What Are the Roles That Could Be Outsourced?

Introduction

What are the roles that could be outsourced? That’s a question many business owners or professionals ask as they try to manage growing workloads, cut costs, and augment efficiency. From startups, small businesses, professional practices, to large corporations, outsourcing is no longer a last resort—it’s an advantageous move.

Outsourcing involves delegating specific responsibilities to a third party, usually a company that relies on a pool of professionals in different areas that they hire, train, and pay. Hiring external specialists permits in-house teams to concentrate on their core business activities and goals. You might want to scale your business, focus on your profession, or achieve a good work-life balance; if so, outsourcing certain roles will be your solution. 

Top 16 Roles That Answer the Question: What Are the Roles That Could Be Outsourced?

If you are not familiar with this practice, you are surely wondering, “What are the roles that could be outsourced?” Knowing which roles can be outsourced is the first step you need to take to improve your workflow and life.

Truth to be told, there are several roles you can outsource, and many times, if you need a quite specific role, an outsourcing company can train their staff to meet your precise needs. So, although there’s almost no limit to what roles could be outsourced, there are some roles that are the most outsourced. 

Besides considering what roles you could outsource, you have to decide how to outsource. You have to determine if you want your outsourced staff to work physically at your company premises (on-site outsourcing) or from another location (remote outsourcing). 

In most cases, when the role allows it, the growing trend is going for remote outsourcing through a business service provider agency. Most of these agencies have their staff spread worldwide, generally located in regions where labor costs are lower. This fact is very important as through them, you’ll have highly trained professionals at lower fees. Visit our pricing page and see it for yourself. 

Deloitte Global Outsourcing Survey 2024 showed that 80% of executives were planning to continue or even increase their investments in outsourcing roles to third-party companies.   

That being clarified, let’s review what the roles you could outsource—and how Virtudesk can support you every step of the way. The following roles we’ll talk about are the most commonly outsourced, which doesn’t mean that there aren't other roles that could be outsourced too. 

1. Administrative Roles

Running a business (both physical or online) or a professional practice means being bombarded with never-ending admin work—responding to emails, scheduling meetings, processing documents and files, and following up on reminders, to mention just a few. These small, routine, and continual tasks often pile up, keeping business owners away from money-making activities or client interaction.

Picture this: You start your day with the purpose of completing a business proposal, but by the time you finish viewing your emails and updating spreadsheets, it's midafternoon, and you haven’t even had lunch. Yes, you’ll have to work a few more hours and miss family dinner. That’s where the real cost lies—not in the task, but in the opportunity you lost. How many times has this happened to you? 

The Solution?

Outsourcing administrative tasks. This means having a competent professional who can handle your daily tasks. From organizing your inbox, booking appointments, to formatting presentations, your virtual assistant helps you run things on time and professionally.

How Virtudesk Can Help: Our trained virtual assistants take over your inbox, manage your schedules, and organize documents, giving you back your time. 

2. Customer Service Support (Including Call Center Services)

We live in an era where commercial and professional success depends on providing great customer service. Is your business already customer-centered? Customers demand and expect immediate, friendly, and precise solutions or responses. As your business grows, handling incoming calls, making outbound calls, support tickets, and chat queries turns out to be overwhelming. Hiring and managing an in-house customer service team can be costly, complex, and time-demanding. Consider you’ll need provide them with the needed workspace and technologies. 

Let’s say you have an e-commerce, and a customer wants to reschedule a delivery or follow up on a missing item. If you’re dealing with logistics, product sourcing, and finances, replying late—or not at all—risks your brand’s reputation.

The Solution?

Outsourcing customer service ensures your clients have consistent and professional support 24/7. Virtual assistants can deal with common inquiries, customer feedback, and escalate serious problems or concerns to you or a manager if needed.

How Virtudesk Can Help: Our experienced call center agents are available 24/7. They are constantly trained to represent your brand, convey your values, and do their work with professionalism. From solving delivery issues to guiding customers through a product return, they’ve got your back. Learn more about our Call Center Services

3. Marketing and Creative Services

You know marketing has a big impact on the growth of any business, but having a full creative team in-house—copywriters, designers, SEO experts, and campaign managers—is very expensive and time-consuming. An issue many firms face nowadays is that businesses don’t have coherent and well-planned marketing strategies because they just don’t have a dedicated marketing team.

Have you ever skipped publishing a blog or running a seasonal promo because “you didn’t have enough time”? You’re not alone.

The Solution?

Outsourcing creative services is the answer. Doing so, you gain access to marketing experts who can craft persuasive messages, design astonishing and eye-catching visuals, and optimize your web content for search engines, without you having to hire full-time staff. 

How Virtudesk Can Help: Our marketing assistants help you create branded content, run social media campaigns, and monitor analytics to fine-tune or iterate your message. Check our Marketing Services

4. Bookkeeping and Financial Admin

You didn’t start your business to spend countless hours balancing books, making invoices, or revising spreadsheets. But not being on top of your finances can result in missed tax deadlines, poor cash flow, or even IRS penalties.

