10 Things Your Competitors Can Teach You about Outsourcing Data Entry

Data entry is certainly one of the most tedious jobs that businesses can carry out in-house. For this reason, enterprises across the world consider outsourcing data entry to cut down on time, efforts, and costs associated with it. Although data entry outsourcing will reduce the cost and time, there are often drawbacks, such as data security threats and cultural differences, which come with outsourcing. This might impact your business bottom line and make you learn from the mistakes you commit.

But learning from your own mistakes can lead to huge monetary and non-monetary loss. One of the wise planning strategies is to analyze your competitors. After all, who could ever teach you better than your competitors? Yes, the best way to cut through the competition is to identify the areas your competitors are surpassing you and take lessons from their shortcomings. This helps you in reaping enormous benefits without hampering your business in any way.

Steal Your Competitors' Success Mantra

Analyzing how your competitors have cracked successful strategies to outsource data entry and implementing the same will help you to make the most out of data entry outsourcing. Right from identifying reasons to outsource data entry to successfully reaping the benefits of data entry outsourcing, your competitors can teach you a lot. Let us now look at some of the major advantages of data entry outsourcing that your competitors can teach.

1. Identify the Level of Customization

   Data entry needs of each company may vary depending on the size of the firm and the type of the industry. Find competitors who are successfully outsourcing and then analyze what qualities they look for in their outsourcing partner. Often successful companies choose an outsourcing partner which can provide a certain level of customization. Find Firms which can provide you the desired level of customization and precisely cater to your business needs.

2. Find Mechanisms to Track and Monitor

   Any competitor who has been successfully outsourcing data entry services, must be working with a firm which enables them to easily monitor and track their processes. This gives them an opportunity to quickly identify any deviations or errors and rectify them immediately, without any scope for inaccuracies or project delays. Therefore, one of the best things to learn from your competitors is to identify mechanisms for regularly tracking project developments. Partnering with a firm that gives real-time access to all the service parameters will help in retaining a control over the process.

3. Evaluate the Willingness to Tackle Emergency

   This is an extremely important lesson that your competitors can teach you about outsourcing. At times, some data might be critical and need prioritizing or urgent processing. Successful businesses choose a firm that has plans to accommodate such emergencies. This is because if the company cannot cater to emergencies, then it just does not serve the purpose. Therefore, firms that have allowance for emergencies should always score above the ones that do not have it.

4. Check the Level of Data Security

   Data security is a quintessential factor to consider while planning for data entry outsourcing. Successful competitors know that security of data is needed from both business and legal perspective. Hence, before shortlisting, such businesses consider the protocols and policies followed by the service provider to ensure complete data security. Additional safety measures, such as checking whether the firm signs non-disclosure agreements with its employees ensure higher data security.

5. Estimate Cost-effectiveness and Turnaround Time

   As cost reduction is one of the major reasons of outsourcing, competitors often look out for providers who assure cost-effective services for their data entry needs. This is one of the major takeaways of learning from your competitors. Therefore, potential service providers should be assessed on their cost to company and their capacity for scaling up, as the business requirements grow. However, the costs associated with such scaling-up should also be considered.

   Next, comes the turnaround time. Partnering with a firm that provides 24×7 support will assure shorter turnaround times. This also prevents data stacking as the work gets evenly distributed and the workflow will be streamlined.

Learn from the Shortcomings of Your Competitors

Failure teaches us what achievement cannot! Analyzing your competitors' shortcomings can be the best way to quickly identify and troubleshoot your own offshoring problems. One of the biggest advantages of learning from your competitors is to efficiently identify the market gaps, such as run time moderation, project uncertainty, etc. Following are some of the disadvantages of data entry outsourcing committed by your competitors, which can help you overcome offshoring obstacles and reap its benefits -

1. Bridge Cultural Barriers

   Taking time to understand how your competitors broke the cultural barriers can help you to reap huge benefits, without going through all the pain they went through. Often, data entry specialists work remotely from an entirely different continent resulting in cultural differences to deal with. These differences might interrupt your workflow. Hiring offshore resources with English fluency who can easily comprehend and communicate with people from your culture will enhance the overall project efficiency to a great deal.

   For example, Philippines is a reputed and one of the most sought-after outsourcing hubs for businesses from Western countries. This is because Filipinos speak fluent English and thrive in a Westernized culture.

2. Avoid the Herd Mentality

   Often, most of the companies choose big outsourcing firms for outsourcing their data entry services. This is known as the herd mentality, which often leads to increased outsourcing costs. Most of the competitors fail here, and this is exactly where you can learn from them. The idea here is to choose niche players who offer lucrative deals on data entry services, which the bigger players might fail to offer.

3. Negotiate Favorable Service Level Agreements

   Most of the businesses fail when it comes to venturing out favorable service level agreements. This is an important lesson that you should learn from your competitors' outsourcing mistakes. Lack of favorable SLAs, will make it difficult for the company to get the desired level of performance from the hired service provider. Penalizing the outsourcing firm for sub-par services will also create problems. Therefore, even if you shortlist the best firm, it is necessary that you create and sign favorable SLAs before project initialization.

4. Overcome Delayed Support and Response

   Differences in time zones often result in delayed responses to business requests and revisions. Learning this from your competitors will help you to avoid any complications associated with delayed response and support. Consequently, you can choose outsourcing partners who can provide dedicated staff working in the same time zone as you. This ensures timely response followed by adequate support.

5. Monitor Productivity by Preventing Shared Focus

   Often, you may see your competitors agreeing to work with an outsourcing firm where offshore resources work on multiple projects for different clients. Analyze scenarios where hiring shared resource didn't affect the project negatively, and instances where it led to inaccuracies. Analyzing the outcome of your competitors will help you to avoid troublesome situations by finding offshoring partners who can provide dedicated staff and let you continuously monitor the productivity of their data entry specialists.

Get Accurate and Organized Data Entry Services at Flatworld

Flatworld Solutions is a global outsourcing company offering reliable data entry services for over a decade now. We have been successfully serving global clients with their data entry outsourcing needs with our quick, efficient, and cost-effective services. We have the required infrastructure and follow stringent quality measures in place to provide you with the best possible services. Our data entry specialists follow strict data security policies and can also deliver the results in the data entry formats of your choice.

If you are planning to reduce your overhead costs and increase your data entry efficiency, then you are at the right place. Reach us now to discuss your data entry outsourcing needs with our specialists.