This fact is too bad given the fact that a virtual assistant can actually aid you with many tedious and tiring day to day activities so that your attention can stay focused on your business.  Here are the top three things that virtual assistant services can offer you.

Data entry -:

When it comes to data entry tasks such as handling product UPCs or wholesaler item numbers, most business owners hate how long it takes to compile such information.  However, there are trained virtual assistant services that can take over your data entry tasks for you so that instead of having a head ache at the end of a long of data entry, you can walk away at the close of the day satisfied with your work on the business and still have a fully completed data sheet in your hand.

Bookkeeping -:

Accounting is another area in which many business owners need help given the fact that a large amount of website based business owners does not have a strong background in bookkeeping.  It can be difficult to sort through sales and profit ratios with the knowledge of what information needs to be reported and filed for later use and which information does not.  However, virtual assistant services nine times out of ten also offer bookkeeping services so that your records can be whipped into shape in no time.

Customer Service operations -:

Finally, if you are struggling to keep up with the needs of your customers and keep your business goals aligned properly, you will find that virtual assistants are a great way to address customer service.  Often trained to work phones, email responses, and live instant chat messaging services, virtual assistants can offer comprehensive customer service when you cannot.

In general, Business Process management is very popular today. Yet, such popular concept is tightly controlled by costs, i.e. you have to consider how to do more business with less money all the time. At some point, you should consider more services than the in-house can offer you. In other words, consider outsourcing.

The hidden quality of outsourcing is that its Service Providers give you more than a cheaper offer, they give you sometimes an indirect bonus in the form of high productivity and quality.

Choosing your partner

The first thing you should consider when you start outsourcing is to choose the offshore employee that will meet your requirements. Your choice must depend mainly on how much you will save money by hiring him/her rather than assigning the task to one of your in-house employees.

Which tasks to be assigned

Recently, some companies discovered that it is cheaper to assign back office Services (like HR and networking within the company) to outsourced consultants than to in-house ones.

Knowing the benefits

It has been clear world-wide that outsourcing is at some point a must for every firm, and in a narrower range for every person with much responsibilities.

It’s even more attracting to companies due to the cost effective solutions outsourcing offers, not to mention offshoring such services to developing countries which gives a chance for even lower costs.

And it’s not just the money, it’s the time too! Outsourcing actually ‘created’ extra time for companies and persons to focus more on the core of their business. Nobody could have imagined how much you can save money and time through outsourcing until it was proven today. Outsourced employees could be considered a major factor of developing your project, even if they are assigned a large amount of trivial matters.

Co-Co !

-         Countries: India is one of the popular locations for outsourcing, also on the top of the list we have Russia and China.

-         Costs: A lot of papers and researches have been done on how much outsourcing can save money, the range is nearly 40-50% savings.

An old concept with a recent popularity

Outsourcing is not a contemporary concept at all, it was present in old ages but under different names. But upon realizing its success all around the world by companies which took the risk of applying such concept in business widely, this made other companies more eager to try it seeking for their own success.

Nowadays many companies upgraded their outsourcing process into offshoring, in other words, they allocated their tasks to many persons and even many organizations around the globe.

Making the decision correctly

As rewarding as it sounds, outsourcing may NOT be your beset option. In order to decide whether to outsource or not you need to know exactly what are your needs. You may need to reduce your costs in general, but you should know that the cost effect specifically doesn’t appear as early as expected. That’s due to initial investments in infrastructure, training, and other such preliminaries. So don’t expect to find the golden pot at the rainbow end easily!

Outsourcing advantages in India

Although India is a land of tens of cultures in one place, it has a unique feature when it comes to languages. You can find many persons of different ages and classes who can speak English fluently, a thing which is less likely to be found in any other non-English speaking country.

In addition, with the lower cost of labor and talents than many other places, it becomes very attractive to hire Indians, especially software professionals whom are expensive if you try to find them elsewhere.

This cost factor made India, as an outsourcing destination, very attractive to the American based Projects which find in India the large variety of cheap labor they are seeking.

IT knowledge starts from nursery!

From the onset of its modern development, India is like a large factory manufacturing software professionals by thousands! Believe it or not, IT education there starts right from nursery, but course with simplified terms that fit children!

Even more, to enable people of all ages to join the league of IT, Indians established specialized institutes available to provide diplomas/degrees in various fields of IT for those who missed higher education or are considering career shifts.

Consequently, you can hear some outstanding success stories in the field of IT, software and telemarketing.

Growing sectors

Software is the ongoing growing sector of all time, specially after the use of custom software to meet each company or organization’s needs.

Even more growing are web applications with all its subcategories which became specifications on their own, SEO sole experts are becoming more popular and popular everyday.