It’s usual to hear from small business owners that they avoid bookkeeping until it’s categorically necessary—by then, it has already become a chaotic mess.

The Solution? 

Outsource bookkeeping, payroll, disbursement tracking, and more to specialists who can keep precise records and guarantee financial health.

How Virtudesk Can Help: Our financial and accounting VAs manage accounts receivable/payable, create monthly reports, and keep track of your expenses with precision. You won’t need to spend late nights reconciling figures. Won’t it be a great relief for you? 

5. IT Support and Tech Services

In the digital-first business arena, downtime or technical malfunctions can bring everything to a standstill. Yet hiring an in-house IT team—especially for small and mid-sized businesses—is usually out of their reach because of the high costs. Many business owners put on the “accidental IT manager” hat, trying to solve Wi-Fi problems or software bugs with no technical background.

Envision you are launching a new product and your site crashes during the peak hour. Without instant tech support, you lose not just potential clients and sales but credibility.

The Solution?

Outsourcing IT support. It allows you to have expert help desk services, cloud integration, data backups, cybersecurity, and system maintenance without having to employ a full-time IT team, providing them with a proper workspace and technologies.

How Virtudesk Can Help: Our tech-savvy virtual assistants can give professional help desk support, do software updates, monitor cybersecurity, and ensure your systems run flawlessly and without interrupting your workflow.

6. Human Resources (HR) Tasks

Recruitment, onboarding, training, and employee documentation can become a burden to your team, especially if you are experiencing fast, sudden growth. Posting job positions, filtering resumes, and organizing interviews demand time and persistence, and any mistake can affect compliance.

You might remember an occasion when you hired someone in a rush, only to realize they weren’t a good fit. 

The Solution?

Outsourcing HR tasks. This gives you access to proficient professionals who can take care of recruiting, document management, onboarding, and employee communications.

How Virtudesk Can Help: Our skilled HR virtual assistants can screen candidates, schedule video calls or interviews, handle onboarding logistics, and keep records organized, to mention just a few, so you can build a great team without stressing yourself.

7. Lead Generation and CRM Management

Generating new leads on a constant basis is crucial for growth. However, sourcing prospects, cleaning up CRM entries, and following up with cold leads takes up a lot of priceless time.

Have you ever missed a lead because you lost their info in a messy spreadsheet? Or have you realized weeks later that you forgot to follow up with a hot prospect?

The Solution?

Outsourcing lead generation allows you to scale prospecting and maintain a clean, active CRM pipeline. A virtual assistant can handle everything from LinkedIn prospecting and email outreach to CRM updates and reminders.

S2wemedia states that outsourcing lead generation improves their results by 43%. Wouldn’t you appreciate such an advantage too?

How Virtudesk Can Help: Our virtual assistants help generate, qualify, and manage leads in your CRM, follow up consistently, and ensure no opportunity slips through the cracks.

8. Real Estate Support Roles

Real estate professionals handle client calls, property listings, paperwork, appointments, and marketing—all while trying to close deals. It’s easy to fall behind when there’s no one handling the backend.

Imagine trying to close with a client but getting interrupted with back-to-back inquiries about other listings, rescheduling visits, or confirming open houses.

The Solution?

Outsource listing management, lead follow-ups, appointment setting, and research so you can focus on client relationships and deal closures.

How Virtudesk Can Help: Our real estate-trained virtual assistants can handle MLS updates, prepare listing descriptions, schedule property tours, and manage leads. They’re trained to understand real estate workflows and keep your schedule optimized.

9. Healthcare Support Roles

Healthcare professionals are often overwhelmed with paperwork, appointment scheduling, insurance follow-ups, and patient communication. Yet, precision and compliance are critical—mistakes aren’t an option.

Think of a solo practitioner trying to treat patients while also handling billing disputes, responding to inquiries, and managing medical records. That’s a recipe for burnout.

The Solution?

Outsourcing healthcare admin tasks ensures nothing slips through the cracks, and that providers can focus on what matters most: patient care.

How Virtudesk Can Help: Our HIPAA-compliant virtual assistants help with patient scheduling, medical billing, insurance claims, and record management. Discover Our Healthcare Solutions

10. Project Management Support

Coordinating deliverables, deadlines, and team communication can quickly become a full-time job—especially when managing multiple clients or departments. Missed deadlines, lack of accountability, or project delays all hurt your bottom line.

If you’ve ever had a project stall because no one followed up on the latest task—or worse, you forgot to assign it in the first place—then you know how vital this support role is.

The Solution?

A project management assistant can help organize timelines, manage communication flows, prepare reports, and keep everyone aligned.

How Virtudesk Can Help: Our VAs track progress, send reminders, coordinate meetings, and ensure deliverables are on time. You stay in control—without doing it all yourself.

