If you’re going to grow your e-commerce business here in Australia, at some point, you’ll realize that working on multiple fronts can place a greater burden on your team than they might be prepared to handle. Most businesses across the country and even the entire world, find that the best solution is to utilize business process outsourcing (BPO) services.
Through BPO, you can delegate the tasks least critical to business success while focusing on your core competencies. Here are the first four tasks you might want to outsource as you start growing your business.
Customer service
Every business knows that building great relationships with their customers is vital to success. And yet, with increased growth comes complexity, and this factor can make it challenging to maintain a dedicated, in-house team for customer support. As a result, outsourcing customer service needs is a common practice, and one you may soon have to consider as you seek to evolve and expand your e-commerce business.
Whatever solution you come up with here, make sure you don’t compromise on the quality of customer-facing interactions. Many Australian businesses fulfill their BPO needs in the Philippines, for example, because of their call center agents’ high level of English fluency and other shared factors, such as similar time zones and friendly culture.
Administrative tasks
Startups and small businesses often have no choice but to handle even the most repetitive, tedious, and time-consuming tasks. But once you have the flexibility to do so, it can be of great benefit for your team to outsource certain administrative duties. A virtual assistant can be an excellent aid when it comes to managing simple yet high volume tasks such as email or social media posts.
Other administrative functions you may want to outsource are human resources, data entry, and payroll. If you can find the right skill set, it could also be cost-effective to let a third party handle accounting, bookkeeping, and even legal needs.
Web development and support
Your e-commerce website is at the core of what you do. It’s how you interact with consumers. The same goes for any mobile app you might have developed. And you’ll probably want to maintain full control over the design of that user interface, being able to tweak and test it over time.
That doesn’t mean you have to handle every aspect of your website or app, though. You and your team may be passionate about designing a perfect online shopping experience for your customers, but the back end work can certainly be outsourced to skilled IT personnel. Especially as you grow and add more features and content to your app and website, updates, testing, and security fixes can all be rolled out more easily by outsourced IT experts.
Marketing and research
Expanding your business often goes hand-in-hand with redrawing and stepping up your marketing strategy. And often, as a small business, you don’t want to lose that sense of authenticity and organic growth by handing over that responsibility for your next level marketing campaign to a third party. But at the same time, early success can go stale in terms of ideas; the same team of people might struggle to innovate when most needed.
Professional marketing consultants can help bring a new set of ideas and a different perspective. A good team can provide high-quality content across all platforms, including researched articles and graphic designs, while working under your overall direction to ensure that everything remains true to your brand.
BPO isn’t just about reducing costs. If you do it right, you can reignite creativity and train your local employees in new skills while driving growth and success moving forward.
