Should You Track Your Outsourced Team’s Time and Other Best Practices?

Outsourcing promises reduced costs, high-quality outputs, and optimized resources. However, these outcomes hinge on the performance of the outsourcing partner.

Monitoring the third-party team is crucial to ensure the success of your business process outsourcing (BPO) initiative. With various strategies available, time tracking has taken center stage in effective performance management.

Is it a necessary evil, a micromanagement tool, or the key to establishing trust and transparency? Find out the answer in this article. Below, we discuss reasons for tracking your BPO team’s time and other best practices to help you obtain positive returns on your investment.

Why monitor your BPO team’s time?

Time tracking ensures BPO workers perform their tasks on time and within budget. By monitoring your third-party team’s working time, you can benchmark its progress against due dates and address potential delays early on.

Understanding how long it takes external workers to complete assignments also helps you estimate project costs. It enables you to verify that the BPO vendor’s billing reflects the actual work performed or the output.

Additionally, recording and analyzing time spent within a business day reveal areas where third-party team members encounter inefficiency. They can indicate a need for additional brand training activities, resources, or working strategies.

Lastly, time tracking results in better time management for all parties involved. Timewatch’s 2022 report shows this advantage reduces stress and increases productivity. Logging time also adds a layer of accountability and motivates employees to stay focused.

Does time tracking mean micromanagement?

Time tracking in the workplace does not necessarily mean you are micromanaging your BPO team. This best practice can be valuable for streamlining work if implemented appropriately.

However, it feels intrusive when micromanagers use data to dispute small breaks and idle times, indicating a lack of trust. The constant pressure of being watched can also demotivate staff. In a contact center, time tracking can further aggravate third-party call center agents already dealing with problematic customer interactions.

In some work cultures, employees consider excessive time tracking disruptive to their work-life balance. Although it helps workers provide timely deliverables, the strategy also increases burnout, especially when every movement is monitored and logged.

You can prevent micromanagement by tracking your BPO team’s time and following these best practices:

• When explaining the need for time tracking, specify measurable and relevant goals. Involve your in-house and third-party units in monitoring their working hours. Inform them about the approach’s benefits to personal and enterprise productivity.
• Use time tracking to enhance the overall efficiency of daily workflows. The data collected about an employee’s time guides human resource managers and third-party supervisors in setting realistic deadlines for short- and long-term tasks.
• Encourage open communication and transparency about time spent on tasks, especially the difficult ones. Discuss solutions that prioritize identifying ways to boost efficiency and not criticizing individual performance based solely on working time.
• Respect a BPO team’s work styles, especially with an overseas provider. Note that employees work at different paces. Instead, recognize the quality of work delivered within a dedicated time and due date.

When is time tracking effective?

Tracking a BPO team’s time becomes effective when addressing the imbalance between outsourcing cost and quality, especially for a long-term deal. Businesses outsource non-core tasks to reduce costs, boost flexibility, and improve service quality. Hence, questioning a provider for charging a high fee for poor output is justified.

Suppose your e-commerce business outsources call center operations. The provider handles your daily calls, live chats, emails, and social media activities.

You initially experienced improved customer service. The third-party team performed the function faster and more effectively. However, your company received complaints regarding customer support during the holiday season. Online shoppers reported slow response times and the third-party call center team’s inability to resolve issues regarding damaged products.

Even though your customer experience significantly declined, the BPO provider still demanded a 20% increase in service fees.

Without time-tracking data, you have limited insights into the external call center’s workflow. You do not know:

• How much time support agents spend on every interaction with consumers
• What causes the response delays and inefficiencies
• Why the service provider increased agreed-upon service fees
• What agents do during working hours or peak customer engagement periods

On the other hand, you can gain valuable insights into the BPO team’s processes if you properly implement the best practices of time tracking. The gathered data can reveal:

• Complex inquiries that consume a significant amount of time to address
• Agents who are constantly overloaded and experiencing consistent downtime
• The day with the most number of customer concerns
• Causes of the declining customer retention and satisfaction rates
• Areas the BPO team needs support for call center training
• Factors causing the increase in service charges

With time-tracking data, you can engage in a constructive conversation with your BPO call center partner to develop and implement strategies for enhancing customer service. These measures may include prioritizing ways to minimize resolution times and exploring performance-based pricing models.

Reasons to track other BPO team best practices

Besides practical and goal-focused time tracking, monitoring how the BPO provider applies other best practices is critical. This effort determines whether the third party consistently follows and effectively implements the following established measures:

• Performance assessments
• Quality assurance processes
• Standard operating procedures
• Robust communication protocols
• Technology and automation solutions
• Data security and compliance strategies
• Client relationship management approaches
• Disaster recovery and business continuity plans
• Iterative process improvements and innovations
• Continuous training and workforce engagement programs

Assessment results identify areas where the best practices require adjustments and improvements. The findings also help you monitor the BPO partner’s progress and output over time. Insights let you see if implemented practices contribute to your bottom line and lead to desired outcomes.

