Filed under: Outsourcing in the News
Here’s a great promotion for those of you interested in learning more about outsourcing. Farrar, Straus and Giroux is offering a free audio edition of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. If you haven’t read it already, Friedman begins by taking readers into Infosys, the Indian outsourcing juggernaut, and then traces the history and reasons behind the global outsourcing movement.
The promotion is available through August 4th. You can sign up for the free audio book by following this link: http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/giveaway.
Filed under: Outsourcing in the News
We subscribe to the Knowledge@Wharton e-newsletter – and in the most recent issue we received, we got this message:
Wipro Technologies and Knowledge@Wharton are conducting a survey on how companies prefer to source business processes from outside providers and how they ensure the quality of those services. This is the first survey in a two-part series. Please take a few minutes to respond to our questionnaire via the link below. All responses will be kept confidential, and the results will appear in a report to be published by Wipro and Knowledge@Wharton. Many thanks for your participation.
We’re pretty interested in hearing the results of this survey, so if you source your business processes and are inclined to participate, here’s the link:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=sQHAwZ6ArZ_2fW2lYPmM3HSA_3d_3d
We found this great blog post today over at Entrepreneur.com, Top 20 Questions to Ask Before Hiring an SEO Company. Here are the first 10:
- Do you guarantee top search engine rankings?
- Will my website need to change?
- What is your process for keyword research?
- What is your pricing, and when can I expect (ranking) results?
- How will I be able to gauge progress, and what level of communication should I expect?
- Are you visible in the industry? Where can I find you?
- Describe your firm’s general SEO experience and a few client references.
- How long will our agreement (contract) last?
- What should my SEO agreement include?
- Who are your competitors, and why are you better for us?
We do a little bit of SEO work at TPL. One of our current clients has his own in-house SEO campaign and dropped in on us in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, during one his frequent business trips to Asia. He sat down with managers and staff and provided a nearly 2-day training on SEO and how we could support his in-house SEO campaign.
It was a really great learning experience – it seems that this client really knew his SEO. His internet store is consistently ranked on the first page of Google results.
Of course, there are many tools and tricks to in order to achieve SEO – and there isn’t a clear-cut formula. That’s why online businesses outsource their SEO work – it’s a huge job and a lot of of it is quite repetitive. We’ll even bet that some of the SEO companies you’re outsourcing to are outsourcing to companies like us!
Filed under: Advantages/Disadvantages of Outsourcing/BPO, Other Outsourcing Destinations, Outsourcing in the News
There’s been a slew of outsourcing articles in the past week, resulting from Brown-Wilson Group’s annual Black Book of Outsourcing, which identifies the 50 best-managed global outsourcing vendors.
Here are a few that we found interesting:
Critics Challenge Outsourcing Rankings, BusinessWeek:
“Brown & Wilson Group’s principals defend their way of doing business. Scott Wilson and Doug Brown say their survey, which results in multiple rankings, is the world’s most independent and objective rating of outsourcers.”
Report: India losing grip on outsourcing ecosystem, ZDnet:
“Despite their slide on the list, Indian players remain a major force in the outsourcing industry, and outsourcers in China are still nowhere close to replacing them.”
Philippines tries to edge out India for U.S. outsourcing jobs, Christian Science Monitor:
“The BPO market [in the Philippines] has grown by nearly 50 percent a year in the past three years alone, generating nearly $5 billion in revenue last year. That’s still only a fraction of the business that India – the global market leader – captures.”
Outsourcing Looks Closer to Home, Wall Street Journal:
“As the world becomes smaller, companies are no longer considering moving offshore as the most cost-effective and efficient way to outsource, but instead are asking: what does the business demand? This transformation means outsourcing is seen as less of a crutch for the technically deficient or work-force challenged company, and more of a strategic tool. ‘It is becoming a matter of looking at the world as a marketplace of skills and products and deciding what gets done where the best.’”
How Offshoring Affects Customer Satisfaction, Wall Street Journal:
“If a company can save more by sending customer service overseas, it will have more opportunity to devote at least some of that money to upgrading its business.
In addition to considering whether or not to offshore customer service, companies should consider whether back-office functions such as information technology may be suitable for offshoring. Our study found that back-office offshoring had no effect on overall customer satisfaction. So the savings a company garners this way aren’t offset by dissatisfaction among customers.”
We’re always interested to hear which cities are moving up or down the list of top outsourcing destinations. It’s no suprise that Indian cities still rank highest, as reported today in BusinessWeek: India Still Top Choice for Offshoring. What’s interesting to note is that China is catching up. For a host of reasons, including the appreciating rupee, infrastructure improvements in anticipation of the upcoming Olympics, and government support, some expect China to become the top outsourcing destination as soon as 2011.
