Customer experience (CX) outsourcing looks very different in 2026 than it did just a few years ago. What was once viewed primarily as a way to reduce costs has become a strategic extension of the customer experience itself. As artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes service delivery, customer expectations continue to rise, and governance becomes increasingly complex, organizations are rethinking how they select partners, measure performance, and balance automation with human expertise.
These shifts were at the center of our recent Outsourcing Briefing, held on May 7, 2026, at Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond. The one-day executive gathering brought together CX leaders for candid conversations about the realities of outsourcing in an AI-driven world, from workforce transformation and operational governance to trust, performance, and the evolving role of strategic partnerships.
Here are some of the biggest themes and takeaways that emerged throughout the day.
Turnover isn’t just a BPO problem; it’s a shared cost
Nearly every leader in the room is wrestling with attrition and has started building it into the contract.
One approach: instead of chasing a raw turnover number, track time to proficiency: how long it actually takes an agent to become fully productive on your specific product, and tie incentives to retaining people past that point. For complex products, that number can be well over a year. Once a partner’s team clears that threshold, they gain access to higher-volume or growth opportunities during peak season. It reframes retention as a shared investment rather than a penalty clause.
Another leader described a simpler version: rather than tracking 10 KPIs, pick 2 or 3 that actually matter, and cap how much a partner’s top-performing quartile can shrink in a given month. Fewer metrics, tighter guardrails, and less noise.
The consensus: if turnover isn’t written into your service level agreements (SLAs) yet, it probably should be because even when a partner backfills a seat for free, you’re still paying for it in longer handle times and lost institutional knowledge.
Some companies are quietly rethinking the phone call
One of the more candid moments came from a leader whose team eliminated voice support almost entirely, pushing customers to a self-service portal to reduce inefficient back-and-forth. It worked until it didn’t. For a subset of high-value customers doing complex annual transactions, the lack of a phone option became a genuine trust problem, and the team is now building a more targeted (and possibly paid) phone experience back in.
The lesson wasn’t “don’t cut voice” or “always keep voice”; it was that channel strategy needs to be segmented by customer, not applied as a blanket policy.
Onshore vs. offshore
More than one attendee pushed back hard on the old mental model of “our team” versus “the BPO.” Their approach: every location, including domestic work-from-home teams, gets a site code and is managed to the same standard. No special treatment for the U.S. team, no lower bar for an offshore site. Leaders who’ve made this shift report that it kills the “us vs. them” dynamic that quietly undermines many outsourcing relationships, and in some cases, offshore teams have gone on to outperform the domestic team once expectations are equalized.
Transparency reinforced this. Several leaders described sharing performance data openly across partners by letting one BPO see how another is performing on the same account as a surprisingly effective way to build trust and drive improvement, rather than a competitive risk.
Vetting a partner properly
This was maybe the most tactical, immediately useful advice of the day: when you visit a potential BPO site, don’t just talk to leadership. Ask to speak with frontline agents without their managers present.
The same skepticism applies to the numbers behind the business. A few leaders said they’ve started looping in finance and audit teams to vet a partner’s financial health directly, not just data security, because a BPO that looks great in a pitch deck can still be late paying its own vendors. With consolidation picking up across the outsourcing industry, that diligence is becoming more important, not less.
Regional consideration is getting more nuanced
Geography came up constantly, but not as a straightforward cost conversation, more as a question of fit. The Philippines remains a major hub and was described as a safe, proven choice for a reason, but several leaders pushed back on treating it as a default. A few flagged longer ramp times for complex, less-scripted products, and there was real debate about whether the market’s famously warm, accommodating service style is always the right match. Some customer bases respond better to a more direct, no-frills tone, and that mismatch can show up in satisfaction scores in ways that are easy to miss if you’re only looking at cost and language proficiency.
The most notable shift was geographic curiosity: multiple leaders are actively expanding into or exploring Nigeria, Rwanda, Kenya, Ethiopia, and South Africa, citing strong English proficiency and labor quality alongside open questions about political stability and operational risk that the group agreed are worth investigating firsthand. Nobody in the room described these markets as fully proven yet; the tone was less “we’ve cracked it” and more “we’re piloting carefully and comparing notes with peers who are doing the same,” which is exactly the kind of ground-truth intelligence that’s hard to get anywhere except a room like this one.
Underneath both points was a broader shift in how leaders are evaluating location altogether: less “where is labor cheapest” and more “where can we find the right combination of skill, tone, stability, and scalability for this specific line of business.” A single global outsourcing strategy is giving way to a more deliberately blended footprint, matched to the complexity and sensitivity of the work being handled.
Outcome-based pricing has momentum
There’s a real appetite for moving away from pure productive-hour pricing toward outcome- or value-based models. But leaders running businesses with many product lines and transaction types described the practical challenge honestly: it’s hard to set fair, meaningful targets when your business has dozens of different call types, each with its own effort and value profile.
Nobody in the room claimed to have fully solved this, but the direction of travel was clear.
AI is the backdrop to every one of these conversations
AI didn’t dominate the discussion, but it ran underneath all of it as the thing that will keep pulling the “mundane, repetitive” work out of outsourced teams over time, and as a source of new tension (agents optimizing for first-contact resolution sometimes over-extend calls trying to preempt every possible follow-up question).
Those in attendance don’t think outsourcing is going away because of AI. If anything, the room’s read was the opposite: outsourcing is likely to grow as a strategic lever over the next few years, not shrink, with AI reshaping what gets outsourced rather than whether it does.
As customer expectations, AI capabilities, and outsourcing strategies continue to evolve, ongoing peer dialogue has never been more valuable.
Want in on the next conversation?
Keep an eye on our leadership events page and join us at an upcoming Outsourcing Briefing to connect with fellow CX leaders, exchange practical insights, and explore the strategies shaping the future of customer experience outsourcing. Whether you’re reevaluating existing partnerships or building your next-generation operating model, these discussions are designed to help you lead with greater confidence and clarity.
