When oDesk, Elance, and RentACoder Aren’t Enough
Suffice to say, there will be times when your business needs are more than what any single outsourcing service (or combination of outsourcing services) can provide, making even the big players in the online outsourcing industry insufficient. There will be times when, for example, a business needs hundreds of thousands of support specialists rather than just a few hundred or thousand.
Microsoft and AT&T are prime examples of businesses that not only need a staff of this scale, but seek an outsourcing solution that can fulfill such a tall order. And quite frankly, traditional online outsourcing services just aren’t the appropriate outlet for this type of requirement.
The Divided Workforce
Traditional online outsourcing services generally host anywhere from 10,000 service providers to 300,000 or more. Of those providers, only a small segment may have the skills required for a specific job. At sites like oDesk, Elance, and yes, even RentACoder, the whole gamut of providers is divided among programmers, writers, graphic artists, data entry workers, and more.
You may be able to access hundreds of PHP programmers, or even thousands of copywriters at these types of sites, but you simply won’t find a huge number of specialized candidates available on the scale that corporations need them.
Requiring an In-Office, Remote Solution
Even more, there are situations in which a business requires an in-office, but remote, solution in addition to a massive staff. These two requirements make the need for a different type of outsourcing environment critical, especially since the outsourcing services we’re familiar with pool from providers working from homes and small offices all over the world.
Large companies, like car manufacturers, retail stores, and global magazine companies which serve a world-wide market, require an outside outsourcing company rather than an online outsourcing service.
So Are There Any Online Solutions?
There are many outside outsourcing companies available online, but it’s important to remember they deserve the same scrutiny of financial stability, industry experience, and contract provisions that smaller-scale outsourcing services deserve. They also require price comparison.
Working with an outsourcing company doesn’t necessarily reduce costs the way you might expect since it operates similar to the way an HR outsourcing company operates. At an outsourcing company, for instance, things like payroll, bookkeeping, and benefits have a small impact on a business’s budget. At an outsourcing service, these things aren’t even an issue, and they don’t impact a business’s budget at all.
Still, when compared to outright hiring, you’re looking at a savings of $3000 – $5000 per employee by using an outsourcing company. And if you’re in the market, your options are as plentiful as ever. There’s no shortage of these types of services whatsoever, making them a perfectly viable answer to fulfilling things like large-scale order processing and/or dedicated customer support.