More specialized services also include CAD services and 3D designing which are also highly demanded. Talking of 3D designing we should point out to its two important uses which are:

-         High-end designing of websites using flash and other 3D programs which are becoming more popular than the usual ‘solid’ html designs.

-         Games and animation movies which are adored by adults before children.

The Indian claimed surprise

Definitely you’ll have costs subtraction and value addition if you choose outsourcing as an option after making sure it fits your case. But don’t expect it to be the golden pot on the rainbow side containing your saved money. In other words, you have to wait until after you settle all the agreements with the new outsourced partners and the wheels begin to be in motion. Just after a while you will notice gradually how much you earned.

Although you don’t usually expect this from a developing country, but it’s claimed that the number of persons with bright and creative minds in India is breathtaking. It’s devastating to know how such countries are like big mines with golden talents waiting for a chance to remove the dust on them.

Summarizing the popularity of BPO

You can sum up the reason behind BPO popularity as:

-         It gives you a wide spectrum of labor choice, where you can choose the cheapest cost of a specific talent you are seeking.

-         It will create extra time and gives the chance to re-distribute attention so that it one can pay more attention to the core, fundamentals and strategies of work.

-         It divides tasks logically according to the importance of each task and the person with capabilities to deal with them so that everybody can focus on what he/she is doing.

-         It allows companies to invest more in growing sectors like technology, thus it makes a better use of their money and investments.

]]> http://virtualassistanceservice.com/2009/07/india-as-an-outsourcing-port/feed/ 0 http://virtualassistanceservice.com/2009/07/important-tips-while-engaging-with-outsourcing-provider/ http://virtualassistanceservice.com/2009/07/important-tips-while-engaging-with-outsourcing-provider/#comments Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:42:17 +0000 Jordan http://virtualassistanceservice.com/2009/07/important-tips-while-engaging-with-outsourcing-provider/ With the growth in global connectivity there has been a greater degree of integration of geographies. It is not uncommon for companies to exploit local expertise from around the world to streamline their product cycle and optimize their costs. Another trend that has picked up over the last decade has been the idea of outsourcing the jobs. While it does help to have all the operations under your supervision, it is sometimes not feasible, especially if your business continues to grow.

Hence, many companies look to outsource some of their work. Typically, one may outsource the data entry jobs, accounting functions and sometimes even the software development of their designs to other firms that specialize in these domains. Outsourcing has benefited several companies and the results are there to see. Hence, you too may be tempted to outsource some of your work and make your business efficient. Though the decision is a good one, it must be implemented with caution.

Outsourcing has been one of the fastest growing markets in the last decade. Given the lucrative option, many people have jumped into the bandwagon to get a pie of this expanding market. Obviously, with so many players the market gets very competitive. Some firms have genuine edge over the others and they standout in the market. Some others that are not able to keep up with the pace may look to cut corners, hoodwink clients or deliver sub-standard solutions for lower rates. These are genuine problems that the industry faces today.

Hence the first point that you must look for in any outsourcing firm is their credibility and reputation. You must also look at their client base and if possible get in touch with the clients for references. Selecting a reliable firm for outsourcing your work should be your top priority.

Once you have your list of good firms to approach, you must start to correlate what they have to offer and what you need. Sometimes, it may be a simple job that you want to be outsourced, and you find sufficient service providers for the task. Sometimes it may be a specialized solution or even be a function that is expected to scale in the near future. Hence, you must look at the services the provider offers, their scale and ability to handle the task now and in future. You don’t want to land with a good provider who cannot serve you beyond a degree and you go through the whole process again.

Finally, the most important point to note is that if you do land with a good outsource service provider, stick with them. They understand your needs the best and have delivered goods in the past. There is no reason to switch such firms. There may be issues on rising costs, with longer term relations. In such cases, mutual negotiations are much better alternative than scouting for a replacement. Remember that even the outsource firms value their clients hence would be willing to negotiate the deals with you. Alternatively you could also look at making the firms your partners and execute the work in joint partnership. By sacrificing a part of the stake in the project, you can bring down the costs significantly.

In conclusion, outsourcing parts of your functioning to other firms is an excellent way of optimizing your business processes and your business can gain short term as well as long term benefits. However, before choosing your business partner, you must carry out due diligence.

Yet, with the spread of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) from the developed countries to the developing countries a new concern began to spread as well. That’s because outsourcing started only as giving minor tasks to offshore employees which will do more for less than their in-house colleagues. But this is not the rule any more.

Many companies found that there are many hidden talents in the poor countries that, if adopted, can be more outstanding than the talents present in their home country. By the time people in these poor countries began to understand this fact and gradually began to give extra care to their talents so that they became in an equal competition financially.

