Insourcing Versus Outsourcing

Up to about ten years ago, outsourcing was a word that was unheard of in conventional business circles. Companies, regardless of their size and the nature of their operations employed their own staff, and enjoyed the benefits as well as the downsides of having a "hands on" staff. However as word spread down the pipeline of the benefits of outsourcing, more and more companies, particularly medium to large sized began to investigate and adopt this cost cutting measure.

As in every scenario, company personnel management began to discover that there were pluses and minuses to the software situation also. Not every company that they trusted their outsourcing to, were actually capable of meeting the promises that they had made and the quality of the staff that they employed were way below the standards promised when the deal was struck. Companies who found themselves in this situation were faced with the dilemma of going back to employing their own in house team, with the attendant increases in cost. Many have found a compromise somewhere in the middle, where the more sensitive issues and oral customer contacts are handled by an in house staff, especially telemarketing. Other functions where there was little or no contact with customers such as software programming and research, accounting and finance services and systems and similar jobs could be handled and handled well in countries such as the Philippines where staff had a high work ethic yet whose financial demands were relatively low.

Now that the dust has settled on the issue of whether insourcing versus outsourcing is a win situation, the result of the ongoing debate seems to be a tie. There are companies who have succeeded in totally outsourcing their item administrative as well as their sales and customer service departments. Such is the depth of their success that they require only a handful of staff to oversee and liaison with their outsourcing partners, who might be situated anywhere in the World. The principal outsourcing centers are in India, with Eastern Europe and the Far East beginning to take an increasing share of the market. For all the success stories, there are those who report of absolute failure in attempting to outsource customer service. However if we were capable of carrying out further research, we might well discover that these companies placed just a little too much faith in their outsourcing partners.