One of the most significant benefits of outsourcing back-office tasks it that it empowers professionals to get ‘back to basics’ and focus their efforts on getting to what they do best. Whether that’s selling, onboarding new customers, or zeroing in on customer success, you got into this business for a reason and your time is best spent on getting to the things you do best. To sharpen the focus on these priorities, many times agents, partners, MSPs, and others opt to outsource responsibilities like IT development, digital marketing, accounting, customer service, and many other facets of the business. Others work with an outside partner to get help with sales assistance, outsourcing their Network Operations Center (NOC) and Help Desk, and technology stack to expand their offerings.
Doing so has proven again and again to save valuable time and money once spent on recruiting and training full-time staffers. Relying on outside specialists also help IT MPSs reduce operational risk on the path toward delivering exceptional service to customers and growing the business. Let’s review some of the top reasons MSPs outsource and explore the best ways to do it.
Control costs on people resources
One way outsourcing helps MSPs save money is that they can reduce their labor costs, which represents a significant burden on IT providers today. Not only that, the competition for skilled IT professionals like information-security analysts, database administrators, and networking professionals is intense. Recruiting and retaining people for these kinds of skilled positions takes a lot of time and money. However, with with the right outsourcing partner working beside you, MSPs can spend less and be much more agile in the way they pursue new customers, evaluate new products and services, or expand to new regions. They can quickly scale human resource capacity up or down to meet the market and customers needs. With a better handle on costs, MSPs, agents, and IT VARs can also reallocate that money to serve customers better and focus on their success.
Spend more time listening
While you may be selling technology solutions, the biggest impact on your bottom line is made by building a solid relationship with your customers. Meeting with a new customer should be the forum to discuss and outline your client’s goals and the outcomes they want to achieve. It’s the time to have productive conversations and show them you understand their IT environment and business objectives. Following those meetings, it’s equally as critical to take immediate action on issues discussed. Having an outsourcing partner to help with pre-sales support tasks can mean the difference between showing those customers that you’re responsive and have an action plan for their success, and missing opportunities. Experienced outsourcing partners can help with critical pre-sales support activities by having automated processing in place. Once initial meetings are complete, you’ll be confident knowing customers are being supported properly with assistance with completion of paperwork and submittal to suppliers, sourcing special pricing requests, supplier escalation assistance, quote assistance for all suppliers and more.
Offer great new products and services
The right partner works behind-the-scenes so their MSPs can focus on revenue generating activities and be growing their business. Because these partners work with several solution providers, they should also be able to share best practices to shorten your sales cycle. Launching a new Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solutions and need Citrix specialists? Your partner should be able to help. Alternatively, want to offer a Unified Communication-as-a-s-Service (UCaaS) tailored specifically for small and medium-sized businesses? With the right outside partner, MSPs can very quickly assemble specialists to help your customers get up and running on these new systems. They can deliver access to vendor technologies as well as security, networking, cloud service and SD-WAN experts to help ensure superior performance and the reliability of these new technologies.
Top-notch back office support allows telecom agents, IT VARs, and MSPs to focus on their core business, instead of quotas, commitments and carrier follow up activities. Technology is continually evolving, and it requires an experienced outsourcing partner to bring all the pieces together successfully. Like any partnership, it’s critical to find a trusted outsourcing partner who best compliments you and aligns with your culture so they will take care of your customers as you would.