This made some economical experts uneasy. Tracing the records of big companies in the UK showed an increasing curve of depending on offshore employees in major fundamental tasks and projects. Statistically, following the mid-1990s till present, offshoring increased by 35% in manufacturing and 48% in services in the UK alone. However, most of this offshoring is still within the developing countries of the EU.

But the main concern about offshoring is that although it creates a lot of extra jobs world-wide, it causes a sever loss of jobs, especially domestic ones, in the home country. That’s because companies have found a new form of labor which can be more productive and cost-effective than that of the same country they are present in, so they prefer to stay in the competition and hire more employees to do more jobs with lower salaries than retaining few high-salary employees.

This raised another worry about the salaries of the employees in developed countries. More and more such employees become less agreeable to employers when they are compared to the other choices abroad. This is not very evident in the field of manufacture because it is still the main quality of developed countries and their workers, but it cannot be unnoticed in services which are preferred by default to be offshored be most companies around the world.

With the world-wide economic crisis, all employers suffer from decreasing wages (if not losing their jobs). This will make the loss more evident in case of developed countries whose employees are competed by offshored ones. It’s estimated that if things go on the same rhythm as they are concerning offshoring there will be a 2% decrease in the salaries in the next decade.

But as many experts are pessimistic about outsourcing, there are also many optimistic expectations. It’s a very good sign for the emerging trend of ‘working from home’ which was considered as a sweet dream in the past. If office employees are decreasing, there is an increasing number of home employees whom are not bounded by physical job requirements as having a desk or getting up early to catch the bus!

To sum it up, when considering outsourcing you should think of the loses and gains, not just one of them.

]]> http://virtualassistanceservice.com/2009/07/outsourcing-local-and-abroad-competitionoutsourcing-local-and-abroad-competition/feed/ 4 http://virtualassistanceservice.com/2009/07/why-look-at-help-desk-outsourcing/ http://virtualassistanceservice.com/2009/07/why-look-at-help-desk-outsourcing/#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:35:41 +0000 Jordan http://virtualassistanceservice.com/?p=139 The term Help Desk is pretty self explanatory. It is a place where your customers can approach for help and assistance – like customer support centers. Help desks are typically the first point of contact for any customer issues or request and consists of trained professionals that are best equipped to solve them. Sometimes, the issue may be beyond their level or expertise, in which case it is referred to other levels of support.

The help desk system is not a bunch of trained professionals sitting to address customer concerns. Over the years the business has evolved into a complex model with several layers and various software used to manage, track and control the operations. Among these the most popular one is the automatic answering services. It is common for customers to call the help desk and be greeted with a voice recording. The simple implementations help you locate the right department to address your issue. The more complex ones can actually provide you the information you seek and also help solve certain issues.

Other important solutions that are commonly used in the Help Desk industry include the call tracking; call monitoring, billing and related functions that are managed by single integrated software or a bunch of them. In short it is pretty clear that Help Desk operations are very intricate and complex. If you want to match these services by running an in-house division, it would cost you a lot and would be infeasible. Besides, the costs, you also need human resources to use and exploit the features in these software and actual agents working in answering your calls. Hence an excellent alternative for such functions is to outsource them.

The help desk outsourcing firms are professionally run, well managed with top class professionals trained to address various aspects of the help desk functions. Besides, you are assured of latest technology being used, best practices being employed and an overall high quality experience being provided to your customer.

The help desk outsourcing can be invaluable during peak call periods like introduction of a new service, launch of a new product, pre-sales campaigning, etc. This is another advantage of help desk outsourcing. You do not have to engage them always, you can do so only when you have a surge in help desk operations. Once the high call volumes reduce, you can switch back to your in-house departments. This is an important flexibility that you can exploit with outsourcing.

Help Desk support is one of the most vital non-core business functions in any organization dealing with large number of customers. Managing it in a professional and scalable manner is a tough ask for the business that really must focus on its main drivers. Help Desk Outsourcing can be an excellent option for such services.

It was outsourcing that gave them a third option and a new hope. Now they are able to hire more experts to ensure their networks are secure.

The best feature of outsourcing is what’s described by ‘actions, not words’. You can find many managers talking in meetings or conferences about how they did this and how they saved that. While actually a good manager, and consequently a good company, is the one focusing more on what number, markets and customers has to say. Hence, they can make better and balder decisions among which is outsourcing and offshoring.

So it’s not surprising to know how much money and time these companies saved, the thing which enabled them to focus more on the core and strategies.

Even more up-to-date companies are going with the global trend of specialization by outsourcing more specialized tasks than others. The very famous example is SEO as a part of web applications, the experts of which are highly required nowadays beside the mother category experts.

If you want to outsource something, it has to have one/all of these characters:

-         Complicity (like tasks dealing with many formulae or details).

