To put this idea into perspective, let’s take a look at some interesting statistics for the Canadian business process outsourcing sector.
 

 
Now, while the above statistics are more relevant to a global outsourcing scenarios where international businesses are making use of Canada’s proficiency in offering high-skilled offshoring services, the key takeaway from this is the way in which companies are warming up to business process outsourcing services.

And much like it is on a global scale, business process outsourcing proves to be a win-win situation closer to home where it’s quickly becoming a preferred option amongst businesses of all types and sizes.

Business process outsourcing essentially involves contracting with a third party to perform specific tasks or projects on a company’s behalf, such as customer care, back office solutions, network security, disaster recovery planning and much more.

In the past, business process outsourcing providers offered only basic services such as technical support and call center tasks. However, with the tremendous scope it offered in terms of cost and resource optimization coupled with the availability of high-skilled labor, more companies are now looking to outsource specialized tasks and activities.

Outsourcing projects helps companies and organizations to better manage their day to day operations and helps them focus on their core business rather than deploy time, money and resources to manage support functions.

For instance, the founder of an internet marketing (IM) startup firm found himself and his core team spending way too much time and effort tending to a myriad of back office functions. And like all startups, he too operated with limited budget and resources.

Outsourcing his back office functions freed up a considerable amount of bandwidth which he could easily utilize to focus on other critical aspects of running his business – namely product and business development. The fact that the company he chose to outsource to was a Canadian firm employing quality local resources made it relatively easier for him to map his requirements and get things done just the way he wanted.

And just like the IM startup, there are many small and medium-sized business owners who have started to realize the benefits of outsourcing.

While the list of benefits can be endless, here are the key reasons why BPO can be an effective way of controlling costs and staying competitive:

Reduce Cost Incurred on Labor – The Number One Benefit
Businesses that outsource their support functions are able to make significant amount of savings on resource and labor. Outsourcing your non-core business functions has been shown to reduce costs by up to 35%. And this doesn’t necessarily include other aspects of resource management, including training, hiring, and telecommunications.

Access to Specialized and High-Skilled Resource Pool
Because outsourcing service providers continually invest in specialized processes and resources, they are able to perform tasks far more efficiently resulting in better management of your company’s non-core functions. Business process outsource companies can access and assign highly skilled labor from local or offshore markets that give you access to a diverse talent pool that you would otherwise find to be difficult and costly to acquire.

Focus on Your Business
Hiring a third party provider to handle certain aspects of your business allows you to focus on the primary purpose of your business. You can carry out functions related to sales and marketing rather than focus on activities such as IT infrastructure, customer support, payroll and accounting. So, by using an outsourcing service, you will have all the time you need to concentrate on business development and strategy.

Improved Productivity
Outsourcing allows a company to achieve improved efficiency, quality, and turnaround time. Because outsourcing service providers take care of other organizations’ non-core processes, they have gained the necessary resources and expertise to achieve better process management, improve customer satisfaction, and adhere to service deliverables.

Summary: Business process outsourcing is a great way to increase efficiency and productivity within an organization. You can use an outsource service to complete various tasks including technical support, POS/retail network support, back office support, multichannel customer care, and accounting services. While there are many companies that offer business outsourcing services, you need to choose the one that best suits your business goals and objectives.

 
Learn more about NetPulse’s business process outsourcing services:

• Business process outsourcing

The post How does Business Process Outsourcing give you a Competitive Advantage? appeared first on Netpulse.

IT innovation drives a business’ profitability and opportunities for growth. Hence it’s necessary to reduce IT cost-to-serve through best practices and proper solutions to conserve your human and financial resources. First, you’ll need to understand which best practices apply in your scenario and their potential impact. IT consulting and services can help you make these assessments and figure out improvements that will benefit your business’ specific situation. Knowing your current IT infrastructure and its true efficiency levels can help you figure out ways to save money.

