Wondering whether to Outsource Business Operations? Watch out for these signs!

Wondering whether to Outsource Business Operations? Watch out for these signs!
Offshore Software Development Company
Running a business enterprise is rewarding but overwhelming at the same time. This is the reason several business owners choose to outsource app development and other administrative functions.
Take a look at these interesting 2021 stats concerning outsourcing published by the online portal capitalcounselor.com.
  • The U.S. outsources approximately, 300,000 jobs every year
  • 70% of entrepreneurs outsource for reducing costs.
Outsourcing business operations have become a current trend and it has been observed that the offshore software development model is the most preferred option. However, the most intriguing question that baffles entrepreneurs is; “When is the right time to start outsourcing?” Well, this post answers it all.
Check out the obvious signs that indicate your business needs to adopt the outsourcing strategy.

Obvious Signs that indicate your Business needs Outsourcing

outsourcing company in India
Your Business is Expanding
When your market grows, your sales shoot up as well. This results in a rising demand curve and more work to be accomplished within a short period. But, catering to the larger volume of orders and delivering them on time, becomes a challenge if you are inadequately staffed. So, it’s high time you seek assistance from an outsourcing firm so that you are able to efficiently meet the rising demand while adhering to strict deadlines. Moreover, when you have a team of experts executing your voluminous tasks, you can invest more time and effort in promotional marketing and advertising your business.
Managing every function proving counterproductive
Several start-up business owners prefer managing every small operations starting from administrative and organizational tasks to customer service, all by themselves. And, since such companies possess a limited number of in-house employees, they end up spending a huge chunk of their time handling repetitive, time-consuming, and monotonous back-office tasks like HR administration, accounting, etc. These essential yet non-priority tasks, keep them from paying attention to core competencies and also suppress innovation. Nevertheless, such counterproductive chores can be easily delegated to outsourcing companies, while enterprises can focus on core business objectives that will facilitate growth and expedite revenue generation.
You are incurring huge expenses due to in-house team
Entrepreneurs hiring and maintaining an in-house team need to incur huge expenses and encounter loads of hassles like as below:
  • In-house workforce needs to be paid monthly remuneration and provided with other benefits like insurance, paid leaves, etc.
  • E-Commerce businesses without a physical store find it challenging to spend on office spaces and purchasing work equipment.
  • Small-scale businesses are likely to commit costly mistakes such as hiring incompetent/inexperienced employees or buying technologies and equipment that do not deliver a high ROI.
  • Large-scale firms end up spending a considerable amount of time and money in recruitment, training staff, and managing administrative/HR responsibilities and other back-office operations.
All these aforesaid challenges can be addressed by sharing your workload with an experienced outsourcing vendor. This is because you only need to pay the vendor for the specific services needed by your business, while all other expenses and hassle-prone activities are taken care of by the outsourcing partner. Moreover, outsourcing companies routinely train their employees so that their skills remain relevant and their services are up-to-date with the latest industry trends. So, the strategy to outsource tasks/projects undoubtedly saves time, effort, and expenses; regardless of the size and nature of your enterprise. Hence, consider outsourcing, if you need to reduce costs and speed up the time-to-market.
You are not equipped to fulfill a Specialized Task
During situations when your company is lacking in specialized skill sets needed for a particular project; there are three possible solutions. You can either train your employees to acquire that skill, or hire full-time professional/s well versed in that skill, or outsource your project to third-party vendors who can provide the specialized services you need.
Training in-house staff may sound productive, but at the same time, turns out to be time-consuming, and yet there’s no assurance that the work quality will be good enough to meet clients’ expectations. The second option – hiring staff – would be worth the investment, only if you are certain that your business will require that specialized skill on a long-term basis.
Outsourcing, on the other hand, sounds like a profitable option in terms of quality as well as delivery speed. Therefore, outsourcing is the most viable option when you have to execute short-term or unexpected tasks requiring specialized skills.
You are unable to adhere to Deadlines
How many of you have encountered situations as given below?
  • Your projects are running behind schedule and fail to get delivered on time.
  • Timely execution of tasks like accounting, regular website updations, etc. becomes difficult and cramming everything during the final moments becomes the norm.
  • You’re stressed that you hardly find adequate time in a day to realistically complete the necessary tasks.
The aforementioned scenarios are detrimental to your company’s goodwill. Furthermore, the pressure to meet deadlines is often nerve-racking and adversely affects the quality of your output. And, hiring an additional workforce may take you several weeks, which is not feasible if you have tight deadlines to meet. However, adopting the outsourcing strategy can be a huge relief as you can obtain adept professionals to whom you can assign responsibilities with immediate effect.
Your Sales are Plateauing
If your sales are plateauing and the root cause happens to be insufficient workforce and improper time management; outsourcing minor tasks or production functions will resolve your issue. This is because most outsourcing agencies specialize in specific industry verticals and domains, and so deliver premium-quality output.
It’s not possible to add New Services without Discontinuing the Existing Ones
There are times when you intend to offer a new service as per the latest trends that would prove advantageous to your clients. But, to your dismay, this plan wouldn’t work out due to the lack of enough time or workforce and you are on the verge of losing clients. And, if you add those services, you will have to make the tough decision to discontinue some existing services for accommodating the additional workload. Nevertheless, outsourcing can be the savior of such situations.
Your Customer Service is worsening
Customer service is a vital aspect that decides the success of a business enterprise. Whether it’s just sending periodic updates via emails to clients or more detailed interaction, it shouldn’t be ignored at any cost. This is because if you are too tied up with other responsibilities and unable to provide adequate attention to customers, they are likely to tail off to your competitors. Furthermore, your capacity to onboard new clients will sharply decline as well. The modern age customer behavior is such that if they are kept on hold for more than thirty seconds, or your instant messaging service is slow; they’ll desert your brand.
Outsourcing, on the other hand, will enable you to provide your customers with an enjoyable UX, and hence will help you in customer retention as well as attracting new ones.
Your Products/Services are vulnerable to Security Threats
Several modern-day businesses are vulnerable to cybersecurity threats such as ransomware, zero-day attacks, etc. Such attacks can cause monumental damage to the affected firms. To protect themselves from such a predicament, companies need to continually update their security systems. In many instances, firms are not adequately equipped to prevent and handle cyber-attacks. Well, in such cases outsourcing software operations to a prominent outsourcing agency are the most viable solution. The reason is specialized IT companies leverage the latest technologies like AI that will allow your security system to create protection layers autonomously. Besides, these agencies are well versed in the methodologies of adhering to security protocols. Thus, outsourcing can be the ideal solution for minimizing security threats.
You have to Fulfill Compliance Mandates
Businesses across certain domains like healthcare need to comply with national as well as international regulatory compliances concerning the protection and security of electronic data. And, the organizations that fail to comply with such mandates end up paying huge fines and tainting their reputation altogether.
Adhering to regulatory compliance like HIPAA Compliance involves certain complex requirements such as the ability to audit your security system and software infrastructure, generate accurate reports of the audits conducted, and many more. The simplest way to satisfy these essential requirements is to hire a proficient IT firm that possesses the necessary resources for securing your network, adhering to the cybersecurity measures as mandated, conducting audits promptly, and generating relevant reports.

