Outsourcing can help your company save money and boost performance. But the success of your outsourcing campaign may ultimately come down to how effective your outsourced agents are. That’s why training is so important. With a solid outsourcing training plan in place, you can optimize your returns from this business decision and set the stage for future growth. This guide will help you do that. It covers the ins and outs of training outsourced agents to help you make more informed decisions.

Let’s get started.

Training Outsourced Agents Requires a Multi-Prong Strategy

The first thing you should note about training outsourced representatives is that there are several different types of training you may need to provide. We’ll take a closer look at each of those categories below.

Product Knowledge

Whether you’re outsourcing with sales representatives or customer support agents, these people will be representing your company to potential or existing customers. They need to have a clear understanding of your product or service. Otherwise, they’ll do a poor of representing your brand and may dissuade customers from doing business with you in the future.

Target Audience Knowledge

Your outsourced team will be working with your target audience on a daily basis. But they may not truly understand them. For example, if your target audience is a U.S. consumer and you hire a sales team from Eastern Europe, there may be a cultural gap.

To get the best results out of your team, you would want to take steps to eliminate this cultural gap through training. That way, the outsource representatives can engage with your target audience more effectively.

Customer Support / Sales Skills

Next, your outsourced agents are going to need customer service or sales skills, depending on what you’ve hired them to do. These can be general skills that apply to all industries and more specific ones that are unique to the items or services your company sells.

For example, let’s say you run a B2B SaaS company. You would want to make sure that your outsourced sales team knew how to approach conversations with B2B decision-makers in large organizations. They would struggle to connect with your target audience if they didn’t have that knowledge.

Technical Capability

Finally, you want to make sure that your outsourced team has the technical capability to use the software and equipment that you ask them to. For example, if your company uses an internal product management dashboard, you may need to train your outsourced team on how to use that dashboard effectively. If you don’t, it could be difficult for your internal and outsourced teams to work together as efficiently as they should.

How to Approach Outsourced Agent Training

Now that we’ve covered the different aspects of training to keep in mind when working with an outsourced team, let’s look at approaches. Here are some tips for creating an approach to your company’s training strategy for outsourced agents.

Make Training an Ongoing Theme

First, make sure that training isn’t a one-time event. To get the best results, you will want to make training an ongoing priority. This can involve creating individual training plans for leaders and asking them to do the same for the employees they oversee.

You may also want to set dates for periodic progress check-ins with leaders or even individual employees. For example, you could do quarterly or annual check-ins to assess the progress that a person is making toward your overarching training goals for them.

The process could even be as simple as asking workers to take skill tests every so often. Then you can evaluate the answers and offer targeted training when necessary.

Set Clear Goals and Objectives

Next, it will be important to set clear goals and objectives for your training outcomes. For example, you don’t just want your outsourced team to improve their efficiency. You want them to improve their efficiency by 10% or 20% over the course of the year.

Clear goals can be measured. This is important because it allows you to track progress over time and make adjustments when necessary. For instance, if you look at efficiency and realize it’s not on track to meet your 10% annual goal, you could take early action to correct course and get back on track.

Build Strong Relationships with Leaders on Your Outsourcing Team Leaders

It’s also worth keeping in mind that you’re not the only person who is capable of training workers on your outsourced team. You can also leverage leaders of the outsourcing team to take advantage of their knowledge.

This is important to do when outsourcing because you won’t have the same level of day-to-day oversight over your outsourced workforce. And when you have a strong relationship with your outsourcing team leaders, they will feel more comfortable communicating with you honestly. That’s a prerequisite to getting as much value out of your outsourced business unit as possible.

Train on your Brand Voice

Another key element to keep in mind is training on your brand voice. Doing this will help to make your outsourced workers fit in with the rest of your customer contact points. That’s an important part of creating a brand identity.

For example, you might want to share the types of phrases that your company uses to describe its products or its overall branding goals. If your outsourced workers have this knowledge, they will be able to use it to provide a more uniform experience to your customers, which will be a positive for your company’s growth goals.

Consider Managed Learning Services

Finally, you may also want to think about managed learning solutions. These are companies that specialize in outsourcing training and can do the job for you.

The value of this is that you don’t have to worry about becoming an outsourcing training expert on your own. You will be able to use a turnkey solution that improves your outsourced workers without having to allocate a significant percentage of your schedule to make it happen yourself.

The Cattalyst offers managed learning solutions that are informed by our decades of experience in the outsourcing industry. We can take your goals and help you train up your outsourced business unit until it’s capable of reaching them.

Challenges and Solutions

As you begin to implement your outsourcing training solution, you may encounter various challenges. Here are three we want to alert you to now so that you can start planning for the solutions you need to overcome them before they can derail your progress.

Language and Cultural Barriers

First, you may encounter language and cultural differences when attempting to train a team of outsourced workers from another country. These can lead to knowledge and awareness gaps, which may slow your progress and prevent you from hitting your targets.

The solution is to partner with someone who can act as a bridge. You want a leader within the outsourcing team or as an external provider who understands both your culture and the outsourced team’s culture intimately. This person can alert you to potential communication challenges and help you resolve them before they become significant issues.

Scheduling Differences

You may also encounter scheduling challenges when attempting to train an outsourced team. This can happen when you partner with an outsourcing firm that’s on the other side of the world.

There are a few ways to avoid this problem. One option is to set up a standard communication channel that leaders on both sides of the equation know to check at certain intervals. For example, you might set up a Slack that you know to check at the start and end of each day to find and respond to messages from outsourcing team leaders faster.

You can also look for outsourcing team leaders or external vendors to help with scheduling problems. They can step in to act as your voice when you’re not available to ensure continuity and minimize downtime.

Data Security

Finally, data security is an issue for outsourced teams that utilize internal data. The solution to this problem is to make sure you emphasize good security practices when training your outsourced worker. The software that you use should also have built-in security protections to avoid especially disastrous outcomes from data breaches.

The Cattalyst Can Help

Training while outsourcing isn’t always easy – even when you use the best practices as outlined in this article. That’s why you may be interested in getting a free consultation from The Cattalyst.

We have decades of outsourcing experience and can leverage it to identify your training challenges and find customized solutions. Whether you’re just getting started with outsourcing or you’re ready to take an existing outsourced team to the next level, we have the expertise you need to make it happen.

So why wait? Take the next step toward your goals by getting in touch with us today for a free consultation. We look forward to hearing from you.