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Nearshore Vs Offshore Customer Service. What Is Better?

Contributed by: Aziz Nicleson

Outsourcing is a collaboration between two organizations that specialize in the identical (related or complementary) field of work and seek mutual advantage. When, for instance, an American firm outsources customer service to a team in Ukraine, given the existence of a cheaper workforce, the American firm benefits by cutting expenses, and the Ukrainian firm attracts customers, thus making a profit. Outsourcing may help meet the demand for labor and facilities to the businesses interested in it. Against disruption and force majeure, it can be a strategic way to ensure business continuity, as resources are not just placed in one place, but provide a profitable environment for enterprise operations and capacity building. In spite of the current situation, the future of outsourcing is not large-scale, but the change in labor conditions, which was a consequence of the spread of coronavirus disease, is a considerable push in its development.  

Today, we realize that the primary goal of outsourcing is to lower expenses. However, there are other reasons why businesses prefer outsourcing. Saving valuable time is one of them. For instance, quite frequently organizations outsource labor-intensive operational tasks in order to be able to focus on more important tasks, such as preparing business strategies, expansion plans, acquisitions, etc. In addition, outsourcing is commonly utilized to seek outside expertise that is lacking inside the company. In other words, when everyone occupies their own niche, the job is bound to be productive.

Types of Outsourcing

There are various types of outsourcing like IT nearshoring and IT offshoring.  Offshoring is generally recognized as the best-budget approach to outsourcing. Enterprises take offshore operations to contractors in distant lands, usually India or the Philippines, where there is plenty of talent and costs are cheap. The timing gap here plays an important role in terms of keeping the 24-hour operations of a business running round the clock.

Nearshoring is outsourcing to a country that is relatively close to the main host region of the company's core business.

Source: https://mobilunity.com/blog/nearshore-services/

The Benefits of Offshoring

There are many advantages of offshoring for businesses as they move operations to foreign offices. Listed below are the top perks: 

1. Saving money. The first and the least important. Offshore cooperation in the research and development of the product is really allowed to save money for companies. You can ask for help from the countries where the creation of certain products is cheaper. Not because the project will be less expensive. All because the overall standard of living in other countries may not be as expensive. The top countries for offshoring include India, China, Egypt, Brazil, and Bulgaria.
2. Offshoring of assets from real estate. Many offshore locations can cost cheap. In megapolises there is a simple rule: if the pay is high, it does not cost much to rent an office or to decorate it. Accordingly, hiring a foreign team in this plan will be cheaper.
3. Tax benefits. One of the great advantages of offshoring is the fact that this type of work can provide a large number of tax benefits. This in turn will allow even more savings.
4. New market - new acquaintances. You can turn offshoring to one project. But under the control will always be experts who can help you during the next similar experts. In addition, it is an excellent opportunity to get acquainted with the foreign market, to learn about its risks. 

The Advantages of Nearshoring  

Nearshoring, as well as offshoring, offers many advantages and perspectives when it comes to cost and performance as opposed to onshore deployment. The main strengths of offshoring are related to the geographic nearness of the broadened crew.

 

Source: https://mobilunity.com/blog/nearshore-services/  

These are a few of the core advantages of nearshoring: 

1. Agile Scalability. Nearshore engineering gives organizations the ability to scope custom engineering capability, to help support a single product or a burgeoning book of projects. The elected external collaborator is in charge of recruiting a dedicated crew with the most appropriate experiences for a particular software, enabling the customer's primary specialists to concentrate on executing higher-quality projects.
2. Availability of a Vast and Varied Workforce. When contrasting nearshore vs offshore outsourcing, a substantial dissimilarity is the presence of a workforce. When an organization selects a nearshore development project management partner, it has exposure to a staff reserve of possibly hundreds of highly qualified and varied professionals without the need for laborious in-house staffing. A software outsourcing partner assembles the ultimate team that matches the customer's design and later incorporates this expanded asset with the internal team of the organization
3. Cost-Effectiveness. By choosing nearshore developing software, companies can significantly reduce their development costs because they shouldn't assume the expense involved in recruiting staff or the greater per-hourly wages that onshoring requires. In addition, in comparison to offshore outsourcing, keeping an expanded team on board can mean that connection is almost immediate, which likewise contributes to lower development expenses.
4. It Is Quicker to Market Software. Nearshore outsourcing significantly cuts down on the learning curve required for the team to get up to speed. Thus, this in particular shortens the total software development life cycle and guarantees that the customer can bring a high-quality software solution to the market in half the time.
5. Locational Closeness. As opposed to offshore engineering, which can be done from the other side of the world, with nearshore outsourcing the extended IT team is within hands-on distance from the customer's office. This implies that the expanded expert team is available for routine onsite trips, as well as improved time synchronization, resulting in better collaboration, communication, and implementation of the project.
6. A Common Cross-Cultural Attitude. Situated near the customer's main crew, nearshore development crews more readily connect with inside assets. Doing so allows them to capture the customer's culture and still provide the sort of practical knowledge transition and coaching for behavioral transformation that offshore engineering departments are not always able to deliver. 

Why Nearshore E-commerce Support Teams Are a Great Business Opportunity?

Customer service is required of every business, regardless of the industry in which you operate. It's an important means of communication that ensures understanding between you and your customers. It's great if you're the type of store owner who likes to talk to your customers. However, you don't have time to spend all day at your computer answering emails. That's why you need to nearshore your eCommerce support team.

While many start-ups think it's more cost-effective to do everything themselves, a common mistake for many start-ups is not to hire a nearshore team. As a business leader, you should focus on growing your company. The key to its sustainability is a professional support team. 

The online store is growing - consulting customers and handling incoming calls take up most of your time. It makes sense to free up time to develop the online site by delegating authority to nearshoring. However, you need to understand that customer support is, in fact, the only point of personal contact with the client, as well as a source of information about the needs, level of service, errors on the site, the portrait of the client, and much more. That's why call center services tend to be last on the list of tasks that Internet business owners agree to outsource. But sometimes this is mistaken, as nearshoring offers many benefits, such as reducing costs and providing better control, which will lead to higher quality products. It also offers access to more skilled workers and reduces labor costs, which improves both quality control and customer service.