Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA (1888PressRelease)
March 07, 2007 - Los Angeles, CA Feb 14, 2007 -- At $2000-$3000 per month per full-time employee this is cost prohibitive to many small and medium-sized businesses.
"I looked into outsourcing my customer service to the Philippines, I heard they speak great English and are very Americanized, but after contacting 25 providers, none of them would even take my business and all of them had rates that were way above our budget." Said Mark Simon, owner of an E-Commerce website. "I always heard that college educated people earn $200 over there, but these companies were asking for $2500 a month and a minimum of 5 or 10 employees"
Mark is not alone in deciding to keep business on-shore, in many job markets around the US its simply cheaper to hire locally. All that is starting to change, there are whole new batch of smaller providers for smaller companies, while they may be hard to find, if you know where to look you will be surprised. One company, SupportSave Solutions, is an American owned and managed company offering a full-time dedicated employee for $699 a month including all facilities and telecom costs. They claim to have pioneered the flat rate pricing scheme in the outsourcing industry in 2004.
"Companies turn to us for a variety of reasons, usually its that they are having troubles finding employees in their local markets, just can't afford to grow their business with more US employees or to cut costs. We find that on average, the increased productivity leads to greater growth and our clients end up hiring more employees in the US, which is contrary to some people views on outsourcing" Says Chris Johns, CEO of SupportSave Solutions. www.SupportSave.com
Increasingly, large BPO or call centers are looking for ways to penetrate the SME market, a necessary Many experts believe the market for Fortune 1000 clients has become saturated, but shifting down to smaller companies won't be easy. Most small businesses prefer to deal with other small businesses and their budget's are far less. Some studies indicate the only was large providers can penetrate these markets is by acquiring many smaller firms with lower cost structures and allowing them to operate independently. This could pose a problem in a fragmented market, but there has been some activity as Indian firms looks to outsource or move voice based services to other destination like the Philippines.
There are an estimated 20 million small and medium-sized businesses in the US, and less than 1% of these businesses are outsourcing.