-         Importance (like tasks that are important yet very time consuming).

-         Unpopular (like tasks that you simply don’t want to do!).

As you can outsource secretarial tasks or transcription requests, you can outsource your web security needs! It’s something like hiring a security guard to a building, you can be healthy enough to fight for your apartment in case someone attacks at night, but you need to sleep in order to be able to do a more fundamental task in your life at the morning, i.e. earning your living!

There are many countries ‘specialized’ in outsourcing like India, Russia and China. Considering India as an example (as it was on top of these countries according to a report released in January 2007 and again on 2008) we can summarize the expected benefits as follows:

-         India’s major investment today is IT.

-         There are a lot of skilled persons and talents waiting for a chance.

-         Most of the service, if not all, are less expensive.

-         Many offers to outsourcing countries are given by many competing Indians suppliers.

-         Many companies have gained experience in management and discipline.

-         Ability to do more tasks in less time.

-         Ability to work with the available resources.

-         IT development grows at a steady pace.

In general, part of your outsourcing success is to choose the right partner offshore. That’s an even harder decision to make than considering outsourcing in the first place because you have to make a choice that relieves part of your stress and gives you and your in-house employees some extra time to work on the project in hand. If you succeed in this, all partners including you, your in-house’s and outsourced will be winners, whether on the personal level (as each person will focus on a specific small task) or the team level.

What’s harder than reaching success is to maintain it. So you shouldn’t keep outsourcing out of your mind in case you are already managing a successful firm simply because you want to maintain that success. Such maintenance needs you to focus even more than you used to while your project was still growing.

In both cases, whether you are targeting success or maintaining it, you have to do some calculations for the costs and benefits of outsourcing in your case before you start finding a vendor or signing contracts. That’s in order not to find yourself in another trap of financial or time management. A thing which will consume your attention and thus makes the whole outsourcing in vain.

And even if that’s not the first time you use the outsourcing solution, you should do these considerations before each time you start a new project because even if they seem similar and carbon copied,  projects can differ widely when you reconsider them.

Another important thing to consider when choosing a partner is the ability and means to contact him at any time when needed. Whether you use the web, phones, faxes you have to ensure the other partner is fully oriented with this means of communication. Some projects might need video conferencing tools, so make sure you have them!

Let’s start with some questions and guidance, but no answers! You have to put the answers yourself to match your exact case:

Why outsourcing?

Not every task needs to be outsourced, and not every company needs outsourcing. Do you need someone to do your additional business service in order to let your employees focus more on the fundamentals of your project? Or do you need someone to help in the fundamentals for a reason?

Who can get benefit from outsourcing?

Are they owners of small, medium or large-sized business? Or does it depend on the amount of business you need to get done whether or not you have the number of qualified and available in-house employees that can do such job?

What’s expected from outsourcing?

Cost-effective solutions? Completing more tasks in less time? Saving in-house resources (like time, offices, and employees themselves) for more basic tasks?

How much will outsourcing be…

Less or more expensive compared to in-house solutions? Beneficial? Repetitive (i.e. the use of outsourcing repeats whether for similar tasks or variant tasks).

And last about your in-house employees, do you have employees who can…
Be skilful enough to complete the job? Be enthusiastic about the job as the outsourced who want to prove themselves are? Rearrange schedules and priorities to do the more tasks you need?

All these questions and highlights are part one of the decision, part two is to choose the right outsourced!

One good thing about outsourcing is that it gives you a wide spectrum of labor to choose from. To narrow such spectrum logically you have to go through some steps, like gathering as much information about your partner as possible. Whether that will be through search engines, personal referrals or ratings by vendors who has previously dealt with them before.

Also it’s important to know the exact field they worked in before. You may need someone to deal with your medical software for instance, so you can’t just go with anyone with previous experience in ‘software’ only with no specifications. That’s crucially important for industries with subdivisions which, though have a common base, aren’t related to each other much.

A customer service task is different from any other task to be outsourced. That’s because you can never have full control over the person you are outsourcing. This requires you to put in mind the risk of first-time-trying a new offshore employee. If you decide to go through it you have to put some very clear guidelines to deal with customers properly (whom are supposed to be always right) and make deadlines with the expected quality.

In addition, before signing a contract you have to make sure you have all the possible contacts of your outsourced employee. Whether it is email, fixed or mobile phone, fax, messenger or whatever means of communication you should be sure he/she’s reachable through them most of the time.

But after all, you can’t rely totally on someone you don’t personally know or have complete employer power over. Even if the outsourced seems efficient and the work seems fine you should put a ‘plan B’ for any reason that causes your dissatisfaction about the work. Plan B is no equivalent to doing the job yourself. But it’s just a ringing bell denoting all possibilities.