How APAC companies can evaluate scalable outsourcing options

BPOs and call center / content moderation outsourcing companies, such as ours, compete on a variety of factors.

While we like to discuss them all (who doesn’t?), and we sometimes want to downplay the cost factor – because there’s much more to building client relationships than just the number on the invoice – the fact is, cost does matter when companies evaluate scalable outsourcing options. Cost matters to everything in business, frankly.

A few weeks ago, we published an APAC Global Expansion guide. The idea is for APAC companies, who are generally seeing strong growth (growth projections shrunk a bit recently due to coronavirus, but are still at over 5%), who want to expand into Europe, North America and other markets. What do they need to know? 

We identified some core pillars in the Global Expansion guide, including top talent, top facilities, regional expertise, multilingual skills, and solid infrastructure. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about unanticipated costs that you can incur when trying to expand from APAC. 

Some of those major costs can include: 

• Regulatory approvals – and for healthcare and fintech firms, these might be (a) higher costs and (b) take longer to be approved. 
• Product localization, meaning new content, translations, legal fees, marketing within the new region, and more. 
• Pricing – you cannot simply take APAC pricing, currency convert it, and charge the same in, say, Germany. You need to investigate and understand the existing market in your expansion target. You need to price according to that. If done properly, this isn’t really a cost and can represent almost instant revenue. If done poorly or not researched well, you can operate at a loss in the new region for six months or more.  
• Hiring new staff, setting up a building, etc.  

When you think about the potential costs of new market expansion, working with Conectys makes a lot more sense. We have the pre-existing infrastructure. We have the multilingual ability to help with product localization quickly. We have the partners on the ground to help with operational establishment. We’ve done this with hundreds of other brands.  

This is where it also goes beyond cost: Because we’ve worked with so many clients, and done well in the process, we become much more than a cost center reduction for your expanding business. We become a consultative partner that know the regions you are targeting and how to be effective in those regions. Many still think of the BPO space as a kind of cost arbitrage, but when done properly with a partner who understands the regions you want to  grab market share in, it’s much more of a value-add partnership than a cost play.