What Does It Mean To Offshore Services? 

Offshore outsourcing refers to hiring an offshore company or partner to provide services from a foreign country. This is in contrast to onshore outsourcing, where teams within your own country provide the services.

Offshore outsourcing can be a popular way to encourage business growth, as is true for outsourcing in general. Offshore teams are similar to onshore teams regarding their skill sets; the main difference is that they operate in different countries. This slight difference accounts for many of the unique advantages of offshoring and also some of the cons of offshoring.

The benefits of offshoring can include financial incentives such as lower labor costs and operational cost savings, and tax benefits. An additional offshore benefit, shared with outsourcing as a general practice, is the increased ability to focus on core business functions after some tasks are handled out-of-house.

Still, there are also disadvantages of offshoring: one of these is a potential loss of quality control. Working with offshore partners in offshore countries can give rise to communication challenges, primarily due to the different time zones and cultural differences. Another potential disadvantage, depending on the outsourcing partner you work with, is potential security breaches.

Offshore locations are typically developing countries with growing economies, such as India and the Philippines. These countries offer a combination of lower labor costs, favorable tax policies, and a growing pool of skilled workers, making them attractive places to outsource work.

Which Services Can Be Offshored?

Business owners can outsource several services to provide adequate, cost-effective, and efficient support for their FinTech companies. One of the services most commonly offshored is contact centers, as well as the relatively new virtual call centers.

Information technology services, such as software development and IT services, are also easily offshored and outsourced to reduce labor costs and increase efficiency. Call center and virtual call center software can be complex and require significant infrastructure and personnel investments to operate at peak levels.

Offshoring service providers often have highly advanced hardware and software assets such as cloud-based servers and systems, super high-speed internet connections, top cyber talent, and the office space to accommodate them all.

Outsourcing — What Is It Good For?

You can use outsourcing for practically any service you need to operate your FinTech company at peak performance. We often think of manufacturing and customer experience when the word is spoken, but you can outsource almost any business process.

From human resources and legal services to office maintenance and cleaning, your FinTech company is likely already outsourcing more services than you might realize. If you can think of a single business process necessary to complete your company’s objectives and tasks, it can be outsourced offshore.

Outsourcing Benefits

Outsourcing is a crucial business strategy that allows companies to achieve desired goals and tasks with partner companies and providers. Here’s an overview of the potential benefits that come with outsourcing services.

Outsourcing Benefits at a Glance:

• • Cost Reduction

• • Increased Productivity

• • Skill Access

• • Decreased Development Timelines

• • Greater Customer Experiences

Cost Reduction

It is no secret that cost reduction and expense savings are the number one reasons that companies choose to outsource certain services and functions. It is widespread for outsourcing to save companies over 50% versus in-house development.

It’s no wonder why so many companies identify areas within their company that they can improve via offshoring and outsourcing. One of the most commonly outsourced services is customer experience via traditional call centers and virtual call centers.

Decreasing costs allows your company to reinvest that capital in other areas, such as research, development, and innovation. As you know, innovation is the key to long-term survival and sustained growth, and so is customer satisfaction.

Developing contact centers in-house takes enormous financial investments, time, and the need for intensive and complicated training and technological installations. In other words, it takes time, costs a lot of money, and requires substantial investments in recruiting and training.

Outsourcing, therefore, is the logical and most sensible choice, especially when your company is experiencing wildfire growth at a rate that could not be anticipated. This is an excellent problem to have, but a problem nonetheless.

Increased Productivity

Productivity is the life force of your FinTech company's growth and survival. Being productive in all areas of your business is vital to ensure you provide your clients and consumers with the best services and products.

Offshoring some of your services gives you access to highly talented workforces and sophisticated digital and technological infrastructures at a fraction of the cost. These companies and providers are experts at what they do and will provide services that give you overnight productivity boosts.

Access to Skilled Workers

Gaining access to people who are highly trained, skilled, and educated at their job is another considerable benefit of offshoring services for your FinTech company. For instance, call center agents are not always immediately thought of when referencing highly trained personnel, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Finding good call center agents can be challenging; great ones are almost impossible to find. Having a provider as your partner who has several excellent and many great call center agents will directly and positively affect your customer’s journey and experience.

