North West businesses missing out on the power of outsourcing for business growth

Moneypenny's Chief Marketing Officer, Kate Cox, has called on North West businesses to wake up to the power of outsourcing.  

In her recent keynote speech at the Festival of Enterprise, in Birmingham, Kate took to the stage to discuss the findings of a new Moneypenny survey.

The findings revealed that, of 502 SME business leaders who were surveyed, 38% of businesses don’t outsource any kind of service, while legal services and IT support are most likely to be outsourced (20% each), followed by accountancy and website support (16% each), and telephone answering and receptionist services (12%).  Least likely functions to be outsourced were live chat (2%), sales (3%), admin and marketing (4% each).

Kate comments: "Business productivity and efficiency can be hugely boosted by outsourcing, as it means a business can spend more time on providing its core money-earning services, by outsourcing support tasks such as invoicing, capturing new sales enquiries, maintaining its website, and finding new employees or customers.  It’s a myth that outsourcing simply means more expenditure to pay someone else to do a job, as these days there are so many tech solutions available that don’t cost the earth and which mean a support task can be performed more quickly and cheaply than it could be done with a company’s in-house resource."

Outsourcing really does pay off in terms of business profits.

Kate continued: "The internet provides numerous ways to find companies to outsource to, even for low volume, important tasks. While improved communications between companies and outsourcing partners mean that external experts act as part of the business, not as remote workers.  From the numerous businesses in the North West that outsource their communications, customer support or live chat to Moneypenny, we’ve had feedback that outsourcing really does pay off in terms of business profits, as costs are reduced, performance, efficiency and flexibility are improved, and fixed costs on employee expenditure become variable costs on the balance sheet."

The Moneypenny survey demonstrated that outsourcing decisions are driven by the size and life stage of a company - so a company in its first year of trading is most likely to outsource its accountancy, legal and reception services. While a more established company, with a turnover of between £1-9 million, would be likely to add website management to its outsourcing list. Yet it also revealed that there are many more functions such as marketing, sales generation, HR and customer support that could be handled more cost-effectively and efficiently by outsourcing.

A live chat service on a website creates 62% more engagement.

Outsourcing of phone calls has been proven to make a business more productive and efficient. From Moneypenny's own internal data for law firms, we know that one in ten phone calls handled for clients are brand new enquiries, while the provision of a live chat service on a website creates 62% more engagement, and 42% of live chats are out of hours, which is business that would be lost if this service wasn’t available.

Kate offers the following advice on choosing an outsourcing partner:

• Be clear on the brief, your budget and performance expectations
• Check a company’s customer references and look at online reviews such as Trustpilot
• Draw up a shortlist of potential companies and speak to multiple suppliers before making a decision
• Assign a dedicated contact to liaise with the outsourcing company
• Try before you buy – even a short trial is useful
• Predict and monitor the real ROI of outsourcing (including no overheads or liabilities)