Role of the IT Help Desk

After the assessment, the prime focus is the optimization of your IT infrastructure. To keep budgets under control, your IT infrastructure continuously needs to be monitored, updated, and modified according to the changing needs of your business. It’s one of the major reasons why IT help desk is better outsourced. It functions beyond standard troubleshooting, repairing, and maintaining systems. It also involves optimizing the entire infrastructure through best practices that save money that can be invested into innovation.

Best Practices

Although best practices vary according to your business needs, below are a few examples:

• Deploy server clusters: Server downtime is a major spending area. Server clusters enable applications to continue running uninterrupted during downtime caused by maintenance work, hardware crash, or network failure. The application requirements such as capacity and storage are analyzed. After, an implementation plan for deploying the clusters is created. A support structure is then designed for the server clusters and data protection is provided for times of failure. Once the clusters are secured, they’re tested and deployed.
• Automate provisioning systems: Using pre-defined procedures, the provisioning or servicing systems deploy an IT service electronically without manual support. Users can customize the services themselves thus saving substantial human resources and time that’d otherwise go into activation or change of services.
• Engage in patch management and software/application deployment techniques: By doing this, the system’s vulnerabilities can be overcome and missing or relevant patches, hotfixes, security updates, and patch reports can be deployed by a patch management solution.
• Transition to server virtualization: The hardware is reduced to a great extent as all computing resources are shifted to the cloud. Some of the benefits of server virtualization include the reduction of the energy and data centre footprint, faster provisioning, and improvements to disaster recovery.
• Use standard network security management techniques such as strong firewalls, limited access, data encryption, continuous backup, etc.
• Manage data according to standard practices.

Reducing IT Cost-to-Serve is always a priority. This post demonstrates the need for best practices and potential solutions that reduce IT costs.

The post Best Practices for Reducing IT Cost-to-Serve appeared first on Netpulse.

The Big Difference

Instead of setting up a thousand more systems with licensed software and applications, a single server can be set up as the core system. This server will then host the several desktops which can be anywhere and in any form like tablets, mobile phones, laptops, and workstations. The dependence of end devices on a core system also implies that server management has to be robust. This is one of the many reasons why this management is often outsourced to a specialized technology services company.

Pros & Cons

One size does not fit all when it comes to desktop virtualization and virtualization related technology like cloud computing. Solutions and processes have to customized, even tailored exclusively to secure all the pros and avoid all the cons involved with virtualization.

The usual pros are:

A Win-Win for Management and Users: All kinds of user environments can be enabled while maintaining a centralized control. Operational challenges like updating, upgrading systems or apps, monitoring the activities and securing all information, data, reports, and logs are made easier while users enjoy flexibility, save time, and are more productive.

Reduction in Costs: Hardware, support, and administrative costs are substantially reduced thereby resulting in business savings. As seen above, hardware can take many forms, support is available via virtual help desk, and no dedicated team of engineers and managers is needed as everyone has the same OS and apps managed centrally.

Security and Stability: Since the system is centralized, the secure data center houses the core. Hence several systems across many locations need not be secured separately. Encryption also protects the confidentiality of the work activities happening across all clients.

Some cons are:

Extensive Storage Needed: Due to presence of several users and their personal preferences, storage space is used up quickly and is difficult to predict. Often, additional storage has to be added to meet demand.

Infrastructure Investment: A requirement of supporting virtualization across many devices is a heavy investment in high quality servers, storage, and network infrastructure. This hardware is usually a one-time or periodic cost. If the core gets affected, there could be a business-wide downtime. No wonder it is recommended to use top quality servers and desktop virtualization services like those provided by cloud computing technology companies.

This article talks about the potential impact, benefits, and shortcomings of desktop virtualization.

The post Different Takes on Desktop Virtualization appeared first on Netpulse.

