone advantage and flexibility, you are much more likely to be able to give enterprise businesses a run for their money. BPO can level the playing field and allow smaller companies to focus on important activities that before only enterprise businesses could, such as concierge customer service and account management. 

Business Process Outsourcing Examples

Business Process Outsourcing Examples 

Typically, outsourcing platforms such as Fiverr or UpWork allow just about any kind of temp or project based task to be posted on their sites. In some ways, these places have become the wild west for finding talent and can often be rife with unreliable contacts - on both sides of the job. But business process outsourcing trends are moving in the direction of specialization. At Invisible Technologies we have a more narrow focus so that we can build niche opportunities in the areas of marketing, sales, hiring, and operations for our customers.

1. Sales Process Outsourcing‍

When it comes to building contact lists and finding sales opportunities, many professionals focus on sales prospecting and lead generation activities. These tasks are necessary, but don’t utilize time wisely for a salesperson’s best skill: actually closing deals.

With Invisible Technologies sales process outsourcing, you can delegate tasks to outsourced workers such as curating both public and private data sources to deliver organized prospect lists with qualified leads. Set parameters for the kinds of leads you want, document your process, and our vetted workers execute behind the scenes to nurture the leads found, and secure meetings for your sales team.


2. HR Business Process Outsourcing

Recruitment can be a long and laborious process with constant back and forth with prospects, and filtering through applications. Invisible Technologies business process outsourcing services for HR and recruiting teams can actually fill your talent pipeline and schedule candidate interviews on your behalf. 

When you set stipulations for the types of candidates you are looking for, and for which jobs, we can create and manage candidate lists that match your needs. We can even reach out to candidates, schedule interviews, and ensure your talent pipeline stays full.


3. Operations Management Outsourcing

Business operations is particularly an area within companies that tends to be recurring but necessary. With Invisible, outsourcing of operations processes includes everything from uploading files and booking reservations to onboarding and transcription services. Our digital assembly line uses just the right combination of people and technology to get the job done. 

An intuitive client dashboard lets you know what tasks have been assigned and how many hours they will take to complete. Your deliverables are always completed with your unique brand and company specifications. 

4. Insurance Business Process Outsourcing

Outsourcing of common insurance business processes to reduce costs and expedite application processing. The insurance industry is a perfect example where price and service are the only differentiators in an otherwise level playing field. Companies that control labor costs and relentlessly chase efficiency are the ones who succeed. 

Case in point, Invisible Technologies recently helped an insurance provider tackle a backlog of over 4,000 applications in the span of just a few months, all at a fraction of the cost of using in-house employees to complete the same assignments. The provider was elated and eventually expanded our work into transcriptions and a number of other mission-critical services. 

The company CEO was so impressed with Invisible Technologies security protocols that he asked how to implement them in his own network.


How Invisible Technologies works

With Invisible Technologies, you can automate your business processes and techniques by outsourcing repetitive menial tasks. As an example, let Invisible aid in your activities such as prospecting, lead generation and targeting. 

Establish a better prospecting workflow by working together with an experienced Invisible agent. Describe your sales prospecting parameters and targeting identities, and Invisible builds out a process that is unique to your needs. We use our technology to outsource this process to highly-skilled, low-cost professionals who are trained to carry out requests in the most affordable and efficient way possible.

Once the process is set up, requests made via email are automatically evaluated and pushed through our system and delegated to these skilled individuals, who execute the tasks.  Requests may look something like “please find X amount of leads by X date.” 

You can check the status of the tasks by accessing your Invisible Client Dashboard, where you can get an overview of what is currently underway, what has been completed, and how long each task took to complete.

The more you use Invisible, the more inefficiencies can be identified, and your process refined to achieve the best results. In just a short amount of time, you can have a fully functioning, automated system up and running, bringing you new prospects without having to spend more valuable time. This allows you to focus on more of the activities that align with your core business, and drive growth.

Learn more about how you can automate your operations, so you can focus on actual business growth activities.

The Invisible Team

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