If you are considering outsourcing your shared services or back office operations, it’s easy to find the best-fit company for your needs by answering a few quick questions. Our free matching tool ensures you get connected with a shortlist of reputable back office outsourcing suppliers, whose offerings and locations match your criteria – whether onshore in Australia or offshore. This saves you time and money in trying to track down the right company. Just click here to get started.
What type of back office services can be outsourced?
Virtually every company has some sort of back office activity that can be outsourced to a third party: this ranges from data entry (from paper-based forms, expenses and applications) through to the processing of insurance/medical claims, payroll, and management of the accounts receivable and payable function. Increasingly, “back office” has extended to research and data mining services, and virtually any tasks where there is no direct engagement with customers (for example, a call centre is considered “front office” in most environments).
Benefits of back office outsourcing
Many organisations consider the back office more palatable to outsource than customer-facing activity, particularly when the services are delivered from offshore countries, where labour is cheaper. Key drivers for outsourcing functions like billing or even salary packaging are cost savings and a desire to focus on core business rather than high-volume, process-oriented tasks that can be performed equally as well, if not more efficiently, by a third party. Outsourcing to domain experts also has the advantage of benchmarking performance against other companies in your industry also managed by the outsourcer.
Tips on working with back office outsourcing companies
Outsourcing works best when the work is clearly defined before transition from an in-house environment. Good outsourcers will engage in a discovery phase and even make recommendations if they feel certain work would be better automated or is not suitable for offshoring. Shipping broken processes to a third party is a recipe for disaster, and it’s important to develop clearly documented processes and procedures that work, to ensure a successful outsourcing experience.
Get to know your outsourced partner in person, if possible, before engaging them. Matchboard focuses on outsourcers with an Australian/New Zealand presence, even if service delivery is from offshore, as this reduces the risk of potential misunderstandings and makes due diligence much easier in the evaluation stage.
Once you are ready to explore shared services or back office outsourcing, click here to get connected with a shortlist of vendors who meet your precise business needs.