We built a small offshore contact center to supplement and "compete" with our in-office contact center stateside and ran them side by side. We sourced high quality English speakers and managed them in house through a professional platform called Five9. This allowed us to provide material, training, oversight, and quality control. We found that the offshore team outperformed our on site team in almost every metric including customer satisfaction, sales close rates, attendance and employee satisfaction. The only place they lagged was in call volume. Their patience with clients on the phone and willingness to thoroughly complete the aftercall work led to productivity rates that were about 40% below our onshore people but at 1/4 of the cost and with all other metrics being comparable or even better it made a lot of sense. We diversified where we hired from a geographic perspective to avoid downtime on a mass scale which may be caused by something happening in a specific geography (typhoons, earthquakes, political upheaval, holidays etc). It was a great move for us and we slowly transitioned to 90% of our team overseas. AI has the potential to be a game changer today. The jury is still out on how customers will receive it- at least in the near term. Over the course of time, I don't think there is any question that it will be adopted almost universally but in the meantime, building an offshore call center may require less upfront capital, produce better results and be easier to create than you might imagine.

Agree with Shane above that offshore contact centers can make a lot of sense. I have worked with multiple companies that now use them. At a 1/4 of the cost and higher productivity, it's hard to say no. You can always start with a single agent trial to see if you feel comfortable before rolling out further.