Category Archives: Outsourcing Articles

You would be surprised at the kind of companies we get applying to be listed on our outsourcing directory. Many of the companies have their assistants fill out the form to get listed with us. There are spelling mistakes galore, capitalization mistakes, notes sections which leave you in the dark about what the company actually does, omitted contact people (no contact person mentioned), websites that don’t function, and other problems. Many companies don’t even put themselves in the right category. They will say Data Entry when they focus more on call center services.

What companies in India don’t realize is that Americans are watching every detail. If Americans see even one spelling mistake, they will assume you are careless. You can explain that you used your fresher to fill out the form and that your company really is careful, and that the form filler was new, etc. But, nobody will buy that. American companies might still use your company if you are dirt cheap. But, if you want to gain loyalty, respect and make good money, you need to clean up your act.

Your website needs to load within four seconds at the longest and have complete information about your company, what they do, how they can be reached, etc. These days sites need to be mobile friendly.

You need to have people answer the phone who announce the company’s name clearly, speak clearly, and who can answer questions.

You need to have experienced people doing the work who are carefully managed and who meet deadlines and get the work done according to specification. Nobody respects late work.

Most outsourcing companies out there do not have their act together. If you want to succeed in the future, concentrate more on being put together and you might get more work than you can handle in the long run.

How fast can someone extract an answer from your company? It is like pulling teeth dealing with you? There are different ways to get information from a company. You can call and try to get ahold of the right person. Or you can email. Calling gets an immediate result if you are lucky, but more be aggravating if you have to talk to a dummy who puts you on hold only to be disconnected which is the standard way of doing business in India.

On the other hand. sometimes I email people to get information from them. The behavior I see varies extremely, and I judge overseas companies partly based on how good their phone manner is and how fast they get back to me.

Excellent Behavior
Some companies will respond to an email within minutes and give detailed answers to all questions. If I ask for rates, they’ll give all of the breakdowns for various types of services and correponding rates based on levels of experience of their workers, etc. Over the phone, a good company will have a rep announce his personal name and the company name. The rep will NOT put you on hold without permission and will give good recommendations as to who the ideal contact person is for your question.

Acceptable Behavior
An acceptable company will get back to me within 48 hours by email and answer my question. How much do you charge for Data Entry work? We charge $2,80 to $4.30 per hour depending on the job. A simple question and an answer that gives you the range of possibilities. Over the phone, such a company would have reps who could conduct an intelligent conversation and get questions answered.

Evasive Behavior
Unfortunately, in many types of businesses, there are many evasive types. I’m not sure how an evasive person can hope to catch clients, but then I’m not sure what is going through their head. If I email them asking for rates, they email me back asking twenty questions regarding the nature of work necessary. I have to put in more work than they do just to get some simple infromation. If I’m emailing 100 companies for the same rate, I’m going to hire the company that gave me the information willingly and quickly, and not to an evasive company who makes me work for basic pricing. Over the phone, evasive companies don’t like to tell you anything. They prefer to make you go to the trouble to make an appointment to speak with a contact person. It is four times the work trying to deal with evasive people, but at least they talk to you.

Bad Behavior
There are various types of bad BPO behavior. Answering the phone with a dull “hello” is typical for Indians. Putting people on hold without permission only to have someone else answer the phone saying “hello” only to be transfered again. You’ll hear three dull hello’s, one after the other and will have to ask who you are speaking to. Then, instead of answering, they will ask who you are, then you ask again who you are speaking to only to be asked to repeat who you are. How exasperating — Indians really have a bad attitude over the phone and their bad attitude is part of the reason they live in poverty. If you ask for a rate, the answer is usually, “Manager not here, call back later” — and then they hang up on you. Maybe you’ll get a manager and maybe you won’t, but you won’t be treated like a valuable person. If you email a bad BPO, you will either not get a response, or get a response five days later, or get a response without an answer to your question. My suggestion to bad BPO operations is to learn to train your workers to answer the phone gracefully, ask permission to transfer people, and try to learn to answer questions. Additionally, state your name when you answer the phone so people don’t have to ask.