Other benefits of tracking are as follows:

• Ensure the third-party workforce maintains high-quality work. Tracking data informs whether the BPO team can deliver reliable and predictable outcomes.
• Set benchmarks and performance targets. Tracking the BPO team’s best practices allows you to pinpoint areas where it excels and struggles.
• Adhere to industry rules and regulations. Tracking the implementation of best practices and industry standards keeps the service provider compliant. It also helps avoid legal penalties and reputational damage that can hurt both parties.
• Maximize resources. Monitoring highlights the third-party unit’s effectiveness in resource allocation. It helps you improve resource distribution.
• Establish accountability within the BPO team. Workers are more likely to abide by best practices if they know they are being monitored and evaluated. 
• Match each other’s strategic goals, systems, and business approaches. The alignment is crucial for securing long-term benefits with the BPO provider.

Key points to consider when managing a BPO team

You can only maximize the advantages of outsourcing if you know how to manage a BPO workforce. Hence, when working with a BPO team, implementing time tracking and other best practices is essential. These measures help optimize outsourcing benefits and address related issues.

Consider these key points to improve processes when overseeing a third-party unit:

Select a suitable time-tracking method and platform

Clarify your goals when assessing the working hours of your BPO workers. When selecting the right time-tracking method and platform, note specific requirements, budget allocations, and desired functionalities.

Check what works best for managing the third-party contractors by first understanding what tasks need monitoring. Identify whether you have to record detailed time or summarized time logs for each activity. Then, choose a time-tracking method that fits each party’s work strategies.

• Manual time tracking involves BPO workers typing their working hours using spreadsheets. However, this option is prone to mistakes, and human errors cause 74% of data breaches. Prepare threat mitigation strategies to protect data and avoid wasting money on resolving such incidents.
• Automatic time-tracking software uses applications or websites to document working hours. It eliminates manual data entry activities and input errors, letting BPO workers focus more on their tasks. However, this method might lead to micromanagement, stifling employee creativity and flexibility.
• The hybrid approach combines manual and automated time tracking, offering enhanced flexibility and scalability. However, BPO workers must diligently log activities that software cannot record. Employers should also clarify needed data for automatic monitoring to avoid micromanagement issues and ensure an excellent work-life balance. 

Pick a subscription-based time tracker that fits your budget. Ensure the platform has all the features you need, such as project management tools and work-reporting capabilities. The tracker should also be user-friendly so contractors, especially those who are not tech-savvy, can easily monitor their working time.

Additionally, select the platform with robust security features. Confirm whether its cybersecurity measures match yours. Ensure the tracker has multifactor authentication, encryption, and access control to protect sensitive personnel data from hacks and breaches.

These actions help avoid wasting millions of dollars to mitigate the impact of malicious online activities. They also strengthen trust between BPO teams and clients. They assure workers that their personal information is safe while producing quality output.   

Address cultural and linguistic differences

Working with a BPO team requires developing and implementing best practices to address cultural and linguistic differences. Because providers operate globally and employ a workforce with diverse backgrounds, you need to emphasize inclusivity and fairness to avoid conflict.

This is what a BPO client should do to handle cultural and linguistic barriers when in a service-level agreement (SLA) with a third-party service provider:

• Research and study the cultural norms of the country where your BPO partner operates. 
• Support and host cultural sensitivity training for all parties involved.
• Leverage cultural diversity to innovate and bring unique perspectives to projects.
• Use clear and concise language when communicating with the BPO team.
• Practice active listening to understand the third-party team’s concerns and ideas deeply.
• Establish centralized channels for smooth communication and collaboration.
• Optimize translation tools to aid multilingual interactions and avoid misunderstandings.

Create and measure key performance indicators (KPIs)

Develop KPIs to measure your BPO team’s performance, output, and contribution to your business. These critical metrics help you track if the provider meets targets and highlight areas needing urgent improvement.

To guarantee effectiveness, identify quantifiable and actionable KPIs. Include a combination of indicators that measure cost efficiency and quality. Consider other relevant industry benchmarks to evaluate the BPO team’s performance against competitors.

Here are the standard KPIs used for managing a BPO team based on focus area:

• Cost and efficiency
• Average cost per call 
• First call resolution
• Average handling time (AHT)
• Turnaround time
• Quality and accuracy
• Customer satisfaction score
• Net promoter score (NPS)
• Error rate
• On-time service delivery
• Employee performance
• Agent productivity
• Agent absenteeism rate
• Employee turnover rate

The bottom line

Outsourcing front- and back-office functions doesn’t mean relinquishing all management rights. You must still monitor the BPO team’s working time and productivity, especially when service costs do not match the quality of outcomes.

Understanding the critical factors and methods of managing BPO workers allows you to maximize outsourcing benefits and mitigate risks. Focusing on measurable goals when tracking the third party’s time instead of micromanaging the external workforce enables you to achieve business targets and significant cost savings.

Do you want to work with a BPO team that values time and service quality? Let’s connect today! Unity Communications implements best practices to help streamline your daily processes and keep projects on track.