Offshoring often gets a bad reputation, especially nowadays with American workers and industries being put under a new lens and sharper focus. Say the word "offshore" and people will occasionally look at you as if you just cursed. Throughout the 90's and 2000's, Americans were getting bombarded with ever-depleting customer service through a rapidly growing outsourcing movement led by major corporations. This left a really bad taste in the mouth of the American consumer, and created a strong distrust that companies of any and all sizes would ever invest in customer service as they had in the decades prior.
In those days, large Telecomm's, Insurance companies, Software companies, and others, were farming their entire customer service apparatuses out to developing countries with relatively poor infrastructure and even worse human rights conditions. People would be packed into warehouses like sardines in a tin can, working long hours, 6-7 days a week, answering call after call. Is it any wonder that the experience for the American consumer suffered? Call quality was terrible, background noise was high, call disconnects were a regular occurrence, and to top it all off, the people working the other end of the call were exhausted, under-trained and underpaid.
Fast forward to today, and many still cringe when they here the word "offshore". The reality is, modern offshore relationships are a completely different animal now, and very much for the better. We're not talking apples to oranges here, but rather apples to orangutans. It's not even close.
Why is that? Well for starters, infrastructure has improved by orders of magnitude. Broadband Internet now exists practically everywhere, with a level of redundancy and resiliency that they could only dream about in decades past. Call someone in China, and the call quality is unquestionably tremendous given the distance that the bits and bytes are traversing. Hop on a Zoom call with a friend in Vietnam, and you'll see them in hi-def with practically zero perceptible latency. That's the marvel of modern infrastructure world-wide, and it's enabled incredible things for businesses.
Secondly, work-from-home wasn't just a thing that caught on here in the states during COVID, it's rapidly become the global trend and generally for the better. You can now hire people just about anywhere in the world who can connect to a virtual work environment from the comfort of their homes, while on fast Internet and reliable power! No longer do you need to cram people together in one centralized location, with the risks that this inherently presents. This means no traffic jams, hurricanes or typhoons to get in the way of your people getting to work on time.
Lastly, human rights awareness has grown significantly, even in just the last ten years. Everyone recognizes that people, all over the world, deserve a living wage and a reasonable work load. The great news is that modern offshore engagements don't have to involve compromising prosperity for any one of the parties involved. There's enough to go around where everyone can be happy and comfortable, as it should be. We're all entitled to thrive.
The important takeaway here is that offshore is just talent in different places. It doesn't have to translate to loss of onshore jobs, in fact, when done correctly it only solidifies and improves onshore jobs.
Ibex Staffing Solutions understands the right way to leverage offshore talent through workforce hybridization. We don't just offer the talent, we offer the guidance into how to make a hybrid workforce work for you, your existing staff and your customers.
Contact Ibex today and see how we can help you accomplish your business goals without busting your budget, upsetting your valued customers or marginalizing your existing staff. Everything is possible with the right talent.