Nearly 70% of businesses now turn to Business Process Outsourcing for one or multiple of their business functions. Sometimes these processes are outsourced to local New Zealand businesses. However more and more New Zealand businesses are now opting to look beyond our boarding to find more efficient solutions. There are many businesses leveraging lower costs in countries like India, Sri Lanka or Eastern Europe.
So, you already know what outsourcing is and what its advantages are, right? Here’s a shortlist of business functions that are already being outsourced by other businesses. Maybe even by your competitors?
Below, you’ll see a potent little list of the top 6 business functions which are most commonly outsourced to 3rd party providers such as SmartStaff. We’ve kept it short and sweet, this way you can select the most applicable (and realistic) business tasks your business can easily start outsourcing today!
1. Website Design
Outsourcing your business’s website design function will save you the cost of hiring an individual designer or team of designers. This allows you to spend the savings on other, more important core business functions such as lead generation, marketing or product development. Web design is one of the most commonly outsourced business functions with up to 50% of companies already outsourcing this task.
2. Accounting / Bookkeeping / Payroll
Accounting is second on the list because just like web design, it’s commonly outsourced already – and for good reason! In essence, if you’re not an accountant yourself or don’t have a good grasp on the processes and compliance standards, your company needs to meet here in New Zealand, it should be outsourced. Unless your business is fairly large, it’s actually much more efficient to hire a reputable New Zealand based company like Accountsdept to carry out this work. These guys are already handling such tasks for various organisations. This creates efficiency and in turn, lower costs. We like that and we’re sure you will too!
3. IT & Tech
Almost all businesses these days, including yours, have substantial IT requirements. The size of the IT outsourcing market globally reached 92.5 billion USD between 2000-2019 according to Statista. If your business currently has no IT department, or Jeff from accounts isn’t working out very well as your part-time IT guy, an outsourced team can easily take care of all of your IT functions. This would probably include infrastructure, help desk, data storage and software development. These functions are often outsourced overseas as many Asian countries specialised in IT and can perform these functions to a high level for your business. Most importantly, at a fraction of the cost.
4. Administrative Tasks (Virtual Assistants)
VA’s are a popular and realistic option for any New Zealand business these days, particularly for solopreneurs and entrepreneurs operating from a home office. Virtual assistants can handle a wide variety of tasks for you such as email management, customer service, scheduling, even social media posting. Freeing up your time by delegating mundane and repetitive tasks is the goal here. Outsourcing a VA can be one of the easiest and cost-effective ways of outsourcing. Hiring a VA offshore is the most cost-effective way to go due to very high local hourly rates for NZ based VA services.
5. Human Resources
Human Resources encompass all business functions relating to hiring, training or managing your team. It’s a very important part of your business. If managed well, your team will feel valued, fulfilled and happy in their work. This results in a more productive and efficient team. If handled badly, it can have a very negative effect on your business and can even make it difficult to recruit new staff. NZ businesses commonly outsource the recruitment component of HR to local recruitment companies. There are also some great HR software products out there nowadays which can help your HR department improve its performance. Lastly, if you decide to outsource or recruit virtual staff based overseas, you’ll avoid the hassle and expense of managing a team here in NZ. If you choose the right outsourcing company, the HR costs are built into the hourly rate. You won’t even need to give them office space, a desk or a laptop. We like that!
6. Sales Assistants
Sales staff and business development managers should be spending their time doing just that, selling or developing new business. But often they’re bogged down in the office preparing quotes, checking and sending emails, processing production orders etc. These things prevent them from spending time on their core task. Similar to a VA’s assisting a business owner or CEO, a good sales assistant will perform a wide range of back-office tasks on behalf of your local sales team. Not only does this collaboration allow your staff to drum up more business, but we’ve also had companies tell us their staff are happier in their work because they’re not having to do the mind-numbing tasks required to process sales or orders.
There are many more business functions you can outsource. These are some great ones to start with if you are new to outsourcing, after all, you can take solace knowing these business functions are so commonly outsourced by other New Zealand businesses!
Offshoring is also a great option to keep in mind, particularly if you can find a New Zealand owned outsourcing business leveraging from low costs. This will reduce some of the potential risks commonly associated with offshoring such as language and cultural differences. If you were to get the same output or better while more than halving the cost, you’d be happy right?
