Clue: It’s About Mastery Not Money

Everyone knows the safety protocol that airlines walks you through before departing: 

“Should the cabin lose pressure, oxygen masks will drop from the overhead area. Please place the mask over your own mouth and nose before assisting others.”

Simply put: If you die, there’s no way for you to help anyone else.

This is crucial to understand even in the outsourcing world because it translates so well to the preparation leading up to the decision to outsource.

Outsourcing Isn’t A Band-Aid Fix

For some, outsourcing is a hands-off approach that gets customer service agents to answer a stream of tickets, but it shouldn’t be. Outsourcing has the potential to be so much more than just sending your angry, worried, upset, tired customers to a random agent in a faraway country to answer their questions or troubleshoot their software. It can unlock a partnership, onshore or offshore, to help add value to your business.

Outsourcing Provides An Extension Of Your Existing Team

At the heart of it, partnering with an outsourcing team should truly be about extending your existing team. Alongside creating an alliance, outsourcing customer support, technical support, content moderation, you name it, you get the opportunity to foster a partnership that carries the weight in meeting customer expectations and even exceeding them. Although it takes effort, over the years, our team here at SupportNinja has managed to help build relationships between countless companies and their outsourced teams. Read on to learn how your team can begin the groundwork before making the decision to outsource.

Key Preparation Step: Virtual Workplace Mastery

At SupportNinja, managing a virtual workplace is in our blood. We started with agents in the Philippines and now we're planning to expand into other countries like Brazil, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Romania, and Morocco. With 5 years of experience, our experience is that we understand the challenges that come with managing a remote team. For example, as a content specialist working remotely, I’ve created a consistent schedule to manage my workload efficiently everyday.

Virtual Workplace Master: A Content Specialist

Here at SupportNinja, my work as a content specialist consists of outlining and writing email content, working with designers and developers to launch new webpages, and collaborating with our video content specialist on new demos or testimonials. 

My day looks a bit like this:

1. Log into computer
2. Check calendar
3. Meet with the team overseas early in the morning (if I have a meeting)
4. Say good morning to my team in virtual standup
5. Check Slack messages received overnight and respond
6. Assign Teamwork tasks and respond to comments
7. Address any comments left in documents (InVision, Google Docs)
8. Send incredibly detailed follow-up emails
9. Document, document, document
10. Do it all over again tomorrow!
    

On top of all that, I also dedicate time to improving my workflow. This is something I constantly work to improve because by building these processes I build efficiency and promote credibility and ownership. Without it, we’re left with random tasks floating with some people straight up ignoring them or some just trying to decide what to tackle first.

How Does One Achieve Virtual Workplace Mastery?

Well, there are many ways one can achieve virtual workplace mastery. It could be encouraging culture, making it clear to your team that their mental health is a priority, setting boundaries, or even auditing standard operating procedures. All have the opportunity to lead you to mastery. Watch our “Leading A Remote Team” webinar series to learn more about how you can achieve virtual workplace mastery!