Experience with overseas labor?

September 12, 2023

by a searcher from McGill University in Toronto, ON, Canada

We recently completed two small HVAC business acquisitions. They both do a lot of work as subcontractors to larger businesses. They collectively deal with hundreds of emails and phone calls mostly related to coordinating the work they do for these larger businesses.

Seems to me there is an opportunity to grow a small team overseas (Philippines) to handle a lot of that routine work and to free up our local employees for more sales-focused work. Does anyone have good experience with hiring labor overseas? Should I find someone directly? Go through an agency? If you've done it I'd love to hear your experience.

Open to suggestions or recommendations!

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Reply by a searcher
from University of Florida in Miami, FL, USA

J, I did this recently for a physicians office/call center. We used onlinejobs.ph for Philippines and a group in Colombia. We used firms in both places because we wanted about a dozen folks with a local supervisor and one single invoice to pay. If you only need 1 or 2 people and are price conscious, and have time+patience to learn the process and train employees, then going direct through onlinejobs.ph or upwork can work - GOOD solution. If you want some local resources (supervisor, office, internet, PC/IT support, etc), I would look for a firm overseas to help source the individuals and manage the group (we used Your Vitual World out of Philippines and I forget the group from Colombia) - this is the BETTER solution. There are also a number of US-based companies that will help identify and train your VA's (see Oceans XYZ and there is another one advertised on Acquiring Minds) - this is the BEST and will cost the most.

Reply by a searcher
from Rutgers in Philadelphia, PA, USA

You're almost certainly right, much of that work can be offshored effectively, most easily the email monitoring and response. That's a $3-4/hour position in the Philippines. Using a collaborative email application like Front or Missive will go a long way there, so that you can be tagged in messages that need escalation or clarification. For voice calls, you'll need a higher caliber of agent. For better or worse, people tend to associate the Filipino accent with cost cutting and low quality (due to poor offshore process implementations by large companies), so you need to be very careful and strict on evaluating their accents. We had have more luck hiring agents to handle voice calls from Latin America, as most people in the US are already accustomed to hearing people inside the US speaking with a Spanish accent. DM if you'd like to discuss further.

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