The Tasks Your Business Should Outsource

Today, businesses face a more difficult set of challenges, with increased labour costs and much tougher competition for Europe emerging in the global market. When presented with such obstacles in achieving success, businesses can no longer afford to remain closed off to external solutions. This is why they have turned to outsourcing talent, with a Statista report noting how some European countries have spent as much as €5.1 billion on outsourcing in recent years.

While many leaders view outsourcing as an optimisation strategy, other businesses see it as a necessity. And while making the decision to outsource is one thing, choosing which tasks and roles to hand over to an outsourcing partner is even more challenging. Here are some of the tasks you might consider outsourcing for your business for more streamlined, core-focused, and effective operations.

Customer Service

Providing quality customer service is a challenge that requires patience and stamina for time-intensive work. As a business grows so does the demand for quality customer service. Outsourcing becomes an excellent alternative to direct hiring for several reasons, one of which is the high cost of hiring and training new employees to support business growth.

Customer service roles will also see plenty of fluctuations depending on demand – it wouldn’t make sense to keep paying idle staff. Furthermore, outsourcing companies can absorb dramatic demand shifts and deploy personnel accordingly.

Digital Marketing

A report published on What's New In Publishing predicts that spending for digital marketing is expected to reach $389 billion (€324 billion) this year, illustrating the tremendous growth the industry is expected to see. It has become an essential tool for businesses with the rise of e-commerce, and many have invested in digital marketing teams to meet the need. Digital marketing tasks can also be outsourced for cost savings and to ensure the highest levels of expertise from specialists.

Take Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), for example, which plays an important role in drawing potential customers to your business. Learning and implementing it can take time and resources – by the time your marketing team has mastered it, SEO will have evolved again. According to digital marketing firm Ayima Kickstart, small businesses will especially struggle with SEO because of how Google’s algorithms tend to reward big brands with large amounts of incoming backlinks. Linking development is often very expensive, resource-draining, and difficult to execute correctly to ensure SEO success and attract traffic to your website. Outsourcing these skills to more experienced specialists can address this imbalance by ensuring that effective SEO strategies are implemented at a lower cost.

Administrative Tasks

Administrative tasks are time-consuming and costly for businesses in terms of hiring additional staff. And in situations where no administrative personnel are hired, these responsibilities land on other employees’ desks, contributing to more costs to cover extended hours. According to outsourcing services provider The Clear Desk, some roles are better fulfilled outside the office than in-house.

Administrative tasks such as managing emails and appointments, drafting presentations, newsletter creation, and internal communications can be done remotely, making outsourcing the role advantageous. The benefit is two-fold; companies will receive quality services from personnel specifically trained for the role without shelling out for the full employee cost. At the same time, the employer the outsourcing company deploys lands a stable role — a win-win.

Accounting

Tasks in accounting such as bookkeeping, invoicing, financial reporting, and more are incredibly tedious and time-consuming. While it’s understandable to prefer that financial data remain in-house, technology has progressed enough to allow document and data sharing that is secure, reliable, and efficient.

Accounting firms can also spot errors and provide a more objective view of your finances than in-house accounting. This arrangement also reduces the chance of fraud due to a lack of internal controls, particularly for tasks such as financial reporting.

Outsourcing has often been cited as the way of the future, providing companies with cost-effective staffing solutions to conduct business more effectively. Here on TIMIFY, we've talked about how digital tools are also becoming more prominent in a similar area: a customer-first culture. Understanding your core business and striving to improve it, whether through outsourcing or digital tools, can be the difference between success and failure.

Article written by Jane Reynolds

Exclusively for TIMIFY.com