Business and Finance

Most entrepreneurs, home-office professionals and small businesses can immensely benefit from well trained personnel who can execute a range of support services to businesses including clerical, administrative, marketing, and financial tasks. Virtual office support professionals can effectively fill the gap in a corporate set up executing even complex and skilful tasks at concessional rates. Virtual assistants bill only the working hours thereby making the keeping the expenditure to minimum when compared to the work accomplished by the regular employees. Since the continuance of the contract for virtual assistance depends on the steady workflow from clients, the virtual assistants will ensure that they offer the perfect solution for competitive rates.

Virtual assistants present a range of advantages over regularly paid employees. Hiring a virtual assistant gets you all the benefits of outsourcing without incurring the burden of employee taxes, insurance, vacations, sick pays and retirement plans. In addition, since your trust and assignments are crucial for the continuance of their business with your firm, the virtual assistants are bound to be loyal and prompt.

Office Ensemble – Virtual Assistant offers several advantages over a paid employee. When you hire a virtual assistant, you get all the benefits of outsourcing – no burden with employee taxes, insurance, retirement plans, vacations, or sick pay. This savings in financial resources is coupled with the loyalty and steadiness of a company employee because your trust and work is vital to the success of their company.

Estimates in the industry sector reveal that the cost spent on most of the support employees is almost triple the annual salary taking into account all the associated factors. In addition, regular employees cannot work without an office space and equipments. The cost of these factors must be now added with the salaries and other benefits to estimate the real expenditure on regular employees. Reputed virtual assistance firms that have established their presence can effectively handle administrative, marketing, financial and a host of other support services.

When outsourcing some people think that it’s as easy as giving the offshore company the requirements and letting them do their thing, and then come back some time later to pick up the finished product. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Outsourcing a project to an offshore company can meet failure due to several reasons, the most common one being lack of communication between the buyer and the seller.

Many buyers don’t consider the importance of regular communication on all stages of the project development until it’s too late. Many barely talk to the company between the moment they award the project and the end of the deadline. And this is a big mistake. Like in-house employees, offshore companies need someone to manage their work and keep them on the right track.

When you don’t communicate, you waste time which you could have applied fixing problems… and eventually you start losing money if you’re dependent on a deadline.

Continue reading ‘The Importance of Communication in Outsourcing’ »

The provision of outsourced business services is not, of course, a regulated industry. But many clients of outsourcing service providers are themselves in regulated industries – indeed arguably the greatest take up of outsourced (and offshore) business process services has been in regulated industries such as financial services and utilities. Regulators have therefore taken a keen interest in the implications of outsourcing and offshoring for their members, particularly with regard to operational risk and the potential impact on their customers.

Other industry sectors can learn a great deal from the way the regulators have addressed this issue – their guidelines are pretty close to a good practice summary for any outsourcing arrangement in any organisation.

Continue reading ‘Outsourcing – Lessons From the Regulators’ »

Outsourcing is subcontracting a service or process to a third-party specialist who has economies-of-scale advantages. Almost every company outsources some part of their business today. But is this really saving company’s money? It makes sense to subcontract another company to come in and take over the services that are not core parts of your business. The most common outsourcing relates to IT, payroll, customer service, and data entry. Basically anything that does not require face to face contact. There are four stages to incorporating outsourcing into a company, strategic thinking, evaluation and selection, contract development, and outsourcing management. Outsourcing doesn’t necessarily have to take place overseas, although that is where it has been proven to be the cheapest. Costs of outsourcing includes, finding a reliable outsourcing partner, training the staff for outsourced services, managing the outsourcing process, retaining the staff and maintaining the quality of service, and transferring dependency on the outsourcing partner. Most companies look to outsource for the cost effectiveness. Continue reading ‘Outsourcing: Good or Bad?’ »

The term freelancer or freelance was first coined in the Medieval Age by Sir Walter Scott in Ivanhoe, while referring to “mercenary warriors”. Nevertheless, this term has acquired different meanings over time and nowadays one can easily associate it to the following definition: a person who pursues a profession without establishing a long-term commitment to any employer (overseas or within the country).
The phenomenon of the Globalization in which the World Wide Web can be located also brought something new to this term’s definition, since a freelance worker no longer deals with geographical constraints. It is then possible to freelance without being physically present: the freelancer can work to a one-time employer living overseas still they are only a click away.
As freelancers became more and more dependant on the Internet, and western companies increased outsourcing, virtual marketplaces such as GetACoder (www.getacoder.com) started coming into light. GetACoder.com brings together hundreds of employers and freelancers from all over the world, who work on a per-project basis. This facilitator system accelerates the whole market process and provides key competitive advantages to both parties involved. It is a win-win situation both to employers and freelancers. Employers get good quality work at lesser costs and freelancers get paid a considerable amount for the project completed.
Continue reading ‘The Benefits of Working as a Freelancer’ »

There are a number of companies doing the lead generation process and the fact is that call centers India use outsourced call centers for generating their leads so that they keep their front end professional sales busy through qualified sales leads. This lets the company focus more on the processing deals rather than the prospecting. This call center lead generation is not something new as the telephone invented several years ago is today a powerful tool than ever. However with the changing global economy most of the companies across America have been able to save several dollars by using call centers outsourcing services

The business process outsourcing lead generation is surely one the best ways to provide your front down sales team with some of the best daily leads. When you just compare the building cost of an in house telemarketing team that is complete with the call center infrastructure needed it would seem that BPO lead generation not just cuts the cost to 50 percent but is also saves up the time and money. Bringing over the training and managing team can be hard enough when you already have sales professionals and overall the telemarketers India would be right enough to outsource your lead generation to. Therefore the clear and the best way to optimize your sales cycle is to outsource the lead generation where you can also make sure that your sales team is spending their time being present with your company’s products or services for qualified prospects

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Most organizations, understandably, develop tunnel vision at the beginning of their outsourcing journey when the prize is getting the right deal done. But what next? What happens when the ink is dry on the paper and clients can relax in the knowledge that they have negotiated a good value sustainable deal with a reliable supplier? The answer is – don’t relax. Translating that deal into successful day to day operational reality is vital from an organisational, and often personal, point of view. The current global economic downturn makes keeping transition costs to budget and realising the benefits of outsourcing even more important. And the cost of getting it wrong?

* Delayed transition to outsourced service

* Business case not achieved

* Increased cost and resource burden

* Poor client / supplier relationships

* End-users and stakeholders opposed to new ways of working

Experience shows that lack of strong and focused client-side transition management activity is a common contributing factor to deals which never got off the ground properly. Research shows that governance and relationship issues alone can account for a 40-50% value leakage on the average outsourcing contract (See Figure 1). Common symptoms are delayed transition, which erodes the business case, leads to messy and inconsistent communications and compromises ability to properly manage the people and processes involved in and impacted by the outsourcing initiative. Resources on both sides become stretched and liability for additional costs incurred tests relationships, often leading to a blame game. All of these things are real blocks to true realisation of both tangible and intangible benefits of the outsource engagement. You get one chance to lay the right foundations to prevent that value leakage from occurring – the transition phase.

Continue reading ‘Is Transition Management Really That Important?’ »