Increase quality and efficiency

Of all the challenges of growing a business, one of the most difficult to solve is quality. That’s true whether you staff up locally or you look abroad for your talent, but it’s tempting to think that quality is bound to suffer more if you offshore. (We’ve all experienced terrible offshore customer support and telemarketing.)

But the truth is, done right, offshoring can actually improve your quality and efficiency. To understand how and why, you first need to understand the difference between what MicroSourcing does and what you’re probably thinking of when you think about offshoring.

You retain full control

When most people talk about offshoring, they’re talking about traditional Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). That’s probably what you’re imagining too.

But that’s not what MicroSourcing does; we’re not a traditional BPO.

With a traditional BPO, you hand over all control of your offshore team, and you have no say in who’s hired, how they’re trained, their conditions, the quality of their work or the offshore organizational culture. That’s where all those nightmare telemarketing scenarios are born.

Our approach to offshoring is totally different. Under our model, your offshore team is all yours – you choose them, and you don’t share them with other companies. You make all the decisions, exactly as you do for your team at home. And you treat them exactly as you do your teams at home. What you don’t have to worry about is the support services side of things – premises, recruitment, HR, labor laws, IT, payroll, security, support, etc. We handle all of that.

This means you can train your offshore team to the same standard of expertise as your local team, and you can monitor and provide feedback on their performance, just as you do at home. You can set and monitor deadlines, design and monitor work practices, and take on board staff and customer feedback about those deadlines and work practices. You can visit your offshore team and dedicate an onshore champion to focus on them.

And you have full control over performance management. Everything’s open and accessible, so when there’s a performance problem, you’re not dealing with a black box. You can easily identify and address the problem.

None of this happens with traditional Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), because there’s an inherent conflict of interest. Traditional BPOs are paid based on output, so there’s a natural incentive to achieve a contractually acceptable result at the lowest possible cost. Tenured employees get replaced by cheaper fresh hires, investments in IT upgrades get postponed and providers even manipulate performance metrics to show the best possible reports.

We’ll guide you with proven best practices

When you’re actively growing and pivoting, it can be incredibly difficult to follow best practices. Your resources are stretched thin, and you rarely have all the specialists in-house to be entirely confident you’re doing all the right things when it comes to data security, performance management, staff training and talent development.

With MicroSourcing, you have expert support in all of these areas. We do have the experts in-house, and we’ll work proactively with you to share our expertise and ensure these processes are all smoothly set up.

Loyal, honest and hard-working staff

Filipinos are renowned for their loyalty and honesty, and for holding themselves accountable to their commitments. They value their jobs highly and tend to stay with good employers for longer than the average American or Australian employee.

This is partly due to the country’s culture of customer service excellence (discussed below), and partly due to the fact that they recognize the value Western organizations bring to their communities.

“They’re very adaptable and the culture itself is a very personable, positive culture. The people are really quite affectionate, there’s strong emotion and they connect in well with both your business and your brand… and the work ethic is terrific. They will, with clear expectations and clear guidance set, work extremely hard.”

Dan Hastings, Oaks Hotels CFO & MicroSourcing client

Whatever the cause, it’s good news for your business. It means your offshore team will actually care about the outcomes of their work. They’ll work harder, stay longer and be more committed to continuous improvement.

The Philippines revolves around customer service

Hospitality is a big part of the Philippines’ economy, so most existing industries are customer service oriented. Filipinos place great importance on understanding and accommodating their customers, because it’s an integral part of their culture. They call it ‘a culture of customer service excellence’.

What’s more, large, multinational American and Australian companies have invested in customer service personnel and training for decades. So the labor market is rich in highly skilled talent.

You’re not distracted by support services

Because we handle the premises for your offshore team, all labor law compliance, all recruitment, HR and payroll, all IT and support, and everything else on the operational side, you’re not continually distracted by it.

This means you’re better able to concentrate on supporting your team to produce top quality work, in a timely, cost-effective manner.

Likewise, you’re not distracted or hamstrung by the costs associated with those operational considerations. So you can afford to invest the time and resources into training up your offshore team to make them every bit as good as your onshore team.

You benefit from our big-business infrastructure

When you offshore with MicroSourcing, you don’t just leverage global talent for up to 70% less than hiring onshore. You also get our big-business infrastructure backing your dedicated team and business – and you can bet that even your top competitors don’t have that.

A real-life example – Oaks Hotels & Resorts

Oaks Hotels & Resorts is one of Australia’s largest hotel chains. They were struggling to find onshore team members to provide customers with booking and reservations support, particularly late into the evening and on weekends.

So they came to us to offshore this department to Manila. They started small and scaled their team to service onshore customers for longer periods of the day and night. The team includes a senior operations person (the expat), team leaders, senior agents and junior agents.

From the outset, Oaks invested heavily in training their offshore team so they were aligned with the overarching goals of the business. As a result, they’ve experienced exceptional return on investment, and their customers benefit with exceptional quality service.

Watch this video for more information about Oaks’ experience with offshoring…