Outsourcing to Central and Eastern Europe: A Data-Informed Review
Central & Eastern Europe: A premium outsourcing hub or just a cost-cutters' paradise?
Multinational brands invest millions in outsourcing their customer operations. Yet 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 use CEE’s mix of highly educated talent, deep technical capabilities, and 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 CEE 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 careers, 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.
Key points discussed
- Total cost of support vs. chasing the lowest hourly rate
- Regional talent strengths across the CEE landscape
- Where AI genuinely helps in multilingual support, and where empathy still wins
- How CEE delivery centres built real operational resilience
- Moving from vendor to strategic partner
Speakers
Co-founder
The Knowledge Group
Co-founder of The Knowledge Group, a sourcing firm for BPO and CX services. Spent ten years in Vodafone’s global procurement team buying outsourced customer care, and earlier led offshore programmes at Orange UK and Cable & Wireless.
Partner
Everest Group
Outsourcing advisor, former Microsoft procurement director and Everest Group partner, where he led the CXM PEAK Matrix assessments of global CX providers.
Customer Service Delivery Leader
Simply Contact
Project Manager at Simply Contact, who started on the frontline as a support agent. Runs client accounts across technology, healthcare and retail, from team setup and AI integration to day-to-day delivery.
