Jasmine Directory

Outsourcing is the business practice of contracting something to be done outside of the business itself. For example, rather than having your large company retain several staff members for answering support phone calls, businesses can outsource that work to trained personnel working in a call center.

These people have access to more hardware and software than the business wants to purchase. They also have training that the business does not have to pay for. The business must provide a script for the call center workers to read, and they must pay to retain the services of the call center. In general, outsourcing the work is a less costly method than doing all of the call center work in-house. The key to outsourcing is businesses wanting to cut costs by hiring other businesses to do work for them. The work is important to the business doing the outsourcing, or else they would cut the service entirely. However, it is not so important that the business wants to have complete control of it in-house. While many businesses that offer services for others to outsource to them are situated in-country, most outsourcing is done to foreign countries where wages can be significantly lower.

This is an extension of using outsourcing to cut costs. Businesses do open themselves up to risk outsourcing to foreign countries. They have less control over the quality of the good or service obtained, the conditions of the workers and other factors that can cause trouble back home.

Some services that are frequently outsourced include call center support work, translation services, security and janitorial services, manufacturing and the entire logistics process. In each case, the service is outsourced to provide the business with lower costs and a higher profit margin. Some of these services are outsourced because the business that they hire is simply more established and better qualified to perform the work than workers hired in-house would be.