Concluding Thoughts:

Isn’t it wise to trade your weakness for rewards by reaping the benefits of outsourcing app development services? So, whenever you find any of these alarm bells ringing, it’s high time you should consider outsourcing. The myriad benefits of this strategy ensure high ROI for your business.
Are you on the lookout for a reliable outsourcing agency? Contact Biz4Solutions, a prominent Offshore Software Development company serving global clients for the last 10 years!

Virtual Event Applications: Benefits, Development Steps and Tips!

Virtual Event Applications: Benefits, Development Steps and Tips!

Owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, thousands of personal as well as corporate events got canceled or postponed, affecting numerous businesses. But then, virtual event applications came into the picture and countless events were conducted through these apps for carrying out personal as well as corporate events. Due to this, several apps got outstanding attention, which were not even known to the masses, and their downloading spiked.
Downloads of video conferencing applications were recorded to be 62 million, just in a single week of March 2020, after the pandemic, according to TechCrunch, the renowned online newspaper for technology news. Since then, a plethora of virtual event apps have been fabricated and the face of online conferencing or virtual event industry has changed forever.
Today, most of the event app development services that has adapted to this online trend are making immense profits from the apps. So, in this blog post, we have shed light on the fundamental steps to create such a next-gen virtual event application. We have also talked about how they prove advantageous to diverse businesses, and their significant features. Let’s commence.

