There seems to be a certain negative connotation surrounding the word “outsourcing” and what it means for companies. We believe that is in part due to the fact that a company’s employees want to “own” something and if you “outsource” it then the fear is that you no longer “own” it. In the past if you mentioned the word “outsource” in a meeting, typically the staff or team members get very defensive and believe this means you will be replacing them with easier and cheaper-to-manage staff through a third party.
Well, that’s not the case! Staff augmentation is a form of outsourcing that allows you to “augment” or “add” to your existing team. Staff Augmentation allows companies to add staff to their teams based on the additional skills required to support their initiatives. Here are just a few of the benefits provided by staff augmentation:
- By adding new skillsets to the team, you can take advantage of your existing resources by leveraging their skills and adding external skills that compliment them.
- The employer’s burden is reduced substantially by avoiding costs and liabilities of direct employees
- If you need something done quickly that will require a lot of resources, then this is the ideal approach. You can find a team quickly and typically get started much quicker than the weeks and months needed to recruit and hire additional headcount that you might not even need in a few months when the project is over.
- ASI has multiple clients that have found it difficult to keep accounts payable and data entry folks on staff. These staffing woes are happening all the while their workload was increasing. The quality and quantity that is provided by the internal staff is not consistent from team member to team member and management has to turn focus on measuring and maintaining KPI’s. We have provided these companies with both local and offshore resources that can be trained quickly to jump in and help with reviewing, coding, and documenting all the accounts payable duties. This way a company can utilize these internal accounting resources on higher level tasks and duties. We have local US project managers that keep an eye on daily progress and work directly with these companies to assure we are meeting their expectations. We typically provide a resource that completes a quality assurance step after the work is done. By providing resources across multiple shifts, we can help companies get caught up quickly. This increases quality and quantity while decreasing cost.
- We had a client that needed someone to review and record the quality of phone calls. Our client recorded the calls, but needed someone to listen to each one and make sure that their staff was following standards and completing everything that needed to be completed all the while keeping a smile on their face with a friendly voice. This project turned out to be a huge success and ultimately helped increase customer satisfaction and sales.
- We had another client that going through a project that required certain pieces of data in the system to be gathered and cleaned. The client exported the data, provided our team with the rules to update the data, and we provided the data back completed and cleaned for them to import back into their system.
