Seasonality varies from business to business across the four seasons. For many seasonal businesses, this means facing several challenges which include –

• managing fluctuating sales and transactions;
• staff recruitment;
• inventory management;
• profitability during the off-season.

These challenges can often become overwhelming for in-house teams to manage. Outsourcing key business functions is an invaluable way to combat these challenges.

The benefits of outsourcing to manage seasonal peaks – 

• Staff recruitment & training: Sourcing quality employees is proving more and more difficult. Recruiting employees for fixed-term contracts has in turn become challenging. Partnering with an outsourcer eliminates the need to recruit and train an in-house team which can be both costly and timely. 

• Knowledge: Whether you’re outsourcing your Marketing,  Customer Support or Logistics, your chosen provider will be able to offer you knowledge and expertise to enhance your business operation during your busiest period. 

• Flexibility: More often than not during the peak of your busiest period you will be required to make some changes to your typical business operations such as –

• • operating hours;
  • staffing;
  • delivery times.

Working with an outsourcer can greatly alleviate the need to make huge changes to your business operations. Rather than recruiting additional staff to cover overtime, the influx in volumes and extended working hours, choose to partner with an outsourcer to effectively meet the spike in demands. 

Arema Connect’s Seasonal Cover 

Over the last 20 years, we have gained extensive experience in supporting our clients’ seasonality. We work with our clients to deliver a solutions-driven approach. We have worked with several seasonal clients requiring support for Christmas, the busy back-to-school period and Valentine’s Day. We have implemented various solutions to meet different needs including – 

• A temporary dedicated team: In order to effectively manage a large increase in volumes, we offer clients a dedicated team for a set period of time. Typically this team is assigned and trained a month prior to the busy period kicking in. 
• Overflow support: During seasonal peaks, in-house teams can come under huge pressure due to the rise in daily transactions. For some clients, we look after their overflow calls and transactions. This solution ensures all customer queries and requests are actioned within the desired timeframes. In the event that the in-house team are unable to answer queries, transactions are directed to our in-house team to manage. 
• A Shared Services solution: In some instances, where client volumes are due to increase but not enough to recruit or assign a dedicated team they opt for our Shared Services solution.
• After-hours support: Many businesses decided to extend their operating hours during peak seasonal periods. As we operate on a 24x7x365 basis, many of our clients avail of an after-hours support solution enabling them to serve their customers around the clock during periods of high demand.