Here are 5 benefits that cloud services can bring your way:

• Easy and secure access to your data: Since your data is stored securely on remote servers that can be easily accessed using mobile devices, from anywhere and at anytime, you no longer need to stay tethered to your PC.
• Scalability: Most cloud service providers offer the pay-as-you-go model, which empowers you to scale your cloud resources up or down based on your business requirements. What’s more, you can easily customize these services to make them more suitable for your needs.
• Reduced costs: Since you don’t need to invest in infrastructure, software and hardware, training, maintenance, etc., you can save a lot of money. Your cloud provider handles expensive updates, quality control, and data management and you don’t have to worry about hiring expensive IT resources to take care of these tasks.
• Efficiency and flexibility: Cloud computing doesn’t just offer scalability, it helps you work with remote workers who are connected worldwide through the Internet. Therefore, if you are thinking about hiring remote services like a virtual help desk, cloud technology is your best option.
• Disaster management: Unlike your on-site desktops, servers, and network equipment that can malfunction or lack performance and adversely affect and stall your business operations, storing data on remote servers with top-notch security, guaranteed resources, redundancy, and a disaster management system helps you to continue with your work no matter what happens. 

Business cloud computing also helps users work fast as they don’t need to install large, complicated applications on their local computers, since their provider will offer high-capacity remote servers, and the requisite IT tools to facilitate seamless work. So, whether you are thinking about using specific operations like data recovery services or help desk services, or you want to move all of your business operations to a more secure and scalable environment, cloud computing is the right solution.

So, what are you waiting for? Act today to assess your business needs and find a service provider that can help you get the maximum benefits of cloud technology.

Summary: Cloud computing has emerged as the ultimate IT solution that’s increasingly adopted by small start-ups and big enterprises alike. Explore some of the benefits of cloud technology.

The post 5 Benefits of Business Cloud Computing appeared first on Netpulse.

If you decide in favor of help desk outsourcing, it becomes even more critical to keep track of the efficiency your service provider in managing your help desk.

Here are 10 metrics that can help you monitor the health of your help desk:

• New tickets: The ticket tracking system is the core of your help desk. By assessing how many new tickets your help desk handles in a month, week, or day, you can plan your staffing requirements.
• Customer’s preferred contact method: These days, customers can contact your help desk through phone calls, emails, web forms, chats, or social networking platforms. Since each of these modes requires different skills, identifying, tracking, and preparing for each contact method is crucial for determining your staffing needs and for responding quickly to help desk requests.
• Tickets solved: By assessing if your help desk can solve most of the ticket requests that come in a week without escalation to higher tier support, you can decide whether your help desk is working efficiently or falling behind.
• Reply and wait times: Long first reply and wait times lead to dissatisfied customers. Within a reasonable time period after your customer makes a request, your help desk should send at least an acknowledgement that the problem is being worked on. Whether you opt for help desk outsourcing to handle technology infrastructure management issues or managed security services, wait times too should be reduced to ensure that issues are being resolved without much delay.
• Resolution time: After a ticket is created, the time taken to solve it for the first time is called the first resolution time. If the ticket is re-opened one or more times to further correct a customer issue, this time is called the full resolution time. An increasing gap between these two times means that more training is required to speed up the resolution times.
• Backlog: If the number of tickets solved in a week is much less than the new requests, there’s bound to be a backlog. When this happens, it would indicate that your help desk is overwhelmed by support requests, and needs more staff and resources to solve the tickets.
• Predicted backlog: Calculating the predicted backlogs helps you note where the team is falling behind and take appropriate measures.
• Ticket distribution: Scrutinizing your ticket distribution can alert you about a persistent problem with your products/services. If you notice a sudden increase in the amount of support requests coming to your help desk, you should check for underlying issues and report them to appropriate internal staff for resolution.
• Satisfaction ratings: With reports and dashboards of customer satisfaction ratings, you can spot problems with your help desk and products/services.
• Employee performance: By identifying which help desk professionals are top performers and which ones need additional training and resources, task allocation can be streamlined.

Summary: Ensuring that your customers are happy with your products and services is crucial for the success of your business. Use the 10 metrics above to monitor the health of your help desk and keep your customers satisfied with your service.

The post Top 10 Metrics to Monitor the Health of Your Help Desk appeared first on Netpulse.