Back when I was starting my web business, people kept telling me to do it like the other companies. I was told not to have a phone number and to just have a form. I disagreed with that logic as I like to keep it personal. As a directory owner, I get to see how others do in business and how following trends works out.

People like my business because we keep it personal and because we offer high quality information with just a simple phone call or email without even needing to be transfered. It is like an instant source of valuable information that helps others survive in their businesses. Other companies make you jump through hoops just to get simple questions answered.

Some of the companies on my directory that only have a form as their sole contact method have a habit of going out of business very quickly. I think it is partly due to their attitude of not wanting to talk to people.

Honestly, to succeed in business is hard, but if you master the art of phone communication, being helpful, and getting work done correctly and on time, you have a real chance as the competition can’t handle those four things.

So, make an attempt to make your business more personal and learn the art of American small talk. It is so important, especially if you deal with Americans!

Too much of outsourcing follows the model of choosing an unreliable company and relying exclusively on them. This leads to you not getting what you want, and them getting fired. Many companies are swift enough to con you into signing a contract. They’ll be very nice to you and tell you what you want to hear until you sign a contract obligating you to a certain amount of money per month for an ambiguous quality and quantity of service normally measured in hours.

You have no idea if they put in the required hours, or if they gave quality work during those hours. Many companies will give you their worst guy who is completely unqualified, or cheat you out of the amount of hours you paid for. Even if you hire a reputable company, if they give you the wrong worker, your project is finished. If a company hires purely reliable workers, it doesn’t matter as much who you get. But, most companies hire 30% decent employees and the rest are disasters — at least in most outsourcing companies I have dealt with. It is so bad, that you might consider hiring in-house people to help you out — unless you can find reliable help overseas. There are good people, but how to find them? So, what’s my solution?

Choosing Workers
What if outsourcing houses offered you the right to choose your own workers on an online module? What if you could sample their work, read their resumes, and communicate with them on your own without needing to involve a busy manager in setting up an uptight appointment. What if it were like a dating site with photos of the workers, and information about the types of projects they had done and wanted to do along with their employment history at the company. Most outsourcing companies have employees coming and going every several months. If you have a serious project, you need someone who has a track record, and dumping your job every three months is exactly the type of track record I want to avoid.

Choosing Deadlines
What if you can submit job descriptions online for bids, including deadlines and detailed specifications. You could specify who at the company is to do the job, how it is to be done, and how fast.

Rapid Response
The average outsourcing company takes around 48 hours to answer an email. But, what if there were companies that made it a point to get back to people within minutes? You could get your project moving in a flash. If the workers you chose would personally get back to you within minutes, or if they were off duty then within hours, even if they were at home — wouldn’t that be amazing?

Quality Monitoring
What if you and a project manager could regularly monitor the quality of the work being done. At most companies, the work is a deeply guarded mystery enshrowded by a veil of secrecy. You never hear where they are in the project or how it is going. Finally after far too much waiting you get the finished product – a bunch of code filled with so many bugs you can’t possibly use it. You are far behind schedule and handed a pile of junk after the salesman assured you that you would be fine if you would only sign the contract. But, what if you could check on the work daily, and what if you received an email with progress daily even if nothing had been done? At least you would be informed.

Summary
The key to automated outsourcing is partly that people are cooperative (which rarely happens in real life) and get back to you quickly. The second key is that you can choose who you use and how fast things get done even if you have to pay extra. I like being in control of my projects, don’t you?

In America, the debate over outsourcing has raged on for decades. Americans are outraged that their jobs are outsourced overseas; while companies are outraged that they can’t find suitable labor resources at a sustainable rate in America. So, who is right, who is wrong and why?

