Education is a priority in everyone’s life. And that’s why not just the wealthy ones should have access to this opportunity, but the underprivileged as well. Likewise, better boundaries for the youth are established by adequate education provision. In simpler words, an investment for the future.
Moreover, the growth of the education sector shows no signs of slowing, with research indicating that the industry is anticipated to be worth $10 trillion by 2030, totalling more than 6% of the gross world product. While these chances are great, educational institutions, as well as business process outsourcing companies who want to take part in this global trend, must be apprehensive of the evolving landscape and be ready to meet critical challenges, such as the five key trends affecting the sector identified by a panel of higher education specialists: shifting industry requirements, the growth of consumerism, increasing competition, geopolitical factors, and shrinking profitability margins.
Outsourcing some functions of your operation is the way to attain both of those goals. It’s why working with BPO outsourcing companies in the education sector is becoming increasingly common and significant. Either change to meet expectations and circumstances or get left behind.
In this blog post, we will mainly tackle the 10 benefits of outsourcing education to BPO providers, but first, let’s go over the necessary information you need to know about education outsourcing.
Let’s get started!
What is education outsourcing?
Education outsourcing refers to functions and services that can be offshored by institutions in the education industry. This enables the educational sector to concentrate on giving quality education to their students while outsourcing service provider’s work on back-office tasks. With outsourcing, schools and universities can have a productively-run, education-rich environment.
Why does it make sense to outsource education industry roles?
- Technology and innovation play a key role in education delivery into the future. As the use of internet access and mobile phones become ubiquitous in emergent and developed countries, the service and operation of educational institutions must be optimised for those platforms.
- According to a 2015 Forrester survey, consumers increasingly leverage agent-assisted digital communication channels and self-service for customer service. That’s how future clients are going to find you and how they’ll engage with you.
- Education-focused organisations benefit from more professional, cost-effective, and efficient delivery of their services to a digitally-oriented client base.
The expertise required to set up and maintain the optimised education infrastructure already exists, with outsourced teams possessing proven experience in:
- Providing email support, live chat and mobile self-service platforms.
- Keeping websites up-to-date with course offerings.
- Handling IT – troubleshooting, maintaining systems, allowing customised online learning portals and video lectures, grading and teaching resource software, and library systems.
- Handling knowledge databases (web design, blog posts, UX, FAQs, searchability for self-service).
- Maintaining profit margins with regulatory requirements and increased competition necessitates streamlining your business operations. Schools and universities, driven by government spending cuts, have already turned to outsource to fill the gaps.
Some functions well suited to being undertaken offshore include:
- Compliance – e.g. preparing for inspections like Ofsted and ISI, staff ratios and HR (staff qualifications and regulatory checks).
- Student Fee management – e.g. payment plans, discounts, collection, etc.
- Financial management
- Document management
- E-learning services – e.g. teaching live online courses about architecture, business, finance, design, and more.
- Resources and facilities management – e.g. purchasing, repairs, insurance, maintenance
Roles and functions that You Can Outsource in the Education Industry
Administrative/enrollment officers
Dealing with students and their information, as well as ensuring everything is up-to-date, is time-consuming. From student information, enrollees, curriculum, grades and so forth.
A secure, updated and accurate school management system courtesy of your outsourced provider will help you elevate records in a snap. Managing data and uploading it to the database itself is no longer a worry for you, as your remote team can do data entry for your institution. Likewise, the database they use can remove and clean up any signs of erroneous records.
With outsourcing, ensure that you will only be dealing with timely and accurate records and information. This can help you and your in-house staff focus on providing support to students and stakeholders.
Online tutors
Do you struggle to find time for your studies? Maybe you want to learn something new to update your existing skills, improve your chances of promotion, or help change careers. Have you considered online tutors?
We all know that attending classes can be hard when you’re trying to balance your career and family. You might have no time to attend classes on a daily basis or need additional help with some subjects. That’s where employing outsourced online tutors can make all the difference, giving you the help you need when you need it to pass your assessments with flying colours.
