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Data plays a vital role in the smooth functioning of your business. Whether it’s crafting a business strategy or generating after-sales reports, data serves as the backbone of these processes, fueling the growth and success of your enterprise.
Managing data entry is a challenging task that demands a dedicated and efficient team. It involves significant resource allocation, which can be both costly and time-consuming to oversee. Outsourcing this administrative function to a third-party service provider can help alleviate these burdens and reduce expenses.
If you’re looking to maximize savings, offshore data entry services are an excellent option. In this article, we will delve into the benefits of outsourcing data entry tasks to offshore vendors.
Understanding Data Entry
Data entry refers to inputting information into a company’s data system using computers or other suitable electronic devices. Data processors, transcribers, and encoders commonly deliver data entry services.
Many jobs focused on data encoding do not require particular skills. However, some complex tasks require certain expertise. Individuals with knowledge of basic computer commands and language rules can apply for data entry positions.
Data entry belongs to your company’s back office. Back-office services include payroll, billing, email processing, product listing, medical transcription, captioning, proofreading, survey data gathering, and word processing.
This type of admin work often consumes more time and energy despite its repetitive nature, especially in a large company. Establishing an in-house team of data entry specialists can be costly. However, you can outsource manual data entry services to continue to ensure error-free data entry while saving on costs.
In particular, selecting a third-party vendor abroad offers a practical approach to help you generate more savings and further boost your company’s efficiency.
Exploring Offshore Data Entry
Small, medium-sized, and large businesses deal with large volumes of data daily. Technological advancements make it possible to simplify the management of these massive datasets. Despite digitalization, data management still requires human intervention to ensure accuracy and security.
Data plays a significant role in running your company. The success of your business relies on how you sort, use, and secure your data effectively. Hence, you should prioritize how to execute your data entry processes properly.
Yet, handling data entry activities on your own can prevent you from working on your business’s core functions such as business strategy development and brand establishment. Even though using technology helps simplify processes, data entry is still a time-consuming, labor-intensive, and high-cost task that can hinder you from expanding your company.
To avoid extensive labor and high expenses, consider hiring a third-party vendor to oversee your data entry tasks. An even more cost-effective option is to obtain these services from business process outsourcing (BPO) companies in foreign countries that offer low-cost rates. This approach is known as offshore data entry.
According to a survey conducted by Clutch in 2021, 18% of 500 small business owners and managers in the U.S. preferred to outsource their business tasks to offshore companies. They cited cost-effectiveness and global and diverse perspectives as benefits of offshore outsourcing.
By acquiring data entry services from offshore companies like those in the Philippines, you can achieve increased profitability and sustained market value while saving resources. Although varying time zones pose a challenge to outsourced data management, you can still expect high-quality services due to their highly trained agents and structured information-tracking systems.
Continue scrolling down to find out more about why you should outsource data entry tasks to offshore BPO vendors.
Five Factors Motivating Companies to Adopt Offshore Data Entry
Solid business reasons guide each decision and step you take for your business. As a business owner, you should look into each organizational aspect affecting your strategy and growth.
Your in-house team should fully administer some components of your company, mainly the core elements. However, you can hire contractors to perform non-core functions such as data entry.
But why should you outsource data entry, especially to offshore BPO vendors?
1. Generate Savings
Saving money helps address both expected and unexpected expenses of your company in the future. Adding savings to your business strategy is vital to reaching your goals when facing challenges or unforeseen events. It also allows you to resume operations during a decline in your sales.
Data entry services are also essential in keeping your company up and running. Although these are part of your non-core processes, you still need to ensure proper data management to avoid confusion and conflicts.
Offshore data entry outsourcing is your best option for generating savings and increasing efficiency. It eliminates the need to spend more to recruit, hire, train, and retain employees for your in-house data entry service team. It also minimizes your budget spent on buying new equipment.
Third-party providers from offshore regions have a fixed monthly rate for their data entry service offerings. Thus, you can plan your budget allocations and savings ahead of time.
2. Prioritize Growth and Other Business Functions
Every business constantly explores new ways to expand. Growing your brand is essential for it to thrive amid global competition. As a result, you need to prioritize business functions that contribute to your success.
Even though data entry serves as one of your company’s foundations for success, information-focused activities are still considered non-core functions. Data entry services are time-consuming and labor-intensive, and they can keep you from concentrating on your most critical initiatives.
Outsourcing data entry jobs can help you resolve such challenges. Agents from your outsourcing partner are highly trained and prepared to deal with this kind of work, freeing you from worrying about the quality of their services.
3. Establish a New Virtual Department
Each division of your company plays a crucial role in keeping your processes organized and smooth. You can set up a dedicated office or department whenever you have new offerings or product portfolios. But if you cannot spend extra money for this move, outsourcing is the most inexpensive option to form a new business unit, especially when dealing with data entry services.
Offshore data entry gives you an entire department without creating a physical one. This approach enables you to free up and allot office space to your other critical functions.
Data entry outsourcing also reduces your space rental costs. It does not require you to expand your facility because your outsourcing partner has a dedicated site for the work. And communication between you and your third-party provider can occur virtually.
4. Leverage Expertise
You cannot totally prevent mistakes when managing large volumes of data. If you are not knowledgeable enough to handle big data, you will see endless mistakes flowing across your work. These will result in repetitive tasks, delays, and inefficiencies.
You need a dedicated data entry service team to address these challenges. You can set up an in-house back-office team if you have enough time and resources to spare.
However, it might take years to hone the skills of your in-house team to perform data entry tasks accurately. If you are just starting up your business, you might struggle financially because of the need to additionally pay for training, salary, equipment, and other necessary employee benefits.
Consider acquiring back-office outsourcing services from a third-party vendor if you have a tight budget and schedule to form an in-house team. An offshore data entry provider, in particular, has highly trained and certified agents to perform your back-office tasks.
5. Provide Strong Privacy Protection
Data entry services involve a large amount of information. Mishandling your consumers’ sensitive personal data can result in breaches, hacks, and low trust ratings.
Respecting and securing privacy are among the most critical factors you should consider in maintaining your customers’ trust and loyalty.
According to a study by global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, 52% of 1,000 surveyed North American consumers trust companies that do not ask for information unrelated to their products. Based on the report, buyers also prefer businesses that respond to breaches quickly and publicize their consumer-privacy interests.
You cannot protect your customers’ confidential data yourself, especially if you are new in the industry. An offshore data entry service partner with a solid privacy protection policy offers security for your business and consumer information.
An offshore data entry service provider specializes in conducting data entry work, and its privacy rules comply with industry regulations. It is transparent about its security practices because it wants to retain the trust and loyalty of its clients. In addition, it ensures that its data entry specialists undergo regular security training to assure its clients of privacy protection.
The Bottom Line
Data continues to pile up as your business expands. However, organizing and securing your business information, which is critical to your business operations, are time-consuming and labor-intensive tasks, especially when dealing with a large customer base.
Offshore data entry outsourcing offers you an option to clear your backlogs. Aside from saving resources and simplifying processes, outsourcing also improves accuracy and security in handling your data.
The proven and well-structured information-tracking systems of data entry service providers make all these benefits possible.
If you’re interested in exploring further, we invite you to check out our comprehensive article highlighting the 20 Best Data Entry Service Providers.
