Q: Frankly, we are concerned if we could adequately and effectively manage someone located thousands of miles away from our office.
A: Your employees probably already work in different locations and possibly even in various time zones. It’s no different working with virtual staff supplied by ExDigita.
Q: How can a virtual staff member located in another country effectively communicate and collaborate with team members, and how can they be properly supervised?
A: Employees and contractors in most companies communicate among themselves and with internal and external customers digitally more often than in face-to-face meetings – especially in the “new normal” caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. There isn’t a significant difference doing an IM chat or video call with someone in the next office or in an office in another location.
Q: What assurances do we have regarding the quality of ExDigita’s services? What if we’re not satisfied with the quality of ExDigita’s services? We don’t want to make a major commitment without first being able to evaluate the quality of work.
A: We can talk about the experience of our management team, their various successes managing technical projects, etc. But we fully understand that, ultimately, what you care about is getting high-quality work done, on time, with the cost savings we promise, and with no hassles. Just give us some test tasks or a small project to see if our work satisfies your needs. Also, our agreements have client-friendly terms and easy “out clauses”. We keep clients for many years by providing great service at low costs, not by tying them up with strict contracts.
Q: Can’t we save even more money hiring freelancers in PH or elsewhere directly?
What value does ExDigita add?
It might be instructive to consider some of the many important differences between using freelancers and using outsourced services. We have summarized some of these differences in the table below.
Some companies are very surprised when they experience the differences between managed virtual staff or outsourced services and using freelancers. For example, in some countries it is common for freelancers to use pirated software, and to work in Internet cafes or on home computers shared by many family members and neighbors. Security of client data may be lax or nonexistent, and confidentiality of client data may be compromised. Viruses, Trojans, and other security threats are very common.
It is very important to consider that somebody in a client company has to actively manage freelancers, and this can take a significant amount of time. Suppose a freelancer charges $7 per hour, with someone in the client company acting as supervisor, manager, and doing QA of freelancers’ work. If, for every 15 hours of freelancer work, a client uses one hour of time to manage a freelancer, and if the client’s time is worth $80 / hour (gross cost), then the actual gross cost of a freelancer would be $12.33 per hour ($7 + $5.33). This is much more than ExDigita’s hourly cost for managed, highly-trained, certified virtual staff. In fact, the actual gross cost of using freelancers is often not lower than the cost of fully-managed virtual staff or outsourced services.
