Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) is a growing resource for companies that has become more popular in recent years. The right BPO can help reduce overhead costs and streamline customer service and other key business operations, letting companies stay nimble. It is particularly useful when companies are growing.
When companies leverage Business Processing Outsourcing properly, it can help them scale up by making any associated staffing issues easy, flexible and affordable.
BPO and Scaling Your Business
As the name suggests, Business Processing Outsourcing is a practice that lets companies outsource key operations. BPO is useful in a variety of contexts, but perhaps never more so than when a company is looking to scale.
Specifically, BPO can help companies scale up in three ways:
Reduce Costs
Labour costs are usually the biggest costs for any business. For example, 60-70% of a contact centre’s overhead is the cost of its agents. Full time employees require salary and benefits, along with other payroll and related tax costs. And of course, finding and training new staff is an extra burden for companies that are trying to scale.
Utilizing BPO, on the other hand, allows you to rapidly increase your workforce, without any of the hassle or expense of HR. With BPO, you don’t have to invest time, energy or money on additional staffing.
For example, as your company grows, your customer base likely will as well. More customers mean more customer service. Choosing a BPO provider that can help you easily scale up your customer service means you’ll be ready as your company grows.
Leverage Experts
Just because BPO saves you money on staffing, that doesn’t mean that you’ll be getting cheap, unreliable service. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. BPO lets you access trained staff who are already experts in their field.
When you use BPO to fuel your growth, you don’t need to build out new systems, software and processes. For instance, perhaps you need to offer your growing user base more technical support. With BPO, you don’t need to invest in building your own ITIL framework, since there are already highly developed options available.
Or maybe you’re ready to grow your social media presence, but you don’t have the budget for a full marketing team. Using BPO can let experts manage your digital footprint at a fraction of the cost, while still maintaining your brand’s online image perfectly.
Stay Flexible
It’s never been more important to stay flexible. This is especially true if you are a seasonal business, or if you often take on special projects. Some companies don’t just need to scale up. They need to be able to grow and reduce staff often, which can be an HR nightmare.
This is where BPO really shines. Again, with BPO you’re not responsible for hiring, training and laying off staff directly. This makes it much easier to be responsive, as well as to plan ahead and budget for upcoming boom and bust cycles.
When you outsource the right operations, you can leverage outside help as needed, while you let your core team focus on what they do best. In fact, the right BPO can also help with strategic planning, ensure that scaling up can be as effortless and straightforward as possible. If you’re trying to grow your company, business process outsourcing just makes sense.