11. Management Services

Managing remote teams without proper infrastructure and support can lead to communication breakdowns, missed deadlines, and disengaged employees. Business owners often find themselves stretched thin trying to manage multiple remote workers while still focusing on high-level strategies.

Imagine trying to onboard new hires, check in on task progress, manage time tracking, and resolve issues—without a centralized system or dedicated management support. The result? Delayed growth and team burnout.

The Solution?

Outsourcing management support services provides structure, oversight, and performance tracking for your remote staff. It also gives business owners peace of mind knowing someone is keeping the wheels turning.

How Virtudesk Can Help: At Virtudesk, we provide management services that help you streamline team supervision, improve efficiency, and enhance communication between you and your remote VAs. From productivity tracking tools to direct managerial support, we help you maintain quality and accountability at scale.

12. Prospecting and Inside Sales Agents (ISAs)

If your sales pipeline isn’t growing, your revenue isn’t either. But many business owners don’t have time to consistently prospect, respond to inquiries, and follow up with cold leads. As a result, warm opportunities slip through the cracks, and business stalls.

Think of a small agency owner juggling account management and trying to grow the client base. Without help, sales take a backseat.

The Solution?

Outsourcing inside sales and prospecting tasks allows you to maintain a steady flow of leads, qualify them early, and build long-term customer relationships without overwhelming your team.

How Virtudesk Can Help: Our trained ISAs and prospecting VAs can run cold outreach campaigns, respond to inbound web or phone inquiries, qualify leads, and nurture prospects over time—so your calendar stays full and your pipeline stays hot.

13. Property Management 

Managing properties requires nonstop attention—from rent collection and tenant communications to maintenance requests and contract renewals. For property managers or real estate investors, these daily demands can be all-consuming.

If you’ve ever had to chase down rent payments while scheduling a last-minute plumbing repair and handling a lease renewal—all in one day—you understand the pressure.

The Solution?

Outsourcing these recurring tasks to a property management virtual assistant allows you to focus on portfolio growth and property acquisition.

How Virtudesk Can Help: Our VAs are trained in the nuances of property management, from handling tenant inquiries and processing maintenance requests to updating listings and tracking rent payments. They’re familiar with industry tools and ready to help you stay organized and efficient.

14. Logistics 

Logistics and supply chain businesses face constant pressure to manage dispatches, track shipments, handle documentation, and coordinate with multiple vendors. Delays, errors, or miscommunication can be costly.

Business owners often find themselves stuck juggling spreadsheets and emails instead of focusing on growth strategies or partnerships.

The Solution?

Outsourcing to logistics pros. A logistics virtual assistant can help streamline communications, documentation, and scheduling so you can stay ahead in a fast-moving industry.

How Virtudesk Can Help: Our logistics VAs assist with route planning, delivery tracking, customs paperwork, fleet communication, and real-time updates—helping your supply chain move faster and smoother.

15. Legal Virtual Assistants

Law firms and legal professionals are inundated with paperwork, case prep, billing, and client coordination. These tasks are time-consuming, yet essential to the accuracy and success of every case.

If you’re an attorney buried in document review or rescheduling client calls, your time isn’t being spent where it counts most—on legal strategy.

The Solution?

Outsourcing legal tasks. A legal assistant lets you focus on legal practice while your VA handles everything behind the scenes.

How Virtudesk Can Help: Our legal virtual assistants support attorneys with research, client communication, document formatting, calendar management, and billing, always respecting confidentiality and precision.

16. Online Education Support

Managing an online learning platform involves content uploading, student support, social media promotion, and email reminders. Without support, educators and course creators often find themselves overwhelmed and disconnected from their students.

Imagine building a course only to fall behind on student messages or fail to promote your upcoming launch.

The Solution?

Outsourcing support for your e-learning business means everything from uploading lessons and tracking enrollments to engaging with students and promoting your courses gets done on time.

How Virtudesk Can Help: Our virtual assistants are trained to manage online education platforms, respond to learner queries, schedule content updates, manage social channels, and support course launches.

Final Thoughts: What Are the Roles That Could Be Outsourced to Scale Smartly

Outsourcing the right roles can lead to dramatic improvements in productivity, cost savings, and business growth. From admin and customer service to marketing and lead generation, outsourcing frees up your time to focus on what truly matters: growing your business.

Are you ready to start outsourcing and recover your time and boost your business?

At Virtudesk, we make it easy to scale competently with expert virtual assistants and a wide range of professionals with diverse skills. Getting started or looking to expand your outsourced team? We’ve got the talent and the tools to help you grow.

 Schedule a Free Discovery Call, visit Virtudesk.com or call us at +1(800) 470-8136 to find the right outsourcing solutions for your business. Let us help you delegate smart and grow faster. And if you are still unsure of “What are the roles that could be outsourced?”, our representatives will be delighted to assist you on that or any other query you might have regarding outsourcing.