In this Outsourcing Q and A we’re going to answer :

  • How can my team member contact me when I am out of the office?
  • Can I set up a phone for my team member so they can take incoming and makeoutgoing calls without paying international phone rates?
  • Will they sound like an Indian telemarketer when dealing with my clients?


David Judge from Affordable Staff and welcome to our RAW q&a session around outsourcing.

We’ve created these series of videos for businesses that have considered outsourcing and they have genuine questions or concerns that need answering.

The format? 3 questions and 3 answers based on over 250,000 hours of outsourcing experience.

Let’s start with the first question…



How can my team member contact me when I am out of the office?


Let’s say you are working in an office in Brisbane and you have another team member working in an office in Sydney.

An outsourced team member would contact you the same way, be it phone, stay in touch via text, email or the same way you would connect when a person is working in a different location to you. Like a business with multiple locations you can also divert calls to your outsourcer when you’re out of the office to ensure someone is always answering your calls.



Can I set up a phone for my team member so they can take incoming and make outgoing calls without paying international phone rates?


This is a Big YES!!! There are a few ways you can set this up…

You can use services like skype or zoom for calls.

Now another option is if you would like your team to receives calls from landlines and mobiles.

Our preferred supplier is a company called onPlatinum that offer a number of services, including hosted PBX phone systems.

These are basically like your old PABX systems, where you’d have a box on the wall in your office that controlled all of your extensions, but now they run on the cloud, or basically, the Internet.

You do need a supplier that’s set up well, which is why we use onPlatinum as the way their infrastructure works, you don’t get the issues with calls dropping, calls echoing and it means you can set up your outsourced team member with a local number on your business.

Actually, like a PABX system, they’re another extension, meaning they answer and transfer calls, you can transfer calls to them, they can handle your 1300 number, etc.

The possibilities are endless and because it’s on the ‘CLOUD’ there are a lot of options to easily and seamlessly set up phone lines between the Philippines and Australia.

onPlatinum ICT – Our Preferred Hosted PBX supplier



Will they sound like an Indian telemarketer when dealing with my clients?


Ok, I get this question asked a lot, and I don’t think it’s about the ‘Indian telemarketers’, I think it’s more about cultural and language barriers and feeling like you’re not being listened to.

Let me give you 2 quick examples.

The first I think comes from Telstra and when they set up an office in India. They were one of the first to outsource calls, and their approval ratings at the time dropped to an all time low.

About 5 years ago they actually transitioned to the Philippines, with a large office within Bacolod, which is where our main office is located. Once they moved to the Philippines, their approval rating and share price went up again, which was a result of a number of areas, including people feeling like they’re being heard and their were issues being resolved ….

The second reason is we were getting indian telemarketers calling odd times of the day and they were so hard to get off the phone. Again the same reason, people felt like they weren’t being listened to.

Whilst I get why people wanted to outsource this way, it certainly didn’t do any favours for the industry.

So back to the question…

The team have more of an american accent and as a matter of fact you were actually listening to Bryan, from our team, asking today’s questions.

The cultural similarities between the Philippines and Australia are more aligned, meaning the Filipinos handling calls goes a lot smoother, with Telstra and now many other businesses that handle calls an example of this result.

Like with any role it’s about selecting the best people for that role and if you have a person receiving or making calls for your business, you need to make sure you have the person with the knowledge of how to handle different questions and most importantly a person with the right mindset.


Ok, great, that’s it

If you’d like to find out more about how outsourcing can work within your business you can call us anywhere within Australia on 1300 139 482

This is David Judge from Affordable Staff showing Australian businesses how to achieve business efficiency through outsourcing.