Most businesses only really think about customer service when it starts going wrong.
Tickets pile up. Wait times creep past what’s acceptable. Your best people – the ones who should be closing deals or solving the hard problems – are stuck answering “where’s my order” for the fifth time today.
Customers notice, and if you’re not careful, they don’t stick around to complain about it. A global study from Qualtrics XM Institute put $3 trillion in consumer spending at risk from bad service experiences, and found 82% of US customers say they’d switch to a competitor the moment they think another company would treat them better.
Which changes what the real question is. It’s not “how do we handle more volume.” It’s “how do we make every customer feel like a priority without burning out the team we’ve already got.”
That’s what offshore customer service actually solves, when it’s done properly – not by cutting corners, but by giving your business more capacity than your local team could ever cost-justify on its own.
Content Guide
Why TGT Global chose the Philippines
Plenty of businesses assume offshoring customer service means trading quality for cost. Fewer know that TGT Global almost didn’t end up in the Philippines at all.
When Peter Bell, CEO of TGT Global, and his co-founder were scoping out where to build, Shenzhen was the front-runner. There were plenty of English speakers, on paper. But it didn’t hold up in practice.
I often get asked why we set up in the Philippines. We looked at many countries before we chose it, and the number one reason was the passion of the workforce. No matter what the role was, everybody wanted to do it and do it very well, to the best of their ability.
Speaking English and knowing how to talk to a customer turned out to be two different things.
What we came to discover was the sheer size of the population. There are more than 115 million people in the country, many of them highly educated with strong English skills. And it is not just English skills. It is conversational English skills.
For customer-facing roles, that distinction is key. Knowing the right words isn’t the same as knowing how to defuse a frustrated customer on a Friday afternoon.
Where it all began
The bit most offshoring companies don’t get right
Solving the issue is only half the job. How the customer feels while you’re solving it is the other half – and it’s usually the half that decides whether they come back.
Peter puts it this way:
It’s a relatively young and customer-focused culture, with a real desire for getting the best outcomes for the client, not just a result. A Filipino would rarely be described as pushy. Yes, they want the customer to get the result, but the way the customer feels on the way to getting the result is equally as important as the result.
You can train someone on your product in a week. You can’t train that attitude quickly – you have to hire people who have that natural EQ and customer flair.
What actually changes when you offshore support
Here’s what businesses who’ve made the move actually tell us.
The backlog stops being a daily fire drill.
Routine tickets, account checks, order updates – the stuff that eats your day without needing your judgement – gets handled by a dedicated team, freeing your local staff to focus on the work only they can do.
Extended hours, without putting on your onshore staff.
Milan Rajkovic, Founder and CEO of TGT partner Otto IT, wanted support coverage outside normal office hours and didn’t want to ask his local staff to cover it:
One of the main things we wanted was extended hours. We wouldn’t have been able to do that cost-effectively with our local staff, and by having a team remotely, that’s enabled us to do that.
You can keep the consistency, without a script that sounds like one.
Your offshore team trains on your brand voice, your systems and your standards. Customers shouldn’t be able to tell which team picked up the phone.
There’s room to grow, in a calm way.
Busy season, new product launch, a sudden spike in demand – instead of scrambling to hire and onboard locally under pressure, you scale a team that’s already built around your business.
A budget that stretches further.
TGT Global’s offshore staffing model can deliver up to 71% in cost savings compared with local hires.
Damien Pepper, Managing Director of TGT partner DSP IT Solutions, put those savings to work:
I have confidence that you can come to TGT, find what you need, get what you need delivered, and have a long-term relationship. What we’ve been able to do, due to cost savings, is have more staff based here in the Philippines as opposed to having maybe one person in Australia.
You don’t hand over control – you extend your team
The word “offshoring” still makes some business owners picture a call center answering with a script, totally removed from how they actually run things. That’s not how TGT works.
Your offshore staff work inside your business – your systems, your processes, your standards. You choose who joins. You set the bar. We handle the recruitment, onboarding, HR, payroll, and the operational support that keeps things running smoothly, so you’re not managing two businesses at once.
It’s a team built around how you work, not a template you have to squeeze your business into.
The real cost of waiting
Every ticket that sits too long, every call that goes to voicemail, every customer who has to repeat themselves to a third person adds up to something you won’t see on a spreadsheet until months later, when a customer just quietly stops buying. Remember – silent customers, are deadly.
If your team is stretched thin and it’s starting to show, hiring locally and hoping the budget works out isn’t the only option. Building the right team, in the right place, might be a faster fix than you think.
Talk to TGT Global about building customer service capacity that doesn’t cost you control – or your customers.
