“For small businesses, every dollar counts as they work to grow and remain competitive. It can often feel like a tightrope walk between reducing costs, generating ROI, and allocating budget for future expansion. Although it may sound too good to be true, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) to the Philippines is an excellent way for small businesses to accomplish these goals and set up a partnership that they can scale with for years to come,” says Ralf Ellspermann, CEO of PITON-Global, an award-winning outsourcing provider in Manila, Philippines.
Historically, companies have outsourced primarily to cut costs, but increasingly, it has also been to gain access to skilled expertise, maintain flexible staffing needs, increase efficiency, and ultimately generate more profit.
Although there is a multitude of ways outsourcing can benefit small businesses, let’s look at the top five.
Customer Experience
One of the biggest benefits of partnering with a leading BPO in the Philippines is outsourcing Customer Experience (CX) processes. CX is defined as the sum of every point of contact between your business and the customer. Customer relationship management (CRM) is crucial to CX solutions and customer service providers in the Philippines can utilize CRM to track interactions with customers, internal communication, marketing campaigns, notes on customer needs, and information on past transactions. They can also utilize artificial intelligence to automate phone calls and reduce wait times.
Lead Generation
Another great use of BPO vendors in the Philippines is for lead generation. B2C lead generation in the Philippines can be used to reduce costs and increase your bottom line by utilizing highly skilled agents for lead generation, which includes any type of marketing that generates sales-ready leads for your business, including social media ad campaigns, paid search engine marketing, email or direct mail campaigns, webinars, and more. Account-based marketing is a specific type of lead generation that targets high-value accounts with personalized outreach often through an account manager or B2B telemarketer. These solutions can help increase sales, customer loyalty, and ROI.
Marketing and Sales
One way to help grow your small business is by outsourcing marketing and sales functions to the Philippines. This can help improve ROI and increase sales by specifically targeting potential customers according to their current activities, interests, and buying patterns. These vendors can also assist with social listening and monitoring to identify trends that can inform your marketing strategy, such as which advertisements or campaigns are working best. They can also be employed to power your omnichannel customer experiences, providing seamless and consistent interactions across multiple channels including website chat, e-mail, phone, SMS, and social media, which is critical in today’s digital communications age. Importantly, multilingual call center staffing for sales, sales support, or CX support can be as much as 40-50% less using a premium BPO provider such as PITON-Global in the Philippines.
Accounting
Management of accounting functions including accounts receivable, accounts payable, credit card processing, and Billing & Invoicing is another process that can be effectively outsourced. BPO partners in the Philippines can take on your bookkeeping, data entry, and financial reporting functions to free up your time for more critical activities. And because they handle sensitive accounting tasks, all BPOs in the Philippines are required to adhere to strict standards for security, compliance, and confidentiality. They can also provide business intelligence solutions by allowing you to always monitor your cash flows, so you know when receivables are being paid and what inventory is available.
IT Support
Outsourcing IT functions has grown significantly in the last decade as more experienced IT professionals enter the outsourcing workforce in the Philippines. This includes everything from handling all the day-to-day IT support needs, from desktop and laptop support to network maintenance, to providing around-the-clock customer support for your business so you don’t have to hire a full-time IT employee. They can assist with any emergency issues that may arise, as well as catch any potential problems before they become serious issues. You can quite literally create a virtual IT department to handle all your technology needs, allowing you to focus on growing your business instead of maintaining systems or hiring additional employees.
“For small businesses, using an industry-leading business process outsourcing provider in the Philippines to handle one – or many – of your business processes will help you contain costs, increase ROI, and ultimately, compete on a larger scale,” says Ellspermann.