Back office functions can be time-consuming. Tasks like payroll, manual data entry, and research can eat up the time of your employees. Instead of burdening your team with additional tasks, you can just consider outsourcing them to a third-party provider. Back office outsourcing provides an opportunity for your company to save some costs by partnering with a back-office support company.
There are many benefits of back-office outsourcing. Aside from access to trained and knowledgeable talents, you can also hire the outsourcing company for a more affordable cost than hiring additional employees. Finally, by outsourcing, you can focus on more value-adding tasks and initiatives.
To ensure quality and a positive return on investment, finding the right back office support company is vital. There are many back-office support providers to choose from. How do you find the right one for your business? Here is a short guide on finding an outsourcing company for your back office functions.
Select partners that provide multiple services
When choosing a business process outsourcing partner, the first thing to consider is the range and variety of services the partner can provide. Some administrative outsourcing companies perform only manual data entry tasks. They are very suitable for outsourcing. You can save money on these activities, but they may not be able to handle payroll and accounting.
Multi-service partners must be able to tap into a wealth of talent and must have the resources to recruit and train talent in all disciplines; These are networking opportunities that companies should take advantage of. Additionally, partnering with back office outsourcing companies with multidisciplinary capabilities can open up new opportunities for your business that have not been discovered or overlooked before.
Choose a partner with flexibility
Some organizations need logistics outsourcing month after year. For others, the job requirements are flexible, so choosing a partner who can provide some flexibility is also very important. Some business process outsourcing companies use tiered contracts that offer price incentives to process large amounts of data. Still, these contracts generally translate into fines within a few months for low transaction volumes.
Ultimately, outsourcing your back office processes should be a time and resource-saving solution, not a problem. Consistent pricing and flexibility are two signs that partner companies value their business and are willing to build long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with them.
Choose a partner that can grow with you
Smaller back office companies may offer more attractive pricing options, but what if your business grows 50% over the next year, and you can’t handle the growing workload? To keep things running smoothly as you grow, you need to choose an appropriately sized partner and bring available resources with you to expand. If your outsourcing partners use 50% of your resources to serve just your business, then your growth can cause them a crisis. This is a useless arrangement.
Choose a communicative partner
Effective communication is obviously very important in business relationships, especially with back office outsourcing partners. Some organizations need a partner who communicates with them every day, while others want to automate the process as much as possible to keep communication to a minimum if there is no problem to solve. The most important thing here is to find a provider that can meet your needs: someone is always there when you need them, respects your time, and checks from time to time if you have everything you need.
Choose partners that comply with information security rules
Back office outsourcing companies will process valuable data about their employees and customers. In today’s age of ever-increasing fraud and data breaches, you need to hire a trusted outsourcing partner. The administrative outsourcing company must establish and maintain an Information Security Management System (ISMS) and associated certifications to demonstrate that it continues to comply with information security best practices. The most widely used ISMS standard in the world is ISO / IEC 27001.
Data breaches can cost your organization millions of dollars, so when outsourcing involves sharing personal data, make sure you understand your responsibilities.
