Outsource A Case Study on Hiring Data Entry & Calling Executives

The following testimonial appeared on a popular forum. Read on to see what one of our customers has to say about working with O2I.

Executive Search and Staffing

Last month I signed a contract between my company and Outsource2india, a leading outsourcing services company from India, and I am very happy with the outcome. We have two talented women from India working 8 hours a day helping us out in our daily business.

I was able to choose them from a bunch of CVs and to interview them. They are learning new tasks daily and are very cooperative, efficient and polite. They have a project manager who contacts me just about every day to make sure things are going smooth. They also have a computer technician who helped setup their computers and is also giving any computer support needed. They both have good computers (Pentium 4) and have SkypeOut setup for making calls to US customers (costs me another few dollars a month and I pay directly to SkypeOut since it's my account. More info on SkypeOut at www.skype.com). We use www.logmein.com (remote computer like gotomypc.com but it's free) to train them on new tasks and to monitor their work (we actually don't have to monitor them because they are very responsible and dedicated.) This is what they are already doing and will do in the future.

Currently Doing:

Data entry - This includes entering faxed invoices info into an Excel sheet and entering requests for quotes and purchase orders into our Yahoo store so that the order or quote is populated into our StoneEdge OM.

Telephone calls - Calling customers to make sure they received invoices and asking them when they plan to mail the check (we have lots of customers that we bill since they are public organizations.)

Miscellaneous - They also compare prices of competitors and enter the info into Excel. We then use that info for making competitive ad campaigns on Google AdWords (and you guessed it right, they will do those marketing tasks too in the future.)

Plan to have them do:

Just about everything. This month I plan on teaching them how to use StoneEdge OM remotely from India. I have encrypted the credit card numbers for additional security (you can ask OM customer support how to do that). They will be entering tracking numbers and perhaps start to process orders. They will also call vendors to ask about lead-time for shipping items and shipping status for existing orders.

I am also planning on having them help us build a monster commerce web store.

Oh, I forgot to mention, one of the two needed to brush up her language skills so the company appointed a special tutor who teaches them language skills daily (at their expense, planned 15 hours).

My recommendation - when you interview, do a lot of scenarios and if you are not sure about the language skills ask to interview another candidate. In our case it worked out ok because one of our new workers, even though she had some accent problems, is very talented in other tasks and very motivated to brush-up her accent so in a few weeks that won't be an issue either. The other worker had prior experience in calling US customers so she speaks fluently and even her accent is minor (but even she is getting the free 15 hours' English course together with our other worker). I have been training them for a month and even though training took up some of my time I already see today that I have less work to do on my end.

I highly recommend this company. The entire staff is so professional (always calling to see what our expectations are and asking if we are satisfied) this includes the project manager, the computer technician, the English teacher, and of course our two dedicated young women.

I apologize in advance if you have questions about this issue and I don't get back to you since I will be out for a few days (I will try later to get back to you). I spoke to someone else in this forum that I know has started using them too after I recommended this company to him (if he wants he can reply to this thread and add his feedback) but I think the best way is to contact their sales representative just to get an idea of what they can do for your company. They can actually do a free demo project just to show you their capabilities. I had no need for that since I saw how professional they were from day one.

By the way, I am not making any money from referring you to this company. I am happy to share with you all, my great experience and I am happy to promote this company that is doing such a great job. I hope this discussion has helped some of you, just like I have learned from others on this forum.

And one last thing, we tend many times as small business owners to complain about the fact that we have to work so many hours (even if we enjoy being our own bosses) but we should never stop thinking how we can take some of that burden off our shoulders. For a reasonable price, you can get a helper from India that can help you towards that "small" goal of working fewer hours.

Have a nice weekend.

CEO, leading Distribution Company in Miami