Outsourcing is the allocation of a company’s business functions to outside entities. Any business process capable of being carried out remotely is eligible to be outsourced. These business functions and processes include but are by no means limited to payroll, management of orders and inventory, processing of transactions, manipulation of images, and call center and transcription services.
Some of these tasks may be non-essential, making it better to outsource them rather than slow down productivity with processes of lower priority that a third party can easily and perhaps better fulfill so that more time and attention is available for profitable core endeavors. A common misconception regarding working with staff virtually is the assumption that one employee is capable of shouldering the burden of taking care of every single task, which is hardly possible in either the virtual or the real world.
Building up a team of members each best suited for appropriate roles rather than tasks that will work together to attain the goals of the business is the better solution. The following are some of the many non-essential functions that companies can outsource to optimize productivity.
Customer Service
One non-essential function that can be outsourced by your office is customer service. Sales calls tend to favor quantity over quality in that a greater number of calls typically leads to more sales and leads. After the performance of the first call, completing the sale is able to be done by the sales force from within. The expertise and skill of a skilled salesperson can be utilized efficiently in order to deal with clients and make sales rather than simply cold calls. It will likely be more efficient to outsource customer support as opposed to maintaining a well-trained support team to deal with such tasks, particularly for companies that are based on and sell products.
Bookkeeping
Another non-essential function that can be outsourced by your office is bookkeeping, which refers to maintaining organized financial records of all company transactions. Investing the time to do this is often easy to overlook, but failure to do it can lead to serious losses down the line.
While there is always the option of hiring an employee to carry out the daily accounting and bookkeeping duties, these tasks have become more practical for many businesses to outsource, which brings a great many benefits, including affording workers more time to focus on the core business functions, saving money as outsourcing accounting is cheaper, and providing access to experts which will increase accuracy and reliability.
Social Media Marketing
Another non-essential function that can be outsourced by your office is social media marketing. Social media is no longer limited to recreation and personal communication, but useful to many companies for carrying out lead generation. However, social media marketing is not quite as simple as just creating a website for the company but also involves engaging with and replying to customers and users, which can be a time-consuming process.
These tasks can easily be outsourced to social media marketing agencies, which have teams of qualified professionals whose job is to increase and monitor the company’s presence on social media platforms. Many companies perhaps unfamiliar with the importance and power of social media tend to think that occasional replies to messages from customers or setting aside small amounts of time each day is enough to fulfill this need, but this is not the case.
Enough time must be invested in order to grow one’s followers and derive the benefits from social media marketing campaigns, which experts can help make possible. Outsourcing to experts can also help healthcare text messaging become a much more viable business option.
When it comes to running a business, there are many different functions that must be fulfilled. However, when seeking to run a successful business, it is important to delegate non-essential duties and divide labor appropriately to get the most out of your business. Attempting to shoulder all the burdens of business or compel another to do so will inevitably slow down productivity and stunt your business’s true economic potential. Workers who are highly skilled in specific areas can help business owners fulfill tasks they may not be as good at or that would otherwise distract from other core business duties. For these reasons, outsourcing non-essential functions are pragmatic for businesses.