IT Outsourcing Fears vs. Team Values: How to Win Your Customers
To keep up with the times and use modern technologies, business owners from various industries prefer to have highly experienced IT specialists in their team. It may also require the involvement of external professionals. Especially if the company’s major activity does not presuppose having strong IT expertise.
To support businesses with the necessary skills, lots of IT outsourcing companies worldwide offer their services dedicating multi-qualified development or software testing and QA teams, providing 24/7 customer or infrastructure support, call center facility, etc. According to Statista, global market spending on IT outsourcing (ITO) is expected to amount to approximately 519.3 billion U.S. dollars by 2023. The numbers are quite impressive, aren’t they?
IT outsourcing entails numerous benefits. And we can spend a lot of time enumerating these advantages.
If to take the simplest one, it grants you access to additional expertise, a large pool of talents; secures assistance with such a remarkable stage of any software development life-cycle as testing and QA, ensuring the high quality of products you use or release.
If to speak about the most important one, it is a chance for you to focus on more essential tasks, such as a strategy for further business expansion or product evolvement.
But why despite all the benefits many people still hesitate to outsource?
Cost, confidentiality, timelines, quality of the service, and security are among the top fears we’ve heard and know about.
We at HireTester understand that offering software testing and QA services, it’s of vital importance to build trustful relations with our customers. Who does not want to be 100% sure in a partner responsible for one of the most important aspects of your business — quality of the product you release to the end-users?
Why people still hesitate to outsource?
To better understand potential customers and therefore face their needs more effectively, our team has done a research dedicated to outsourcing fears. We’ve reached the founders, co-founders, and managers from various business domains with the following questions:
1.Have you ever outsourced anything? If “yes”, what was that?
2. What holds/held you back from trying outsourcing?
3. What key principle(s) may guide / guide(s) you when selecting an outsourcing partner?
In fact, we were pleasantly surprised to find out that more than 2/3 of the respondents prefer to outsource software development, management, or testing tasks.
Software testing and QA stand somewhere at the top of the list, after the development, of course.
Here are the top 4 IT outsourcing fears interviewees named:
- Confidentiality and security. It is of utmost importance for a business that specific details about the company, information about the project, and its peculiarities stay safe and are not disclosed to a wide audience. The same goes for system or application integrity issues such as safety, security, privacy, usability, availability.
- Quality and timelines. No surprise that every client wishes to get the best services ever in the shortest time. But quick does not always, and in most cases, it actually does not, means good. Shortened project timelines result in reduced quality and lead to an increased cost of correcting the issues that appeared during the hastily done work.
- Miscommunication. To successfully operate on the IT outsourcing market, vendors must literally speak the same language as the client. However, communication challenges are still present. Cultural nuances, behavioral expectations, comprehension barrier, language proficiency form the miscommunication fear.
- Pricing. The last but, of course, not the least point mentioned by the majority of respondents is the cost of software development and testing services. Too often inconsistency between the quality of the provided service, and the price paid for it (high price and low quality) was the primary source of the complaint and substantial argument for further outsourcing fears and hesitations.
So, let’s move to the final question of the research! What are the key principles that guide business owners when selecting an outsourcing partner?
The answers differ. However, the majority tend to keep to the following points:
- Competitive pricing and service quality. As one of our respondents said,
“The cost associated with each outsourced solution should be carefully monitored and, therefore, the benefit should be greater than the cost.”
For us, this means that the quality of the service we provide is accurately reflected in the rates we offer.
- Partnership, trust, and reliability. An outsourcing company should become a partner for its customer, should follow client’s concerns, and be honest about what services it can or cannot deliver. Thus, the customer and service provider can better understand each other and therefore optimize their business relations.
- Knowledge and reputation. References, recommendations from influencers and previous customers about the IT service provider’s reliability and competency, ability to get the point of customer’s business can be trigger points in the decision-making process.
- Commitment and pro-activity. Having highly motivated people with interesting ideas and their readiness to dive into the project, ease the communication and project flow.
- Real team. The outsourcing team should be a team of real specialists — experts in their field. These should be the people who work together for a long time, are open to new challenges, and are oriented on the long-term engagement in the project.
Fears and expectations detected. How to meet them?
We highly appreciate the time respondents spent participating in the survey. Their answers showed a full picture of hesitations and expectations people considering software development and QA outsourcing services may have. It’s a pleasure to acknowledge that we are on the right way since we do treat our customers as partners. What other principles and values the HireTester team follows?
We strive to completely take over the testing tasks, freeing up the customer’s time for a further product or company development. Our greatest reward is positive feedback about our team and work. We believe that the first and the most important thing in any partnership is trust.
We don’t work from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. but strive for the best results within the agreed timeline. We notify our customers about all the milestones and bottlenecks we face during the software testing and QA.
We tend to keep to the project timelines and inform partners beforehand if we face any difficulties that can potentially prolong the project.
Our mission is to make the customer happy with our service. Thus, we don’t work just to check the box. Our purpose is to provide QA services aligned with your business needs, treating every project we take as our own.
We care about customer’s security and confidentiality. Therefore the non-disclosure and cooperation agreements are the documents we’re always ready to sign.
Moreover, all our specialists are experienced QA engineers who have proved their expertise on practice working on real projects, able to provide high-quality software testing and QA service for your product as well as easily integrate with your team.
Summing up
To summarize, customers’ fears and expectations for outsourced software development and testing services are alike. Every business owner wishes to work with a trustful outsourcing vendor, who can supply quality, timely, cost-effective services built on partner-oriented relations. If you are ready to follow these principles, you’re on a halfway to success.