With the internet, you can leverage the experience of outsourced online tutors globally, helping you to learn easier and faster, and achieve better scores, all for a fraction of the expenses of hiring in-house.
Teaching assistants
In most cases, teachers simply don’t have the means to spend quality one-on-one time with each student in the class. Moreover, massive size classes often cause some students to fall behind, not understanding their work as well as others and floundering from a lack of individual attention. This minimises their results and your educational outcomes.
As such, hiring remote teaching assistants is a sensible option that needs to be highly considered. Just by using the internet, teaching assistants can reinforce the teacher’s lessons, either in small groups or one-on-one with individual students. This additional teaching assistance can increase your students’ understanding, help them feel included in the class, and enhance your facility’s reputation.
E-learning specialists and technologists
Do you want to boost the e-learning capabilities of your educational institution? Maybe you already have online courses but need to expand your department. Online learning is a rapidly developing sector that can help your institution expand and grow, significantly optimising your market share.
Outsourcing renders a range of e-learning specialists and technologists that excel at developing interactive and innovative content across various subjects, operating with minimal supervision but under your direction at all times.
English teachers
With an increasing number of students coming to learn English, providing top-quality English lessons is essential. Even top universities deliver their classes in English, making teaching English a very competitive field. As an educational provider, one of your biggest challenges is the cost-effective delivery of English lessons to your students, which is why outsourcing English teachers makes sound business sense.
The Philippines is well known for its bilingual education system and has become one of the best low-cost English language teaching destinations for students. But you can minimise your costs even further by hiring offshore English teachers.
Financial managers
Keeping accurate records of invoices and receipts is not the primary focus of these staff. They are here to ensure your school has the necessary funds to keep it running. Offshored accounting and bookkeeping teams can do these menial tasks and can provide the support they need.
Your remote team will only provide processed financial reports that will give insight to your financial managers. This is to make sure they perform on the correct information and can give you precise projections to keep a healthy cash flow.
With necessary support from your outsourced team, you can redirect your budget allocations and in-house staff to all-important core operations. Additional support, albeit virtual, diverts your human resources on activities that have greater value. By doing this, you enhance your service delivery and education quality.
Instructional designer/modules designer
As everyone has access to the internet while technology constantly evolves, education is no longer just the sole purview of schools, universities, and colleges. That’s because many organisations and companies now need to educate their staff and clients, so the scope for online educational materials has vastly increased.
This is where outsourced instructional designers or modules designers become vital to the process of learning because they can plan, develop and streamline educational resources for a variety of needs for any organisation, company, and educational facility. These needs can include student guides, training modules, seminars, tutorials, manuals, online courses, and inductions. They can be in the form of instruction materials, videos, assessments and so on.
Customer service
This role is all about how well the interaction between customers (teachers, parents and students) and educational institutions can be optimised. Examples of what an outsourced customer support team can do include offering technological support that can make it easier for teachers and students to consume the learning resources, making sure that parents can access the required details to track the growth of their children, and many more.
10 Benefits of Outsourcing Education to BPO Providers
The following are the reasons outsourcing roles, functions and services in the education industry is a smart strategy.
1) Concentration on the educational institution
With less focus on back-office tasks due to the education BPO provider helping you and your staff to handle repetitive and time-consuming administrative tasks, you will have more time to concentrate on issues related to your students and faculty, address the obstacles that hinder your teachers and mentors for them to be efficient, and rethink your strategies for effective recruitment, counselling, career development, student services and remote instruction.
Education outsourcing will help you acquire the needed support you need in specific areas. This strategy strengthens the grip on efficient and streamlined background processes. All these are to keep your school running at top speed.
2) Bringing in specialised experts
Even if a school or university has an in-house staff focused on guiding students about technical courses or the creation of educational materials, some abilities and capabilities are far too specialised. As such, they may lack familiarity with the authoring tools required to produce advanced interactivities for your e-learning.