What goes up must come down
When America loses jobs, it is normally because there are not enough quality people available to do those jobs. Many manufacturing jobs went to China, Honduras, Vietnam and other countries simply because labor was so expensive, unreliable, and temperamental in the United States. Additionally, labor unions made it cost prohibitive to manufacture automobiles in the United States which nearly put many American car manufacturers out of business. For decades there were endless disputes between labor and management which were very disturbing and costly. Many manufacturers decided it would be easier to relocate somewhere where people actually wanted to work without all the hostility. However, despite tens of millions of American jobs being outsourced overseas, unemployment has been generally 5-10% over the years. Additionally, we are so short of labor, that we rely on a constant influx of Latin Americans and other immigrants to help do all types of jobs. America has a labor shortage, and no matter how many jobs are offshored, there will still be a labor shortage. Additionally, jobs sent overseas gain American currency as payment, and that payment comes back to us in the form of purchases of agricultural exports, toiletries, and other products. If you visit India, everything in their small stores seems to be made in America — you’ll recognize Tide, Head and Shoulders, Snickers and hundreds of other brand names.

If America starts really hurting…
Americans often want manufacturing to come back to the states. What they don’t realize is that for economic conditions to be ripe for manufacturing to come back, our labor rate would have to come down to $3 per hour. America would have to be in a permanent economic depression for labor rates to ever be that low. With the recent mass influx of Latin Americans into the United States, labor rates have been going down. Hispanics have a higher birth rate than Anglos and normally do labor intensive jobs which means that future labor rates in the U.S. will be very low as we will have a huge labor pool of Hispanics. Additionally, with technology and robotics becoming so developed in America, we will be able to compete with China for the first time in recent history. Chinese workers are not as efficient as American workers, and lack the robotics to help them decrease labor costs. It seems clear to me that tech-aided manufacturing is already making a comeback in the United States and could continue to prosper as labor rates in China rise.

What about programming jobs?
It is very difficult to find a programmer in the U.S. Most programmers are overloaded and there is a vast shortage of qualified programmers in America and overseas. It is common for programmers to leave jobs undone as other jobs come onto their plate. You might feel that is irresponsible, and you are correct. But, the work ethic and integrity today is not like it was years ago. This is part of the reason jobs are outsourced to India. Conversely, the level of responsibility or quality of work in India is dismal. There are some good programmers, but nine out of ten are not. Hourly rates and availability are where India can really compete against the U.S. After you factor in how little they get done per hour, and how much of the work is so sloppy that it needs to be completely redone — it no longer looks like a bargain.

Americans need to compete
Americans feel entitled to make a huge salary. Additionally, many Americans have a real attitude problem, ego, and are hard to manage. People in India are happy to work for less. An IT job is their ticket out of slums so miserable, you wouldn’t be able to stand even walking through one. When you see the level of desperation in India, you will see how Americans need to be a little more motivated to compete.

Call center jobs went to India and took a U-turn
Americans are always resentful that so many call center jobs went to India. Then Americans were once again dismayed that the quality of the call center employees in India really horrifying. The Indians got their karmic payback and most of their call center work was redirected to the Philippines. Even companies in India often outsource their call center work to Manila as the quality of the reps and the clarity of their English is so much better. Is it fair that Indian jobs are being outsourced to the Philippines? I don’t hear Indians wailing about this type of thing. They are too busy finding other ingenious ways of taking “our” jobs.

There is no “our”
There is no such thing as an American job. The job belongs to the employer. If an employer hires lousy workers, they will soon lose their business. In real life a company cannot just outsource any job wherever they want. They have to be very particular about the quality of the work being done. If the work is terrible, they lose a very expensive client and their reputation.

Does anyone want to work?
Ironically, I have been trying to outsource some call center work myself. However, nobody is emailing me back. I offered to pay more than their fee, but wanted to interview the workers myself just to make sure they were good. I guess people want me to sign a year long contract and hope for the best when it comes to figuring out which rep I get. Well, I am not going to guess anymore. I’m doing the work myself and automizing the rest. Now, “American” jobs are being done by an auto-caller. I think that my personal story is ironic — foreigners don’t even care if they get “our” jobs, and I don’t see any Americans begging to do my lousy calls either. In reality, it seems that nobody wants to work. No wonder companies outsource overseas. You can get someone who doesn’t want to work at a quarter of the price.

