Being Aware in Business & BPO (Business Process Outsourcing)
I wrote a previous blog article about being aware in business. You really need to be a Zen Monk to be good at business. You need to have a still and watchful mind that notices everything. You need to notice behavioral traits in others. If you can spot bad behavior or signs of risky character traits in others EARLY, then you can save yourself a lot of grief in business. But, what I have been thinking about recently is more tactical.
Multiple approaches to getting tasks accomplished
Let’s say that you have a particular set of tasks or BPO business processes to do. You might have one way of doing those tasks. Perhaps there might be other ways of doing those tasks that you thought of. But, what if you meditate on this business process and come up with ten ways to approach the tasks at hand? The issue is that in business, your workload varies over time, and your labor resources vary too. It is expensive in terms of time to interview lots of people just to fill one position, and then potentially have that person quit or get fired. One interesting way to solve this situation is to have a “fluid system” for business process outsourcing (BPO Outsourcing).
What if you have what I could term as a BPO overflow tank?
Your car has an overflow container for radiator fluids, why doesn’t your business? Let’s say that you handle most of your work in house, but you always have a certain percentage of particular tasks outsourced to a BPO company. Let’s say that according to your business model, 20-70% of your outgoing call work is outsourced, and the rest is done in house. That buys you tremendous flexibility. The outsourced call center work might cost you more in labor, but you don’t need to interview people, etc. That buys you time. You can delay your interviews until you have more time in your management schedule. You can be more selective about who you hire. You can fire someone more easily who is not capable or who is slacking off. Having a reliable, tried and tested overflow system for handling your business processes is a great idea. Keeping that system always running ensures that it will run more reliably as well.
There are other solutions too.
If you want to outsource call center work, there are auto-call systems that you can use online that can send messages to clients. You can have a mass email system to communicate with mass amounts of clients. You can even auto-text them. You could devise a system where you would reduce the quantity of outgoing calls under certain business circumstances so you could gracefully adjust to changing workloads. Managing labor resources is fascinating and more complicated than you think! So, try to increase your awareness and think of more innovative ways you can solve problems. Write these solutions down and compare them. Don’t be afraid to use more than one system simultaneously!
You might also like:
Are you aware in business?
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/06/18/are-you-aware-in-business/
Paying attention to the long range effects of business decisions
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/06/13/paying-attention-to-the-long-range-effects-of-business-decisions/