Building an effective CX partnership.
CX,
partnership,
BPO services,
outsourcing,
specialization,
customer service,
Customer experience,
Published on Fri Aug 07 2026
Updated on Fri Aug 07 2026
4 minute read
The majority of companies - across all industries and all geographic regions - handle their customer service processes internally. It is hard to get specific data on a percentage split between in-house customer service and outsourcing this to a partner because it varies from region to region and industry. However, analyst estimates vary from approximately half to three-quarters of all companies handling all customer experience (CX) processes internally. So there are a lot of companies out there that have captive CX in-house.
Some will not even be considering partnership as an option, and some will be considering it for the first time. Many will be assessing the option to work with a partner based on experience from a long time ago. My colleague Dario Bakovic recently wrote an excellent LinkedIn post on this theme where he argued that if he is looking to buy a Peugeot car in 2026, then he will not form an opinion on that brand based on his memory of his father’s Peugeot from 1998. So why work with a partner now?
Think about why you insist on keeping the CX team in-house - or using an internal business service unit to “outsource” internally. The most common answer is to retain control over processes. The next answer is usually the retention of deep insight into customer behavior or trends. But after these two answers - which could be defended as reasonable in some cases - there are other reasons that seem harder to defend as rational.
Empire protection is when managers perceive that their own personal value to a company will diminish if they work with a partner - because their direct reports will no longer report to them. Some managers fear the transition from managing a visibly large group of internal people, rather than managing suppliers. Meanwhile, legacy bias is the outdated view that a company only ever works with a supplier when the outcome is a lower cost service. This attitude once applied to customer service managers who all explored offshoring to remote locations with the intention of reducing the cost to service their business. Managers that remain concerned with this issue will talk about the loss of control or issues around quality that are bound to arise when working with a partner.
Put yourself in the shoes of a retail or banking CEO. It’s possible to argue that you want to remain close to your customer by managing customer service processes in-house. It gives you close insight into customer trends and demands. But are you really going to ignore the opportunity to improve how your business interacts with those customers because some of your management has outdated views on outsourcing, or they are just concerned about protecting their own empire?
On the other hand, the strongest argument for working with a specialist customer experience partner today is something that many managers fear losing - their expertise. The problem is that the world is changing so quickly that most internal teams are not designed to respond to the rate of change. They want stability. Artificial intelligence, process automation, multilingual services and exploring how to base the cost of a service on outcomes rather than headcount are all areas where specialist partners are now investing time and effort.
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Created at Thu Sep 17 2026
6 min read
Leading Voices: most brands fail at agentic AI. Our solutions experts share how yours can win.
Something happens when a technology concept outpaces the terminology we have to describe it. Across the customer experience landscape, vendors start applying the same label to wildly different things. For instance, industry leaders start buying into the AI label instead of its real operational capability. And somewhere between the pitch deck and the production environment, the real question gets lost: does any of this actually address a real operational need? Agentic AI has reached that stage.
