Outsource the switchboard or remove the calls? Count first

The quote from the contact centre is on the table, and it looks reasonable: they take the calls, you lose the queue. I have bought outsourced phone support myself and later run it for others, and what I learned is that the quote answers the wrong question. The question is not who should take the calls, but why people are calling. This article shows how to count that before you sign, and what happens to the calculation once the calls that never needed to be made are gone.

Why do companies want to outsource the switchboard?

Because the phone is still the channel that demands the most of the team, and because it cannot be scaled with office hours. Gartner noted in February 2025 that the phone is still the dominant service channel, while only 35 percent of customers whose last contact was by phone are willing to use an AI assistant instead. So customers call, and they do not stop calling because you wish they would.

That drives three problems an outsourcing quote promises to solve: the queue grows in peaks nobody can staff, customers call in the evenings and at weekends when nobody answers, and the phone ties up the person taking the call for the whole length of the call. Deloitte's global outsourcing survey 2024 shows that cost is no longer the main reason, only 34 percent named it against 70 percent in 2020, but rising customer expectations. Companies buy opening hours and capacity, not a lower hourly rate.

But the quote prices the calls as they are today. It does not ask how many of them should have disappeared.

Which calls should never have needed to be made?

The ones where the customer wants to know something the company already knows, and could have looked up. Listen to a day's calls and sort them, and the pattern appears:

In my experience the first three rows make up between half and two thirds of the calls in an online store or a service company. They do not call because the customer prefers the phone, but because the digital channels did not answer. How the order question specifically is designed away is described in the article on where is my order.

One reason the calls remain is that nobody points them away. According to a Gartner survey, 60 percent of agents fail to refer the customer to self-service when the opportunity exists. The customer who calls about order status today calls again next time, if nobody showed where the answer was.

What does the law require of your phone?

That you have a phone number, and that you do not force the customer into a particular channel. According to the Swedish Consumer Agency, a company must state a phone number under the distance contracts act, together with name, company registration number, email address and postal address, and the contact details must be easy to find. The agency is also clear that the company may not require the customer to contact you in a particular way; the customer should not, for example, have to call to cancel a contract.

That means two things for the decision. You cannot remove the phone, so an outsourcing that merely moves it does not solve the underlying question. And you may not hide it behind a chatbot that refuses to hand over. What you may do is give the customer a better alternative before the phone: a help centre that answers, a chat that looks up the order, a customer portal where the action can be taken. Then the customer chooses, and the phone becomes the channel for what needs a conversation.

What does a call cost compared with a digital answer?

Many times more, and that difference decides the calculation. The most cited reference comes from a Gartner survey in 2019: staffed channels such as phone, chat and email cost on average 8.01 dollars per contact, self-service around 0.10 dollars. The figures are American and seven years old, but the order of magnitude holds.

Set that against the quote. Assume 400 calls a week, half of them lookups. The contact centre prices all 400. A ticketing system with help centre, chat and customer portal removes the 200 lookups, and the 200 that remain get shorter, because the agent has the order, the history and a reviewed answer in front of them. Counted that way, the quote should be compared with the cost of 200 calls, not 400, and that usually turns the calculation. How such a business case is set up in full is in the article on AI in customer service as a business case.

When is outsourcing still right?

When what remains after the removed calls still cannot be staffed: evenings and weekends, languages you do not have, or peaks like November. That is the same assessment as in the article on outsourcing or keeping customer service in-house, and its conclusion holds: hybrid usually fits best, where you own the knowledge and a partner takes hours and languages.

The difference is the order. Remove the calls first, then outsource what remains. Whoever does it the other way round pays a partner to answer questions an article would have answered, and sits with the same volume when the contract comes up for renewal. Gartner reports that self-service, live chat and knowledge systems are set to overtake phone and email as the technologies customer service leaders value most by 2027. That is the investment the quote competes with.

What does a setup look like where you keep the switchboard but halve the calls?

A ticketing system where every channel answers from the same reviewed knowledge, and where the phone is one of them. This is how it works in Supportifier, and the principle is the same whatever the tool:

1. The help centre takes the fixed answers. Opening hours, delivery time, returns, withdrawal and complaints as articles, written once and reviewed by whoever owns the subject.
2. The chat and the customer portal take the lookups. Order status, invoice copies and address changes require a connection to the order system or e-commerce platform, so the answer applies to this particular customer and not to "delivery in general".
3. The inbox takes what needs a person, with the customer's history, the order and a suggested reply from the same knowledge base. The call that still comes gets shorter, and the agent logs it as a ticket in the same view as the emails and chats, so the statistics hold together. What the inbox does is described on the inbox page.
4. The phone remains, clearly stated, for advice, complaints and whatever does not fit. It can be run by you, or by a partner in the evenings and at weekends.

What makes the setup cheaper than outsourcing is not that someone answers faster, but that fewer need to answer at all.

What to do

1. Listen to a day's calls, or read the switchboard log, and sort every call into the five rows of the table.
2. Count the share in the first three rows. That is the volume that can be removed.
3. Recalculate the quote on what remains, and add the cost of what removes the calls.
4. Write the twenty most common answers and publish them in the help centre before deciding anything else.
5. Connect the order lookup to the chat and the customer portal, so that "where is my order" stops requiring a call.
6. Have the agents refer to the help centre answer in every call where one exists, so the next question does not become a call.
7. Measure calls per hundred orders week by week. If it does not fall, the lookups have not disappeared, whatever you have built.

Common questions

Can we remove the phone number entirely and only have chat?

No. According to the Swedish Consumer Agency a company must state a phone number under the distance contracts act, and the customer may not be forced into a particular contact method. You may, however, make the digital channels the natural first choice by having them actually answer, and keep the phone for what needs a conversation. A chatbot that does not hand over to a person is not an alternative to the phone, but a reason to call.

How quickly do the calls fall once self-service exists?

Expect the fixed answers, such as opening hours and terms, to disappear within a few weeks of being published and referred to. The lookups, such as order status, fall when the connection to the order system is in place and the notifications answer the next question. Follow calls per hundred orders per call type, and you will see which part moves and which does not.

Should we outsource evenings and weekends?

Only if the calls that need a person arrive then in sufficient volume. Evening and weekend questions are often precisely lookups, and they are better solved by a help centre and a chat that answers from reviewed knowledge, with handover to the next morning. Count the volume after the lookups are gone, and test a partner in one channel before you build shift work or sign a larger contract.

What do we do with calls that require a lookup in our systems?

Give the digital channels the same lookup the agent has. A chat or customer portal that can fetch the order, the invoice or the contract from the customer's details answers what the customer is calling about. That requires a connection to the order system or e-commerce platform, with reading and actions specified separately, and it is the connection that usually gives the largest reduction in calls.

Sources

• Traditional Customer Service Channels Are Losing Ground to Mobile and AI Innovations — Gartner, 2025
• Global Outsourcing Survey 2024 — Deloitte, 2024
• Gartner Survey Finds 60% of Customer Service Agents Fail to Promote Self-Service — Gartner, 2025
• Måste företaget ange telefonnummer på sin hemsida? — Swedish Consumer Agency, read 2026
• Gartner Says Only 9% of Customers Report Solving Their Issues Completely via Self-Service — Gartner, 2019
• Gartner Survey Finds Self-Service and Live Chat Will Surpass Traditional Channels as Top Customer Service Technologies By 2027 — Gartner, 2025