For high-growth businesses in industries like high-tech, biotechnology, and renewable energy, there are a number of essential business processes which are frequently contracted out to third-party businesses.

Outsourcing examples include:

  • Manufacturing
  • Customer service
  • Business development and sales
  • Marketing and advertising
  • Accounts receivable collections

Each of these outsourcing scenarios has its own unique benefits, so let's dive in a little deeper on each.

1. Contract Manufacturing

Some of the most successful and well-known businesses outsource their manufacturing - including Starbucks, Apple, Nike, and Cisco. These companies establish the designs, technical specifications, and employment standards of the manufacturing process, but don't need to invest in the capital costs of a factory, production equipment, or manpower.

Manufacturing industry segments like electronics, automotive, consumer packaged goods, and pharmaceuticals are especially lucrative for contract manufacturers. Popular brands can focus on research and development of new product offerings, while contract manufacturers can focus on what they do best, building market-ready products. Contract manufacturing can control costs while improving profitability.

2. Customer Service Outsourcing

Contact centers are a leading segment of the business process outsourcing market. This industry has evolved from round-the-clock interactions with customers on the phone to multi-channel contact centers, connecting with customers across voice, live chat, social media, and email channels.

Many onshore and offshore contact center BPOs have implemented cloud contact center and unified communications platforms to enable efficient interaction management across all of these channels. It also enables real-time and historical monitoring of performance against service level agreements. The contract BPO manages human and technology resource management and takes direction from their customer on the skills, expertise and quality standards required to meet their objectives.

3. Business Development and Sales

Business development and sales outsourcing take many forms in the digital age, including:

High-growth businesses often need to invest a great deal of their HR budget in research, development, and delivery of their products and services. Contracting out sales on a success-only basis, or other contract arrangements is generally more affordable than paying for the headcount of full-time sales and account development employees.

These sorts of companies often leverage services like Unified Communications for online meetings between customers and pre-sales engineers or product managers.

4. Marketing and Advertising

Digital marketing and advertising agencies are equally lucrative as extensions of a company's in-house marketing team, or as a cost-effective way to outsource the creative, technical, and tactical elements of marketing campaigns. Self-service and e-commerce websites are acting as stand-alone profit centers for many businesses.

Those companies that don't have core competencies with digital and physical marketing and advertising are aligning with agencies around the world. UK SEO and digital agency Trendzer has had great success in account management and business development with 8x8 ContactNow, a multichannel contact center solution. Though contact centers are usually thought of as very large teams of agents, smaller teams can benefit from better inbound and outbound activity.

Digital agencies and SaaS SEO agencies often need to have screen sharing sessions to present design project phases and present statistics like SEO traffic and ranking.

5. Accounts Receivable Collections

For high-growth businesses that are looking to build relationships with customers, pursuing those same customers for payments can be an uncomfortable, and delicate process. Contract collection agencies can prioritize client follow-ups based on how long payments are outstanding.

As a third-party collections agency doesn't have the same sort of relationship with your customer that your business does. Whether one of your customers just needs a "nudge reminder" to send in a payment, or if it's time to collect a lump sum payment and part ways, outsourcing your accounts receivables can be a great way to reduce invoice-to-cash timelines.

Leading companies that specialize in collecting debts have the strategic and legal expertise to bring in outstanding payments. They also know how to use tact to preserve relationships which are worth keeping, or notifying your legal team when it's necessary.

Collections agencies can leverage cloud communications platforms like VoIP and contact center platforms too. Functions like predictive dialing and expert connect and workforce management are ideal for high-volume collections agencies.

Is your business looking to shift responsibility for certain functions of your business to a company that specializes in processes like manufacturing, sales, marketing or collections? These outsourcing examples offer some strategies for high-growth businesses. We're always interested in learning about others.

Your business has enough on its plate. Outsource what makes sense for your business, choose a world-class SaaS technology solution and focus on what's important: your clients. Call 1-866-498-2316 or fill out an online form to request a no-obligation quote from an 8x8 product specialist.

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