Remote working has been the trend lately, especially with the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic. This has even pushed brands and startup businesses to outsource their operations to individuals, remote workers, and virtual assistants rather than to BPO companies.
Now, this trend requires us to analyze the current standings of the BPO industry and judge if this move is worth trying. That’s exactly what we are here for. We are to look into a detailed analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of when brands consider remote workers over a call center in the USA or any other part of the world.
Here we go!
Advantages of Hiring a BPO
The BPO sector has been around for a very long time now. This indicates that industry has been extremely vital for other sectors, or it wouldn’t have survived so long. And when we compare it with the newly developing remote working sector, we do have a lot of aspects to talk about.
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Official Process
We just consider the process of hiring a BPO as the first pointer here. An established BPO company, or even a small call center in Albania, will have the same official and formal process or client onboarding. The entire process is scrutinized under the existing contract laws, and transparency becomes a major factor.
On the contrary, it is often not possible to have a formal contract between the two with an individual remote worker. So instead, the proof to contract is mostly restricted to communication on various channels, like meeting software, emails, messaging apps, etc.
So, there is a lack of a formal onboarding process for remote workers.
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Huge Infrastructure
Now, this can become the decider in comparing a BPO call center company and a remote worker. A BPO company is a commercialized entity with a complete office setup with employees, support staff, managers, a physical office.
Apart from just this, there are other benefits of having a huge infrastructure. For example, both the hardware and software capabilities of a BPO company are better than individuals. Cloud servers, an on-call setup for communication, data privacy software, CRMs, etc., are also missing for individual remote workers.
This means that there are many restrictions for outsourcing your business operations to an individual remote worker.
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Auto-pilot
A BPO company can be extremely handy for businesses that put a lot of time into their operations and upscaling. Once you have outsourced your business processes to an El Salvador call center or even to off-shoring hubs in the Asia-Pacific region, you can rest assured since they work on auto-pilot mode.
You don’t have to manage the work they do; they can do the job without your supervision. So, in a way, you are outsourcing your entire operations without employing any resources to manage them. A win-win situation for you!
On the flip side, the case is different with individual remote workers. These workers are not auto-pilot, and you have to have a manager to oversee and handle them. Again, this is extra on top of the regular stint of reporting and analytics.
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BPO company – Commitment to ServiceÂ
Without a doubt, the commitment to service for a BPO or a call center company is way higher. Since you outsource a huge part of your operations, the revenue at stake for the companies is higher. Plus, with years of experience and a market reputation to maintain, BPO companies strive to offer an excellent commitment to work.
Moreover, the BPO companies also use their commitment to work as bait to lure clients. The ultimate result of work commitment is client satisfaction. So, BPO companies make sure that they have a clear record of client satisfaction.
Contrary to this, the work commitment for individual remote workers is far inferior. Since there is no legal binding in some cases, there is no strict obligation for these virtual assistants to get a particular job done in a way that the brand deems fit. Plus, the monetary stake is also less here.
On An Ending Note
Having looked at the various advantages of BPO and call center companies over individual remote workers, it can be seen that the latter has a lot of restrictions. For example, BPO companies cannot outsource all sorts of operations to individuals, and the chances of up-scaling are missing. Plus, you will always need in-house staff and managers to manage the work you outsource to remote workers.
All of these make one thing very clear, be it a call center in the USA or other locations, the BPO sector is always the better choice over individual remote assistants. So, the trend of outsourcing small quantities is temporary. Once the business sector is completely free from the effects of the pandemic, the focus will be back on the BPO sector.