How, What and Why to Outsource in 2017

How, What and Why to Outsource in 2017

The benefits of outsourcing particular tasks and positions within a business are indisputable, however, some business owners still choose to be sceptical. Whether it’s virtual assistants you’re looking for, or perhaps web developers, sales assistants, or customer support personnel, outsourcing from the Philippines is a great way to find exactly what your business needs. Here, we’ll look at five reasons why the Philippines is the place to be, and the types of roles we see outsourced most often at Virtual Coworker.

So, what’s all the fuss about outsourcing to the Philippines?

The time zone is great

For Australian clients, hiring Filipino virtual assistants is an excellent move in terms of work schedule. The Philippines is on the same time zone as Western Australia which puts them just one or two hours behind QLD and 2 or 3 hours behind NSW depending on daylight savings. This makes it easy for you to train, manage and maintain contact with your outsourced workers during business hours.

The people have excellent skills

The Philippines is known to have a high literacy rate, and on top of that, most Filipinos also speak English as it’s taught in school starting in kindergarten, as is their native language. They also have the ability to hone their vocal skills so that they have a good, neutral accent, which helps a great deal when working for American and Australian clients. Also, it’s not difficult to find a diverse skill set, with some Filipinos having great IT and programming experience while others have strengths in finance, HR, content creation, or customer service.

Your business can grow more</stron

Often times, for a business to grow, many things have to fall into place. You need to make sales and build a great team to facilitate growth, but often you also have to handle the mundane tasks as well. By outsourcing these time consuming jobs to virtual assistants in the Philippines – who can handle them quite well – you give yourself more hours to focus on the highest value activities, which helps your business grow faster.

The talent pool is large

The Philippines has a population somewhere around 100 million, many of whom are young and can greatly contribute to the workforce. There are around 450,000 students graduating from university each year, which ranks the Philippines third overall in terms of talent pool size coming in just behind India and China. In 2014, only about 1% of the total population, or about 1 million people, worked in the BPO or outsourcing industry. In 2016, this is expected to see an exponential increase with as many as 1.5 million new jobs being generated.

You can lower costs without compromising quality

Virtual Assistants in the Philippines are usually very hard working and will provide excellent service for whatever position they’re placed in. Also, the cost of living is far lower than in countries like Australia and the US. This means that a Filipino virtual assistant makes roughly 20% of what someone in a more developed country would earn. This makes it much more cost effective for companies to outsource because they can pay a lower rate which will still be a good amount for the Filipino virtual assistants to earn and support their families.

Top 10 areas SME’s globally are off-shoring:

1. Bookkeeping
This can be one of the most time consuming tasks within any business, so why not have someone else keep your books up-to-date? A virtual assistant will be able to easily and automatically manage your billing and invoicing, bank reconciliations, refunds, debt collections, financial reporting and BAS statements, through cloud based app solutions like Xero.

2. Market research
This is important to the success of any business, no matter what size. Outsourcing research to a virtual assistant will help you to find objective and relevant information, analyse said information, and deliver the results in a clear format. This is a critical component to generating leads and can greatly increase the productivity of your sales team.

3. Administration
Your virtual assistant will help you undertake any basic administration tasks, including managing your calendars, scheduling appointments with clients on your behalf, capturing and responding to messages, and writing letters and
memos.

4. Customer support
Outsourcing customer support is a cost-effective solution, providing flexibility across different shifts and time zones, which can be invaluable for individual businesses that do not have the same resources as a large company. Providing technical and administrative support, and a range of email, phones, and live chat support on demand is critical. Your customer support can be outsourced to a virtual assistant with excellent communication skills and years of experience.

5. Web development
Through offering remote online management tools, outsourcing your web development to an experienced virtual team will allow you to focus on other elements of your business. The interview process to find a web developer suitable to your needs is undertaken, including a thorough screening process, coding tests, and design tests, with any further interviewing that you may require done through Skype.

6. Content writing
Getting the right message to your target audience is important and takes time when formulating the right words in an effective way to achieve cut-through. Have some or all of your content written for you – from web material and newsletters, to blogs, brochures and presentations – with an experienced virtual writer.

7. Sales Assistance
Managing the sales process is vital in terms of attracting and retaining clients. A virtual assistant will save you time by managing sales leads and CRM, giving you more time to focus on generating additional leads and translating those leads into sales. Provide a virtual sales assistant to your current business development team and witness how many more calls and meetings they’re able to attend.

8. Data entry
This is a basic task that can take up valuable business time. Have your data entered into a format that will allow you to access information in an easy and organised way, allowing you to get the most out of your data. Tasks such as this are so easy to delegate, can easily be done virtually, and are too menial for senior managers to be doing.

9. Email management
Answering emails cannot only be a mundane task, it can also be time consuming and distracting. Consider what you could be doing in that time instead of reading and sorting through your mail. A virtual assistant can help to organise, sort, create folders, file, and manage priority mail on a daily basis.

10. Social media
With social media becoming one of the most common ways to network and communicate, it is an invaluable tool for business growth. It is therefore important to ensure frequent research, communication, and management of your social media platforms is undertaken. Utilise a virtual assistant to save you time by managing your social media daily, researching market trends, and managing ongoing messaging and communication to your followers and
prospective clients.

Virtual Coworker provides a range of convenient, easy and cost effective services, and world-class management through time-tracking software, allowing individual businesses more time to focus on business strategy and clients. Click here to contact our sales office today for a free job consultation.

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