Have you ever wondered how ‘back office’ originated? Well, you know during the early times, companies used to design their office spaces in such a way that employees assigned at the front part were tasked to interact with the customers while those hidden from view or positioned at the back rendered support to the front people. In other words, the front office is considered as the ‘face’ of the company while the back office is the ‘lifeblood’ of the business.
Nowadays, countless companies of whatever scale, delegate part of their functions to third-party organizations for many different reasons. Let’s see what back office functions can be outsourced so that when your company is ready, you can start looking for back office outsourcing services you can trust.
Most Commonly Outsourced Back Office Functions
We’ve implied earlier that while the front office is in charge of generating sales and profits, the back office is responsible for raising the revenues, being the company’s lifeblood. So, here are the back-end processes performed in the back office that can be easily entrusted to external vendors.
- Administrative Functions
- Human Resource
- Accounting
- IT Support and Management
Administrative Functions
Administrative tasks are aplenty but telephone and customer service are obviously the most common. If you’re a customer, surely you wouldn’t be happy to get unanswered calls and be irritated by a constantly ringing phone that nobody’s picking up.
If you’re on the management side, you’d likewise be pissed by a noisy phone that no one bothers to answer because you lack manpower. Thanks to outsourcing, today you can now hire 24/7 phone services so that you’re no longer distracted in doing the core activities of your business.
For customer service, there will always be an unending stream of inquiries and complaints from various clients and attending to them is irrelevant to your role. With an outside vendor, you’ll now be freed from the tedious task of day-to-day emailing to customers and other forms of communication.
With just the proper training, your outsourcing partner not only can handle all those tasks well but can also go beyond such as doing research and monitoring customer experiences to look for ways on how you can improve.
Human Resource
Tasks under this category include recruiting and hiring. Currently, high turnover of employees is commonly happening among different companies. So, if the recruitment and hiring process is done by your third-party contractor, such a burden is taken off of you so that you can continue to focus on what you’re supposed to do best. Leave the creative employment ads to the hands of the real pros.
Accounting
Finance, data entry, bookkeeping and payroll are among the usual tasks done by a huge department like Accounting. If daily reports are to be submitted at the end of each working day, then it’s better to have a team do this for you because anyway, this isn’t really your forte.
The good thing is, these tasks can be performed by part-time outsourcers and you’d be happy to know there won’t be any more delayed tax payments or accounts receivables and payables are always updated.
IT Support and Management
This department needs people with expertise on information technology and hiring them would entail higher cost. Leave the IT functions to the experts in apps maintenance and development, network management and operations, data centre operations and the like.
These days, any company can outsource practically all back office tasks in all of its departments so that top management can have all the time to focus on their core business.
