Peak season is always a great opportunity for a startup company. With more customers than usual, you can expect a lot of revenue to come in. But such seasons also bring in a lot of challenges, particularly for smaller companies. Discover how you can better take advantage of these seasons with Virtua Outsourcing Solutions’ help.
Why Should Your Startup Company Outsource During Peak Season?
Whatever your startup company’s line of business is, there are several good reasons to get external help during peak season. These reasons will dictate not just what kind of outsourcing you should use. You will also get a good idea of how much you can outsource during these periods.
Cost Efficiency
Getting additional employees that only stay for the duration of the season can be rather laborious and costly. You have to go through the same intensive hiring process used for regulars. After that, you also need to provide for their training even if they are only staying for a short period.
Outsourcing will give you quick access to additional personnel. You can even deploy them just a day after signing them up. And since you can get an outsourcing company’s services for a fixed contract, it is easier to set aside a definite budget for it.
Better Scalability
While peak season is generally seen as ushering in more customers, it can still be unpredictable. The exact volume of customer demand can vary significantly throughout the season. This issue makes it harder to expand your business accordingly.
There is also the matter of having to roll back operations once the season is over. Letting go of temporary employees can be challenging. Outsourcing provides you a more flexible solution to overcome these issues. Firms like Virtua Outsourcing Solutions can readily assign additional agents to you as demands increase during the season. On the other hand, they can also readily reduce the number of personnel assigned to you as needed.
Greater Availability
During peak season, you would want to extend your operating hours as much as possible to get more of the incoming customers. By outsourcing, you can do that without overstretching your team.
The outsourced provider can take over after your regular business hours. You can even extend to a 24-hour operation to maximize revenues. They can take orders from customers in the evening and prepare them for your approval and processing the next day. They can also provide customer support even outside office hours, paving the way for satisfied customers.
Preparing Your Startup Company For Seasonal Outsourcing
While it is only for a short time, your startup company still needs to plan out how it will do its seasonal outsourcing. Your goal is to have the outsourcing process fit seamlessly into your business workflow. That lessens any disruptions that might happen when transitioning to and from the seasonal peak.
Identifying Your Seasonal Peaks
With that in mind, your first step is identifying when these peaks happen. Note that they can vary from time to time. However, you can get an idea of when those increases start coming based on past experiences. You can also look into industry-wide trends to get a picture of where the peaks begin.
Virtua Outsourcing Solutions can help you even at this early stage of the game. Our virtual assistants will help conduct marketing research to better understand your sales patterns. From there, we can assist in planning out your strategy.
That planning typically happens at least three months before the start of the seasonal peak. At this point, you should also have a clear idea of what the typical customer engagement will be like. For instance, look into what kind of queries you can expect from them. You need to take into account both the initial pre-sale inquiries and the after-sales questions.
Once you have the above information, decide how to prioritize each query. If you are expecting more pre-sales inquiries, you can have your internal team focus on those. The outsourced teams can then handle after-sales customer support. This will give you an idea of what type of outsourcing service to get.
Getting The Right Outsourcing Firm For Your Startup Company
Even if getting only temporary agents, you would still want to have high-quality service. Some of the things to consider when looking for a seasonal support provider include:
- A full-service team: The outsourcing provider should provide you with a support team that can handle multiple roles.
- Multilingual support: This one is especially handy if you plan to cater to customers outside of your region or country.
- Bundled Services: Depending on the type of bundled services a provider offers, you might get more savings than having to negotiate each service separately.
- Brand expertise: Beyond their expertise, you should see how dedicated the provider is in handling seasonal work. Their portfolio should include these seasonal projects.
- Easy integration: The outsourced team must be ready to use whatever tools you already have and integrate these into their work processes.
- Reporting: Your chosen provider should be ready to provide recommendations on how to improve your services for the next season.
Virtua gives you all of these and more. We can create a seasonal outsourcing package that will best fit your needs for that particular year. And we can make adjustments to your service contract as needed as soon as possible.
Getting Your Startup Company Seasonal Team On Board
Once you have signed up with us at Virtua, we start meeting with you months before the start of your peak season. Here, we get to know your business more, including specific goals for the season. This helps us better plan out how to deliver the best service for you.
At this point, you can also start training the agents that we assign to you. What you will like about our service is that our agents require minimal training. Thus, you might want to focus on the specifics of your business processes. Beyond that, our teams are ready to deploy after a short orientation period.
Get The Most Out Of The Peak Season With Virtua
Even if it is for a few months, having the right outsourcing team to help your startup company during peak season can bring a lot of revenue. Virtua Outsourcing is always ready to help you achieve that goal. Sign up with us today and we can be your partner for the seasons to come.