According to Robert Handfield’s “A brief history of Outsourcing”, outsourcing was not formally used as a business strategy until the year 1989. Outsourcing is the delegation of particular tasks or projects to an outside company or consultant. These days, outsourcing is very popular and standard, especially for large corporations who have global networks of skilled people ready to assist.

In the past, it was considered not advisable for companies to outsource critical tasks or core competencies. However, now many companies are doing exactly that. In my experience, smart companies in the United States do not outsource purely to save money. They divide their workload into segments or components. They find which tasks are the least critical and outsource only those. Saving money on important tasks can get you into trouble and can backfire as a strategy if the provider company doesn’t get the job done correctly and on time as that can cost you a client.

Traditionally, companies outsourced tasks they just couldn’t handle themselves. Publishers outsourced composition, printing, and fulfillment regularly. Outsourcing support services didn’t start appearing until the 1990’s with tasks such as Human Resources, Data Processing, Mail Distribution, Programming, Security, etc.

Outsourcing is a great strategy to deal with the problem of fluctuating demand. If your business is sometimes very busy and other times very slow, you can decrease your permanent employees and hire other companies to handle your overflow. However, the real costs for outsourcing are deceptive. Many companies quote particular rates, but the real price for them to get the job done within particular time constraints are hidden as many companies do not guarantee delivery times.

Outsourcing can also reduce training time. If there are certain tasks you want to focus on, then you can train people for those. You can outsource other tasks which are not worth training your own people to do. Many small businesses engage in multi-tasking and have dozens of tasks to do. New and even old employees typically only want to do two or three of the dozens of tasks, so to get them done it is often easier to find an outside consultant.

Is it better to do everything yourself at varying levels of competency or to hire twenty consultants who are each experts in their niche field? This is a question only you can answer. But, outsourcing to freelancers, overseas BPO’s or domestic companies will give you some insight into the quality of what you are paying for.

In today’s world, outsourcing could be for various reasons. Searching the world to find the best people to give you the best results is one of the reasons for outsourcing. Cost effectiveness is another. Overflow management will continue to be a reason as well. Strategic partnerships are a standard business practice among larger companies and corporations. The problem is that for smaller companies, it is hard to find reliable service providers as the high quality providers tend to be monopolized by larger outfits. So, as a small business owner, blindly mimicking the tactics of the big boys is not an effective strategy. You need to research companies one by one and sample their work to see who is a real strategic asset for you and who is just an unreliable buffoon!

There are different models for outsourcing. Big companies dominate this arena and often open up their own overseas offices or partner with others who have a reputable office overseas. Other companies hire individual freelancers domestically or overseas. It is also common for American or British companies to hire BPO companies in India, The Philippines, Romania or Africa to do a variety of tasks. Many BPO companies specialize in one type of task such as call center work while others can do anything from telemarketing to payment processing, bookkeeping, ecommerce set up and PHP programming.

The way outsourcing typically works is that a company in an industrialized country will need help getting some repetetive work done. They will often source companies overseas who can do the work for a fraction of the price domestically. Sometimes a quote will be given for a particular job while other times a long term service contract will be set up. Call centers often want you to commit to use a single rep for a period of one year while others will lease you an employee on a day by day basis. Programming houses typically charge per hour, but they can also bid for finished projects. The problem is that the specifications need to be very clear if someone is bidding on a completed project, and what if there are bugs in the program or if something doesn’t function correctly?

As with any other business arrangement, it is much easier if you know the people you are working with. If you have gotten reliable results from them for a year and you know the staff members personally, you are much safer with them than with a stranger regardless of what the contract says. A contract is only a piece of cyber-paper and doesn’t specify how good the “quality” will be. And if your contract is violated, how can you possibly enforce it if the company you are using is in Mumbai?