Fortunately, BPO providers have access to staff who are experienced and knowledgeable in instructional design, learning and creation (L&D), and every other aspect of effective online learning when they choose to outsource educational development.
3) Combining high-quality content and faster turnaround times
Given that outsourced service providers have the necessary expertise to complete the project and are knowledgeable about the development process, growth is likely to be completed more rapidly. Why? They incorporate quick authoring tools and technologies, which helps them to rapidly develop high-quality modules while keeping the material effective and entertaining for the target student age group.
4) Helping to let staff focus
Overwhelming paperwork robs your educators and mentors of focus on things that matter. Likewise, administrative support drowning in tedious tasks cannot provide the necessary assistance your teachers may need from them. Sometimes, hiring additional staff is not an option, too, as it can also be highly expensive. Thus, you force your in-house employees to double their workload, which may lead to poor quality.
By outsourcing several functions, roles and services to a third party, you can free your in-house staff from repetitive, tedious tasks and let them focus on more valuable projects.
5) Saving on costs
Many educational institutions are already running at a deficit– ill-equipped to pour resources into fundraising or student recruitment services. Education outsourcing can help close the financial gap, giving schools and universities access to tech-savvy and highly-trained staff, and technological infrastructure at reasonable rates.
For instance, collaborating with a remote team enables educational facilities to dramatically reduce expenses on training development because the e-learning provider is in charge of acquiring, maintaining, and upgrading the technology needed to educate students.
6) Scaling up or down easily as needed
Schools and universities may produce scalable educational solutions on demand using outsourcing. Vendor products include asset libraries and built-in templates, making it easier to plan for gradual or rapid scaling. Moreover, outsourcing education-related tasks provides access to years of domain-specific knowledge and instructional design expertise.
7) Boosting learner engagement and productivity
Courses in online learning with a good dosage of interactivities and multimedia are stimulated and preferred by modern learners. Outsourcing educational development to a knowledgeable and experienced external service provider elevates the likelihood of attaining that goal. Students feel more dedicated to the tasks allotted to them and are ready with the necessary skills for their school responsibilities when they are trained by expert educational professionals.
8) Partnering for growth
Growing education institutions can count on flexibility from their document management partners. As schools and universities nationwide open their doors to a new generation of students, the possibilities for expansion are endless. Whether you’re a small vocational college welcoming record enrollment numbers or a large state university looking to open a satellite campus, a partnership with an outsourced professional document management team can ensure you retain the flexibility and freedom to achieve new growth while maintaining consistent levels of storage capability, security, and peace of mind.
9) Handling the various education pain points
BPO service providers combine the most comprehensive levels of guidance, advice, and support with immediate action. Although instructors and teachers may have the same capability, a majority of them only have basic knowledge of technology.
But with outsourcing, remote staff understand how different educational institutions are in terms of having specific requirements and distinct demands. Thus, it aims for simpler services that are easily accessible to educational institutions.
10) Increasing employee retention
By evaluating your efforts, you can meet every employee’s job satisfaction. That includes staying updated on current market standards for salary, benefits, training and best practices for developing attractive workplace culture, strong manager-employee relations and quality employee experience. If you want to increase your employee retention rate, one of the best options you have is to outsource your team from a reliable external provider.
Conclusion
To wrap it up, attaining high-standard education is now made possible through outsourcing. Results include higher completion rates, higher learner productivity and engagement, cost efficiency, and much more. The time has come for BPO providers to be seen as crucial partners in nurturing students into fulfilled, well-rounded individuals and in helping the reputation of educational institutions become more remarkable as they move along the future.
Take back your focus and deliver impeccable education to your students with The Lead Enquiry. We have services tailored for this sector that we can further customise based on your needs through our reliable and trusted service providers partners. Our industry expertise and experience allow us to generate processes with the speed and accuracy guaranteed. Contact us today.
