26 Jul The tech tools to use in outsourcing

We give you some tips on some of the tools you can use to manage how the work flow is conducted and monitored in a very time effective manner.

Outsourcing from every angle

Mentor – Nick Ogden

• Use remote traing tools
• A fish or a fishing line?
• Train once and move on

Transcript:

Kevin Turner: Once again Nick Ogden joins me. Nick is from Beepo, and we’re talking this week about Outsourcing. Just building on that theme because it’s become so huge in this country with more and more agents and agencies looking at doing outsourcing. So we’re taking you through the pros and cons of that. We have said earlier this week and I’ll say it again, it’s not for everyone but it should be and it can be, if you approach it correctly.

Kevin Turner: One of the things that you can do is make sure that you’ve got the technology tools available and that you actually allocate the time to learn it and to train on it. Nick Ogden, that’s our subject for today Nick. What are some of the tools that we use, or that you use, to make this link a lot happier between the outsourcer and the outsourcee, I guess?

Nick  Ogden: Technology obviously is one of the main reasons our business even exists. Using remote training tools initially and meeting tools like Zoom. We certainly recommend Zoom and use it ourselves internally. It’s just a great, simple face-to-face video meeting tool that is sharing screens and sharing the day-to-day ops of a role and actually recording that. What it allows you to do is create a video library of your training and your systems and processes locally as well. It ends up just being a great resource for a business to have on file, whether they’re on-boarding staff locally or indeed offshore.

Kevin Turner: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Task management, too, I mean it’s good to have communication with your outsource team but there are some days when I might talk to our team maybe twice a day, there are some days where I’ll talk to them every half hour if we’ve got a lot of intense things happening. But we’ve built all of our activities around the Trello board, or Trello boards, which allows me at the end of every day just to make sure that all the tasks that I needed done are done and I don’t need to remind our team about them. So you don’t have to be in their face all the time, Nick, do you?

Nick  Ogden: No, you don’t. Indeed, some of even the internal systems that real estate businesses are using also have this functionality within the systems themselves. What we’re finding, particularly in the property management space, some of the more … It’s definitely better if you’ve got cloud-based platforms in terms of your property management software, so Property Tree or Property Me or the like. Just much more efficient in terms of day-to-day operations and access. But also we use tools, as you mentioned Trello, Jira, WorkflowMax.

Nick  Ogden: But also our leadership team are there to provide you with that support in terms of reporting on day-to-day tasks, weekly and monthly as well.

Kevin Turner: Yeah. I want to talk to you tomorrow about the Beepo support team who I have found to be absolutely fabulous. We’ll cover that off in detail tomorrow. But the technology tools that are available, there’s so many of them. Now as you said, if it wasn’t for things like the internet and these technology tools, your business wouldn’t be in operation and we’d still be working with paper-based products in our own offices, Nick.

Nick  Ogden: Yeah, absolutely. We’re doing a lot of work now building case studies around some of the other really clever tools that are entering the market even in artificial intelligence as an example, and what impacts those tools can have on a business when working in conjunction with low-cost offshore staff and some of the results we’re starting to see are remarkable.

Kevin Turner: Nick, we’ll catch you again tomorrow. I want to talk to you about the Beepo support team and their roles and how they can help bring us into this outsourcing world. Nick Ogden is my guest. Nick is from Beepo. You can contact Nick and the team by using any one of the links right here at REUNCUT. Thanks, mate, talk to you again in the morning.

Nick  Ogden: Great, look forward to it, Kevin.