TIPS & RESOURCES

Wondering what administrative tasks to outsource? Read on for a guide for eight admin tasks to outsource and the benefits of outsourcing administrative tasks

8 Administrative Tasks To Outsource

A small business owner wears so many hats, from CEO to entry-level administrator. Their self-confidence and can-do attitude are admirable, but that doesn’t mean they lead to the most efficient outcomes. In fact, 72% of small business owners feel overwhelmed with the number of tasks on their plate—or hats on their heads.

If your head is weighing heavy, it’s time to invest in a solid hat rack: an outsourced team of administrative specialists to share the responsibility.

But when it comes time to take off one hat or another, where do you start? This guide will go over eight potential admin tasks you can outsource and the benefits that outsourcing administrative tasks can provide.

#1 Call Answering

Is there an answering service for small business? One of the most basic admin tasks that can be a huge help to outsource is simply answering the phone. The last thing you want is for your customers or business partners to become frustrated because they can’t get a hold of anyone to answer their questions. A virtual receptionist or call center can help by answering all inbound calls, which means you won’t have to:

Answer simple, sometimes tedious customer questions
Handle complaints and appease frustrated customers
Speak to and qualify new potential leads
Receive product orders
Provide technical support for bugs, glitches, or damaged items

And these are just a few examples. Nexa’s 24/7 virtual receptionist is easy to set up and affordable. With someone handling all these basics, you can free up your time while maintaining peace of mind that everything’s being completed correctly.

#2 Live Chat and Text Answering

Beyond just picking up phones, you can outsource all types of inbound communication—including answering SMS texts and live web chats. While it can be difficult to manage omnichannel customer support on your own, it’s easy and efficient with a dedicated outsourced team, allowing you to simultaneously offload administrative tasks and add on new methods of communication.

#3 Appointment Scheduling

Whether you own your own medical practice, automotive repair shop, or beauty salon, appointments are the bread and butter—or nuts and bolts—of so many industries. You can outsource the tedium of filling your schedule while maintaining fully booked days for maximum revenue.

A quality outsourced scheduling service will even integrate with your existing calendar and CRM to ensure you’re always notified of new appointments and changes in your schedule. Beyond just the initial scheduling, your outsourced provider can automate appointment reminders and confirmations to minimize no-shows, which cost your small business.

#4 Bookkeeping

Turning a pile of expense receipts into a neatly organized balance sheet is no easy feat, especially for small business owners who can’t afford a full-time bookkeeper or accountant. However, the meticulous organization of your financial records is of utmost importance.

By outsourcing administrative tasks and bookkeeping tasks, you’ll be entrusting someone else to:

Keep track of your business expenses
Monitor your accounts receivable
Create up-to-date financial reports
Invoice clients
Pay outsourcers and contractors

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#5 Lead Generation and Sales

One of the harder parts of running any business is turning leads into new customers. You don’t want to spend so much time chasing new customers that you neglect your old ones. On the other hand, if you don’t generate new customers, you won’t be able to grow your business.

To solve this issue, try outsourcing lead generation, qualification, and sales. It allows you to continually reach out to prospective customers without disrupting other elements of your business.

Here are a couple of things to keep in mind when vetting potential outsourcing partners for outbound sales calls:

Personalization – You don’t want to hire a center that will have callers blindly following a script. Instead, be sure that you’re outsourcing to real agents who know how to talk to people and can adapt on the fly.
Strategy – Follow-ups are important, but how soon and how often? Do you want to integrate text messaging into your strategy? These are the types of questions you should be able to go over with your outsourcing partners so that you can be confident they’re following the strategy you believe will be most effective for your customers.
Analytics – Lastly, you need to have a variety of tools to assess how your outbound calling campaign is performing. That way you can adjust your strategy as needed.

#6 Research

Whether it’s market research for a product in development or medical research into a new potential patient treatment, research is a vital task that is consistently time-consuming.

How can you best deploy outsourced researchers? Depending on your company and industry, consider asking them to prepare:

Competitor analysis within your vertical
Trend research to identify new opportunities for product iterations
Industry news recaps so you can remain at the forefront of your industry
Potential client profiles leading up to a big sales pitch
Updates on emerging technologies that could disrupt or advance your offerings
Legal compliance and regulatory requirements

By outsourcing the research itself, you’ll be very well positioned to use this information to your company’s advantage.

#7 Client or Patient Intake

Knowing details about your clients or customers is important for businesses regardless of industry, and in certain industries (like healthcare), that information is vital to provide them with the best service. Intake is also time-consuming and can easily become monotonous.

An online form can help save time but an outsourced intake service can manage the administrative process from start to finish, leaving you with only the information you need. Some issues a dedicated intake team can help you handle include:

Following up to ensure people fill out the required forms
Requesting clarification or additional information, if necessary
Dealing with confusion and answering questions that arise during the intake process
Providing information according to the specific company’s protocol

Intake services help simplify the onboarding process and deliver the information to you in real-time. This takes a potentially frustrating experience and makes it smooth and easy for both you and your customers.

#8 Maintaining Accurate, Up-to-Date Records

Meticulous organization is every company’s best friend, but when you’re busy with clients, sales, product development, and so much more, record-keeping can feel more like a foe. Especially for small businesses, outsourcing these routine tasks ensures that you have accurate information when it comes to:

Customer sales data
Customer contact information
Employee contact information
Statistics of key performance indicators (KPIs)
Patient or client files

You can’t outsource your day-to-day business operations, but you can make sure that when you need information, it’s available and up-to-date so you have everything you need to make the best decisions.

Benefits of Outsourcing Administrative Tasks

Is your inbox overflowing with unread emails, your phones ringing off the hook, or your to-do list growing increasingly long by the second? So much of our time is spent managing tedious administration tasks like communications, organization, record-keeping, and intake. And while this is all incredibly important to running a successful business, it can detract from the work that only you and your core team can do.

By outsourcing this type of work, you’ll see benefits beyond just a smaller badge number next to your email inbox:

Time – Everyone has heard the phrase “time is money.” You can agree or disagree with the sentiment, but one thing is certain: time is finite. The more time you or your staff are spending on administrative tasks, the less time you have for the rest of your work. And there’s only so much time in the day before you either run out or lose all semblance of work-life balance.
Money – Maybe time isn’t money, but money is. You could hire additional staff to deal with administrative tasks, but their salaries will almost always cost you more than what you’ll pay to outsource. Beyond that, outsourced teams are built to scale alongside your company and are already equipped to complete the tasks you need, mitigating the need for employee onboarding and training.
Attention – Even if you do manage to keep up with your administrative tasks, they still require you to divert your attention when it could be on other elements of the business. This could lead to product issues, uninformed business decisions, a dip in team morale, and more. In short, diverted attention can result in avoidable mistakes.
Quality – Did you start a business because of your acumen for administration? The reality is that professionals who specialize in administration are likely to be more efficient and proficient at it than you are. Outsourced administrators will answer phones, organize files, intake clients, and schedule appointments with a high level of expertise, while you remain committed to building your business.

Effective Outsourcing with Nexa

Outsourcing may seem foreign at first, but between the extra time, added savings, and a renewed commitment to quality across all areas of your business, you’ll quickly realize that it’s well worth it, especially when it comes to manageable tasks like inbound calls and scheduling. Wondering where and how to outsource call center?

When you outsource with Nexa, you can be assured that you’re working with top administrative professionals. We have experience in a variety of industries such as legal, real estate, and healthcare, and will quickly adapt to the needs of any company. With real-time reports and analytics, you can see just how well we’re performing.

When you outsource, you’re showing trust in your partners. At Nexa, we reward that trust with great service and measurable results.