If you’ve decided to take the next step towards business growth and invested in outsourcing services, there’s one thing that can make or break your trajectory towards that goal: communication. But just how crucial is effective communication for outsourcing success and overall business growth?
Outsourcing is an investment that offers an abundance of benefits. But you need to have some vital elements in place to maximize the relationship between your organization and your BPO (business process outsourcing) provider.
In this post, we’ll look at the role effective communication plays between businesses and their outsourcing partners.
Two Important Aspects of Communication that Influence Outsourcing Success
#1 Proper Communication with Outsourcing Providers
Long before you recruit your outsourcing provider, you already need effective communication. After all, you need to communicate your expectations in terms of skill sets and organizational objectives. Clear and concise communication during the recruitment process ensures that your service provider is perfectly matched to your unique business needs and objectives. Plus, you’ll get a better understanding of the operational basics of your provider, the processes they use, and the kind of services and support they render.
#2 Communicating as One Team with Your Outsourcing Provider
After you’ve recruited an outsourcing partner, you need to build relationships with your new team members. Your offshore team needs to be included in meetings just like you’d include other employees in meetings. Your onshore and offshore team members must be treated equally because, at the end of the day, that’s the only way to ensure you’re using unified processes and procedures across the board.
How to Improve Communication for Outsourcing Success
There’s insufficient communication. And then there’s unclear communication. Both scenarios are problematic, but the latter kills the aim of real-time collaboration between organizations and outsourcing providers.
To achieve outsourcing success, each party in the outsourcing chain has to participate in crossing barriers that can arise due to varying expectations and requirements. Although some of the drivers for outsourcing include cost savings and access to new resources and skills, all that and more goes to waste with ineffective or insufficient communication.
With that being said, here are some ways to overcome those barriers in communication:
Implement Agile Methodologies
You can only make a success of outsourcing if proper communication exists. And you can make this easier with an agile approach to communication. Strategies that include monitoring daily or weekly progress and running effective ceremonies make it easier to maintain transparency. And when you’ve got transparent communication, you’ve got a much higher chance of delivering the project as per expectations.
Create Enabled Teams
Your teams must be well-versed with the required knowledge and insight to ensure the proper functioning of a project. And outsourcing is no different. Smooth outsourcing communication is the key to lasting professional relationships throughout the entire project lifecycle. The way to maintain this is by equipping team members with the communication tools they need to deliver clear and concise communication.
Implement Project Management Tools
Communication tools can make it so much easier to facilitate communication during an outsourcing project. Explaining daily progress becomes tedious and time-consuming, and not everyone has the luxury of making time for this task on a daily basis. Tools like Trello can drastically change your experience with outsourcing since it allows you to see what the other team is working on and what the next steps of the project are. You also have access to various reports and can view the progress of a project without getting in touch with your vendor.
Trim Down the Amount of Communication Channels You Use
Do you know what’s even worse than a bloated email inbox and communication challenges? Searching for something in hundreds of different places, especially if it’s important files pertaining to a specific project. However, you can avoid this situation by sticking to one communication channel for each type of conversation.
Skype, for instance, works well for video conferences. Slack is great for everyday communication. Jira and Trello are outstanding for project management.
The more channels you have, the more likely something is to go missing along the way. Making decisions on one communication channel places a communication barrier between you and the rest of the team, which leads to issues in information flow.
It’s also best to avoid 1-on-1 communication to keep things as transparent as possible. As a team, you don’t have room for misunderstandings and understatements. Unless it’s absolutely necessary, don’t share information with just one person in the team.
Use the Cloud for File Sharing
Tech makes achieving outsourcing success much easier because it facilitates enhanced communication. Cloud solutions allow you to share files with all team members with just a few clicks. You can also update the documents, and everyone has real-time access to changes. And this is highly beneficial because it helps you avoid the risk of team members using outdated information.
Stick to Your Initial Communication Rules
It’s easier to make the rules for successful outsourcing communication than it is to stick to them. But it is essential to remember that the outsourcing experience can be much more stressful if you don’t focus on optimizing communication. Make a point of training your team on effective communication and the expectations you have for it. Prioritize regular check-ins and continual training to ensure information always flows the way it is supposed to during projects.
Wrapping Up
At the end of the day, the biggest influencer of communication in outsourcing is effective team management. Every tip we’ve listed in this article can be crucial to avoiding poor communication that leads to outsourcing success and strategic partnerships. But when you always have seamless communication with your team, you’ll immediately pick up on any weak spots that need attention.
Working with an outsourcing service provider can pose some challenges at times. But time and distance shouldn’t influences or negatively affect appropriate communication with a proper system implemented within your teams. Get in touch with the team at DayBPO today to learn more about the role of communication in outsourcing success!