Outsourcing to Central and Eastern Europe: A Data-Informed Review

Multinational brands invest millions into outsourcing their customer operations. Yet, so many buyers remain trapped in a frustrating loop: they switch providers, chase the lowest hourly rates, or over-index on offshore regions, only to find that CSAT and quality drop and the cost of fixing failures completely eats away at their projected savings.

The mistake isn’t outsourcing; it’s evaluating location and talent through a pure line-item lens rather than operational reality.

This session explores what it actually takes to build a high-performing, resilient nearshore operation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It moves beyond the generic regional labels to examine how to leverage CEE’s unique mix of highly educated talent, deep technical capabilities, and undeniable cultural proximity to maximize the value generated per dollar spent.

Session summary

Everest Group partner David Rickard cited data showing almost half a million people working in Poland’s business services centres in the first quarter of 2025, 60% of them doing knowledge-intensive work rather than routine tasks. He argued CE wins by being a premium, multilingual, nearshore hub rather than a low-cost, high-volume alternative to the Philippines or India, and separately estimated that around 80% of the outsourcing problems he saw on the buyer side traced back to the client rather than the provider. Procurement advisor Joel Walker, who previously sourced around 80,000 agents across 50 countries for Vodafone, argued that buyers default to familiar high-volume regions mainly to avoid risk to their own career, with case studies and credibility doing more to shift that decision than price alone. Both speakers named Croatia as an underused multilingual location worth watching. Simply Contact’s Anna Mazur described clients who moved complex support out of lower-cost offshore hubs into Ukraine and Moldova: the hourly rate went up, but so did productivity and quality outcomes, lowering the total cost of the operation.