How Is Success Defined with an Outsourcing Agency?
The decision to outsource parts of your business operations is a significant first step. Next is the equally important task of defining what success looks like so clear objectives can be set and measuring those objectives can take place. According to Statista, business process outsourcing (BPO) will reach US $390 billion in 2024. With an experienced outsourcing agency like OSI by your side, you can tap into our expertise to help develop unique measurement practices for your business.
What Are Your Goals?
Before anyone starts working for you and your business, create clear, achievable objectives that can be measured and tracked. As with any business objective, they can change once work has begun, but if you start a new venture without setting goals, you’re asking for failure. Would you ask for capital from a bank or investor without a business plan? It’s doubtful, and this new partnership should be treated with the same amount of preparation.
What Metrics to Measure
The goals you come up with must be measurable; vague goals can’t be measured effectively and could hurt this new business relationship. Another thing to consider is measuring metrics that fully represent the work being completed. You’ll get faulty results if you are too heavily focused on one or two areas. Create a scorecard that can be standardized and used across each member of the outsourcing agency for fair and balanced measurements.
Service Quality
Service quality can be an all-encompassing category that needs guidelines placed around areas of your business where it’s needed the most. Here are some topics that may make the cut in your scorecard:
- Availability: During the workday, what is the percentage of time they are available to service clients versus offline or doing other duties?
- Accuracy: Are their answers accurate if a client asks questions about a product or service? Or are the orders they put through for a client correct to what the client was expecting?
- Interaction quality: Do the agents receive complaints or praise? In email communication, does the tone match the personality of the business?
- Surveys: With customer surveys, are there any areas that need improvement?
- Document and customer privacy: Customer information is highly regulated, so are the needed steps in place to protect that information? Have there been any documented mistakes?
How important is service quality? Extremely important. A recent HubSpot report found that 93 percent of customers will make repeat purchases with companies that offer excellent customer service.
Cost Management
You could be looking at the overall costs associated with hiring an outsourcing agency and the cost efficiency of the employees in terms of the services they are providing. Nevertheless, here are some examples of what you could track on the scorecard:
- Increased revenue
- Discounted pricing
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Operating expenses
Operational Efficiency
According to Salesforce, 80 percent of customers now consider the experience a company provides to be as important as its products and services. It’s one thing to do a job, but is the job being done well and up to the standards of the business they represent? That’s a question for any employee, not just for an outsourcing agency, so you may already have some metrics that can be used for these purposes:
- On-time delivery
- Response times
- Productivity
Strategy and Growth
Getting your outsourcing operation off the ground is just the beginning. How you strategize for future stages will be critical to your growth potential. By building milestones, you can plan for potential successes and how you will tackle any challenges that come your way. With a scorecard and coupling that with your strategy and growth potential, you’ll quickly see where you stand at any given time.
Regular ROI Audit
The scorecards and goals create a more efficient and effective ROI calculation. If done correctly, ROI, or return on investment, gives you exact returns on your initial and ongoing investments. For instance, if you initially invested US $60,000 towards your new business venture, but after a year, you profited US $100,000, would that ROI meet the standards or goals you set out?
Make Clear Objectives When Engaging with an Outsourcing Agency
When engaging with an outsourcing agency, it’s beneficial to set some internal goals but lean into the experience of your new partner to help iron out any lingering questions. OSI is your trusted partner in nearshore or offshore outsourcing. We have qualified individuals ready to help in any business operations you need.
Contact us today, and let’s grow a successful partnership together.
