As your business grows, the workload can become overwhelming. You probably know about outsourcing to accounting professionals or headhunters, but more outsourcing options are available. Here are five tasks you probably didn’t know you could outsource. Doing so might just give you back the time and energy you need.
Customer communication
Phones are wonderful things, but not when they go off in the middle of an important task. Yet if you don’t answer, you might miss something key; and every business has to be there when customers call. Email is another time waster you could probably do without, and just keeping up with all the email is practically a full-time job in itself.
You can outsource a lot of this, and get some of your life back, with business process outsourcing, or BPO. BPOs offer cutting-edge solutions to meet customer communication needs, provide excellent customer service that preserves your reputation, and can even win you new clients. Just make sure your BPO is using BPO call center software with omnichannel integration so you can be sure that your customers are getting the best possible experience.
Design creation
Creating designs for embedded systems eats up your engineers’ valuable, and limited, time. Much of the time they’re starting from scratch. You can outsource much of that design work to FPGA engineers who partner with you to help you overcome development challenges and see the big picture with your objectives at the center.
And fgpa engineers can provide your own engineers with a “digital toolbox” to draw from and will work with nearly any embedded system. By outsourcing this task, you save valuable time so your people can concentrate on the tasks they do well. Instead of building every project from scratch, reinventing the wheel at points along the way, your engineers can start their tasks a few steps ahead.
Collecting the mail
Physical mail can be as big a hassle as email. Even if you’re making a concerted effort to go paperless, you probably still receive reams of mail, all of which has to be opened, read, and then dealt with properly. Most of the time you can separate out the spam in your email with just a quick scan; but doing it with physical mail usually involves actually opening it.
Some companies now offer virtual mailbox systems. They’ll pick up your mail, do the opening, and scan it all. Then they upload it and send it to you so you can read it from your computer. Your packages will still get delivered directly to you, but you save valuable time once wasted collecting and opening every piece of individual mail.
Invoice processing
Every once in a while, an honest client will call and remind you to send them an invoice. But most of the time, if you forget to invoice you’ve just made a costly mistake. Even if you remember to invoice, the process itself costs an estimated $12.90 per invoice (and far more if something on it isn’t correct).
It’s even worse when you have to follow up on an invoice customers aren’t paying, and both tasks can eat up your valuable time. An invoice processing service will take care of all these tasks for you. They make sure your invoices go out quickly, work with customers to verify if there’s been a mistake, and chase up your clients to ensure you get paid on time.
These are just five ways of outsourcing common office tasks that steal time and distract you from more important business. Not every task that can be outsourced needs to be, but they’re all worth considering. If you’re starting to realize that your time is your most valuable resource, it might be a sign.
