Came across this little snippet the other day and thought didn’t know of.  there are a couple more I know of that are not on this list also.  Off the top of my head I could mention would be General Motors, Yahoo!, DHL and FedEx.

Now if you are dealing with a Fortune 50 or even a Fortune 500 concern, as most of these are, perhaps you aren’t going to be able to get anything going with outsourcing short of one of those multi-story, multi-million dollar "conventional" call centers … so this might not seem like a useful article to the majority of my readers.

But consider this.  The actual majority of businesses in the US are NOT in the Fortune 500 … American business, more so every day, is small business.  In fact many Fortune 500 business entities outsource even within the US, converting company division after company division into outside contractors.

In the spirit of my friend Bob’s recent book (">’>well worth a read, by the way) and in answer to the so often heard complaint, "Oh if only I could make a living in the Philippines, I’d move tomorrow", let me just throw out a couple ideas:

• Specialized Call Centers: Back in my former hometown, Colorado Springs, there is a fellow who owned several profitable McDonald’s restaurant franchises.  Now a McDonald’s "store" is a pretty healthy investment and most of them are pretty darn profitable … so why doesn’t this fellow still own his?  because he found that taking orders at the drive-thru window was one of the hardest jobs to fill with motivated employees, and one of the most profitable parts of each store’s business.  Of course he could have paid more to the order-taker, but in addition to coming directly off his bottom line, that would have created an employee slot that was sometimes overworked and at other times "twiddling their thumbs" waiting for an customer to drive up to the window.  Even when a drive thru line is busy, the actual time the order taker spends with each customer is only about 15% of the hours on duty … the rest of the time they are idle, waiting for the line of cars to move.  The solution?  Tie multiple drive thru ordering stations to a standard call center switch … a computer device that hands each call to the next available agent.  Agents sit in a call center, take the orders, and type them on a keyboard that puts the orders on the screen in the appropriate sales outlet … exactly what order takers do on a one-on-one basis today.  Result?  Big increase in driveway sales, big decrease in labor hours for the individual stores.  I haven’t heard of this catching on anywhere else.  What places do you work, or do you do business who could use competent, always available order-taking help?  Remember, over the Internet almost all your communication costs are nil … and it doesn’t take graduate-level language skills to ask "And would you like fries with that burger, sir"?
• Computer Aided Drafting: CAD software was one of the first business tools that made small computers practical for business.  Nothing can get built, manufactured or placed in service without drawings.  Also, in the US, hundreds of thousands of sates, counties, municipalities and businesses have literally millions of drawings that need to be placed in electronic form, or already in electronic form and updated.  You could build a business of nearly any size with this strategy, even simpler than a call center.  There are a lot of graduates of computer drafting schools and even degreed engineers with CAD training here in the Philippines who are lucky to find a job driving a cab, let alone in their area of expertise.  You solicit business in the US, ship the drawings in electronic format (paper ones can be scanned automatically) to your team of CAD operators and when the modifications are done, the finished product is again shipped electronically to the client.  In many cases clients who demand a paper copy will even provide the plotting machines in their own engineering centers because they would prefer to have control over the process and the finished drawing product.  There’s a tremendous markup available here and I personally know of government agencies with years of updates and corrections to drawings left undone because of staffing costs.

OK, enough for one crop of ideas.  there are plenty more available.  And for my readers who get annoyed and angered at the idea of taking jobs away from Americans and ‘killing US business’ I’d like to point out that both these services are ones that exist because American companies can not find workers willing and able to do the work for a rate that allows the business to stay operational … so frankly a service like this actually helps American business by allowing them to be more profitable and provide more highly paid jobs for Americans on American soil.

Related posts:

1. Outsourcing Doesn’t Cost — It pays
2. More Help On Adapters — Fit Any Plug
3. How To Make Millions In The Philippines
4. When Opportunity Knocks, Answer The Door
5. 49 Ways to Make a Living in the Philippines — Book Review

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