Virtual Event Apps and Their Potential Advantages

What is a virtual event? Well, the events that are hosted online allowing the participants to participate or view the event from any corner of the world are known to be virtual events. These can be webinars, virtual conferences, internal or external hybrid events, etc. Such digital events have some agenda and are usually expected to be collaborative sessions and are streamed online.
Such digital events are hosted using live-streaming platforms called virtual event apps; where live streaming is the essential functionality of these apps. Zoom, Webex, Google Meet, Vimeo, Digitell, GoToMeeting, Intrado, Evia, etc. are a few popular platforms/apps being extensively used.
  • Safety and Security of All – During the pandemic, online event apps ensure the health and safety of the participants, event organizers, and all the involved staff, as there is no physical meeting between people and hence social distancing norms are maintained.
  • Better Opportunities – All the details like the number of tickets sold out for events, related email marketing reports, etc. are available on a single application. Besides, the participants can access the pre-recorded events, as per their will and availability. Also, they can chat with other users during live events to build business relationships. Such benefits offer extended opportunities to both- app owners as well as participants.
  • Budget-friendly – The app owners need to bear only the initial cost of development of the virtual event platform, unlike the offline events. In offline events, the event planners have to consider a host of other costs like the cost of expensive equipments, location, travel expenses, accommodation for participants, lodging, etc. Thus, with virtual apps, the cost of events is drastically reduced making the events much budget-friendly.
  • Flexibility and Scalability – Whether a simple sales kickoff meeting, or a thought leadership meeting, or any event for that matter, all types of events can be flexibly hosted using these platforms. Options in multiple languages are also available for inviting guest speakers. Furthermore, users all across the globe can instantly join the meeting at the same time.
  • Easier Networking – Participants don’t have to go to a particular place to meet new people. Online chatting options make things much easier. Besides, they can conveniently collect details like the name, profiles, companies, etc. of other professionals in the meeting.
  • Feedback Collection and Result Analysis – Virtual event apps allow the participants to provide feedback easily through polls or real-time sessions. This feedback will help in the evaluation of the overall performance of the event, allowing the owners to make future improvements. Also, the insightful data generated using these apps are quite useful for result analysis. Such apps can track data like the number of participants, the timing when they logged in, what amount they paid and how etc.

Top Features of Virtual Event Apps

  • Event registration
  • Profile creation of the users
  • Event page for details like event topic, date and time of the event, host details, etc.
  • Speaker booths for multiple speakers to create their profiles and related details
  • Facility to record live sessions and meetings
  • Real-time chatting, one-to-one, and group chatting options
  • Live video streaming option
  • Payment options via PayPal, Google Pay, or credit/debit cards, etc.
  • Social media integration for sharing event-related data with other contacts
  • Integrations like sales tools, email marketing, etc.
  • Report generation and analysis
  • Other features like screen sharing, virtual hand raising, mute participants, polls, etc.

Steps to Architect a Virtual Event Application

Here are the crucial steps required for the creation of an online conference app:
Development of Backend: In the initial development stages itself, build a server for running the application. It is always advisable to create the server from scratch rather than making use of any ready-made technologies.
Designing User Interface: UI marks the first impressions for your virtual conferencing application and hence, it is of utmost importance to thoughtfully design a captivating and intuitive UI.
Android and iOS Compatibility: If you want to reach a wider audience range, it is essential that your app runs on both- Android and iOS devices. For ensuring that your video streaming app supports Android, make use of WebRTC and for iOS, use Swift.
Next, let us look into the two most important aspects during the development of virtual event app- cloud network and video architecture.

Cloud Network

The virtual conferencing applications come with an integrated data center infrastructure that is strictly supervised, tracked, and regularly modified by the development teams. This cloud network is created for providing global connectivity and for enabling users from all across the globe to connect and participate seamlessly. For example, Zoom has more than 15 data centers globally which are going to be expanding in the coming years.

Video Architecture

Now, the app architecture should be optimized to meet the video requirements for which, four important features must be considered, as given below:
  • Distributed architecture: This architecture enables the participants to share meetings across the network and allows them to easily join meetings via private communication using the nearest data center. Using a distributed architecture rather than a centralized approach will offer the required scalability to the app so that thousands of viewers can simultaneously get a consistent video experience.
  • Multimedia Routing: This step offers the users with various streams of videos from other participants and also reduces the need for computers’ power and thus, makes the app a greatly scalable system.
  • Multi-bitrate Encoding: Every single stream can be altered to several resolutions besides stream routing. Due to this, the need to decode, encode and optimize the output is removed. This also allows the apps to provide video quality levels depending on the network capabilities and the system.
  • Service Application Layer: Higher quality of service application layer ensures optimized audio, video, and screen-sharing for every device and the available bandwidth for offering the best network-wide experience.

Concluding Views

During the pandemic, most of the offline events are now being conducted online using the live-streaming event apps. It is very likely that in the future too, several events will be carried out online, owing to the benefits like cost and time-saving and the event app development industry will flourish more than ever. Needless to say, the need for creating live streaming apps will remain higher for years to come.
That’s it for now. Hope you enjoyed reading this post.
Do comment below or drop us a line for further assistance on building virtual events apps.