We are delighted to have caught up with Georgia Robertson, Digital Account Executive at Square Owl, a leading digital consultancy in Manchester. The team at Square Owl discuss the benefits of outsourcing UX and CRO and why it is the ultimate agency move.
As a digital agency, I’m sure, like Square Owl, many of you have gone back and forth about the requirements and offerings within your business. We work within a competitive industry where systems, software and trends change on a daily basis. It can be exhausting to keep up with these in a specialist area while having a work load as long as your arm.
This is where we believe the true benefits of outsourcing comes in and why we base our unique business model around this. As a small company, we try to reduce our overheads as much as possible by outsourcing the specialist stuff we don’t have a skill base for in-house.
We do the strategy, prototyping and user experience / conversion rate optimisation process then hand it over to competent developers, who can obviously code better than us, but we pride ourselves on delivering the highest quality all the time, every time (shameless plug).
There are advantages of both in-house and outsourcing, but we feel like we have some good reasons of why either working with an external agency or freelancer could be your best bet to higher quality results.
Some food for thought: Can you afford to be taking hours out of your weeks to hire someone, pay them a full-time competitive salary with on-boarding costs – If you only require their expertise on specific projects? How do you justify paying someone a salary if the workload is so fluctuating? On top of that, as any good employer you should be providing your employees with support and necessary training for them to progress in their career, which can be expensive.
Outsourcing UX can offer a wider area of expertise and opens your business up to a wide breadth of contacts within a knowledgeable field – which is always a plus. They can also offer an un-bias outlook on a project, and may even come up with ideas that have bypassed an in-house team who are heavily involved in it.
An in-house designer may get too comfortable in the styles that stick “within the brand guideline”, whereas sometimes a fresh pair of eyes is necessary on a project, whether it be for your own company or a client’s.
Lots of specialisation and time is needed to keep up with changing UX trends. If you run on a busy schedule, doing this isn’t time efficient for you or your workforce. UX specialists dedicate their whole time to it so can offer you the most up to date trends and research with access to specialist software.
Like UX, conversion rate optimisation is also best dealt by a specialist and unless you are prepared to give your full-time employees extensive training on CRO, outsourcing will help to free up your time. CRO is often directly related to ROI so you need to ensure you don’t have a negative impact with your changes, so often it is wise to put your trust into someone with proven success. It is a process that often requires a heuristic evaluation, user testing, statistical analysis and access to research papers. A CRO program is a long-term commitment and results don’t happen overnight, patience and data-driven choices are needed to gain results beneficial to your business. This is again another point for the outsourcing side, as someone who isn’t directly involved in your business can offer a non-bias and new mindset on how to help your company achieve realistic results.
If you want to get in touch to see how we can help with your business’ needs and for digital consultation or strategy contact us on 0161 282 2820, or if you’re local to Manchester – the kettles always on!