Merely putting on a headset does not make you qualified to handle customer support issues. It is a craft and an art to handle customers with expert care while being professional and effective. Having first-contact call resolution significantly improves the customer's attitude and opinion of your company.

Fueled chiefly by remote work and digital revolutions, accessing highly skilled workers has never been easier. As a FinTech company, you can appreciate the potential that today’s digital landscape provides both companies and consumers.

Decreased Development Timelines

As we mentioned previously, in-house development requires not only significant capital investments but also significant time investments. If done correctly, in-house development takes a lot of time to perfect, especially with highly technical and advanced services.

Outsourcing these services to a capable provider can save you valuable time and money.

It may take your company six, 12, or even 24 months to develop a service in-house properly. Outsourcing, however, can be done in mere hours, a few days, or just a couple of weeks.

Decreasing development timelines means that your clients and consumers receive better customer experiences at near lightspeed. You would likely lose clients or miss out on conversion opportunities if you sidelined customer satisfaction in favor of in-house development. Reducing customer churn is far less expensive than bringing in new customers.

Greater Customer Experiences

Your FinTech company exists because of your number one asset — your clients and consumers. Without them, you do not exist. Without them, you have no service or product to provide.

Enhancing the customer experience leads to higher customer satisfaction, greater brand loyalty, and increased revenue. When customers genuinely enjoy their experiences, they develop loyalty, which usually results in referrals to friends, families, Google, and Yelp.

Offshoring services where you are weak or struggling can improve the customer experience dramatically and quickly. While you should develop certain services in-house, there are many you can efficiently and safely outsource to offshore providers.

Choosing what to outsource and develop in-house requires an honest and objective analysis of your company’s strengths and weaknesses. Outsourcing weaknesses and improving strengths is an equation as obvious as 1+1=2.

Services That Are Commonly Offshored

Now that we know the benefits of offshoring services for FinTech companies, let’s briefly look at some commonly offshored services.

At A Glance:

• • Customer Support Call Centers

• • Information Technology Services

• • International Advisors

Customer Experience Call Centers

Customer support call centers are excellent choices for offshoring because they provide significant infrastructure and resources that are incredibly costly to develop in-house.

For a fraction of the cost, offshoring contact centers can provide customer support services that meet and even exceed your demand.

As a FinTech company, you have access to a world of customers. Unlike the traditional brick-and-mortar business model, your company operates almost entirely on the web. This means anyone with an internet connection anywhere in the world can conduct business with you.

Offshoring call centers ensure that you have adequate staffing across the globe, covering every time zone and providing assistance around the clock.

Information Technology Services

We don’t want to beat a dead horse, but information technology services are expensive and highly sophisticated. Offshoring these services can drastically reduce the costs associated with development, retention, maintenance, implementation, business operations, cyber security, and talent acquisition.

Daily advances in technology only feed into the cost issues with information technology. As a FinTech company, information technology is not one of your strengths, even if you operate within its world. It’s best to leave this service to the experts, many of whom you can find around the globe.

International Advisors

Here’s a hypothetical situation: Say that your FinTech company wants to expand beyond just one market, like the United States. To assist customers from all over the world, it will be essential to have expert international advisors on hand to navigate the various complexities of the financial industry internationally.

Offshoring these services ensures you can provide these services to your clients as needed while retaining much of your talent in-house for markets you’re more confident in.

Summing Up

Outsourcing, like anything else, has its challenges. However, offshoring certain services will result in positive outcomes for your FinTech company.

After all, who doesn’t like to save a little money while also receiving top-notch service? It sounds like a good deal if you ask us.

If you’re looking for an outsourcing partner, Awesome OS is here to help.

For over 12 years, we’ve developed a unique results-driven approach to customer experience based on 12 years of partnering with over 90 high-growth startups and mid-size companies.

Are you interested in learning more about us? Get in touch to see what we can do.

Sources:

Remote work revolution may lead to globalization of white-collar jobs | The Washington Post

IT firms need pricing improvement to ease margin woes: experts | The Economic Times

The Value of Keeping the Right Customers | Harvard Business Review