Retailers Should Connect Site Selection and Contact Center Strategy

Most retailers talk about their contact center strategy as if it's one decision: Where should this be located? In practice, there are two decisions, and treating them as one is where a lot of strategies go wrong. The first is geography: onshore, nearshore, or offshore. The second, and the one most often skipped, is ownership: Should the retailer run the operation or hand it to a BPO partner? Get either one wrong on its own and the other can't fully fix it. Home improvement chains, e-commerce and marketplace retailers, electronics retailers and event-ticket marketplaces all answer these two questions differently, because the right answer depends on how each one's call volume actually behaves, not on a single industry template.

Two Decisions, Not One

Insourcing means the retailer builds, staffs, and manages the operation itself. It buys control over training, brand voice and escalation authority, but insourcing is capital-intensive and hard to flex. A facility built to cover holiday peak sits partly empty the other 10 months of the year. Outsourcing to a BPO partner trades some of that control for flexibility: variable cost, faster ramp-up before a seasonal surge, and access to labor markets where a retailer would never build a facility in on its own. Geography is a separate question that applies either way: An insourced team can sit onshore or nearshore, and so can an outsourced one. Confusing the two questions is how retailers end up with capacity in the wrong place, run by the wrong model, for the volume it actually has to handle.

Why Retail's Seasonality Pushes Toward a Blend

Retail's demand curves make an all-insourced or all-outsourced model hard to defend. Home improvement retailers see storm-driven spikes; e-commerce sees the holiday curve; ticket marketplaces see overnight surges tied to on-sale dates. Building enough insourced capacity to cover the peak means paying for idle seats most of the year.

That's why most retailers land on a blend: a smaller insourced core, onshore, handling the highest-value and highest-complexity calls, backed by an outsourced partner who can flex volume up and down as the season demands. The mix isn't fixed either. A retailer expanding into new product categories or shifting more volume online changes what "core" and "flex" actually mean within a year or two.

What Actually Drives the Decision

A handful of factors determine where each piece of volume should sit:

• How much resolution risk is tied to the average sale value.
• How much the volume swings seasonally.
• How sensitive the calls are to product or brand knowledge.
• Whether the retailer has the balance sheet appetite for fixed capacity versus the flexibility of a partner contract.

Volume that's high-value, brand-sensitive, and steady tends to justify insourcing onshore. Volume that's high-volume, routine and seasonal tends to make more sense outsourced, regardless of geography.

What This Looks Like in the Call Mix

The framework holds up once you look at what retailers are actually fielding. An appliance delivery dispute or a large furniture claim carries real resolution risk and usually stays with an experienced, onshore agent—insourced or through a dedicated outsourced team. A home improvement retailer's project-specific technical questions, like matching a part number or scheduling a contractor, fall into the same bucket. Electronics retailers see a similar pattern on big-ticket purchases: a laptop or television with a setup or compatibility question is worth the same onshore, knowledgeable agent as a large appliance dispute.

Order status and shipment tracking, on the other hand, form a steady, low-complexity baseline that's routinely outsourced and often offshore. Ticket marketplaces see a narrower, higher-stakes set of calls—transfers, exchanges, cancellations—concentrated into short windows around specific events, which tends to push that volume toward a dedicated outsourced team that can staff up fast rather than an in-house team sized for a slow week. Nearshore, almost always outsourced, has become the strongest spot for the mid-complexity, bilingual volume in between. Colombia and Costa Rica offer quality close to onshore at a real cost advantage.

Channel Changes the Calculus

Channel adds another layer worth factoring into the same decision. Phone-heavy, high-stakes volume tends to reinforce the case for keeping it onshore, whether insourced or through a dedicated partner, because a live agent with real resolution authority is still the fastest way to save a large sale.

Chat, SMS, and self-service volume are a different story. They're well suited to outsourced teams, often offshore or nearshore, because AI-assisted tools and scripted workflows narrow the skill gap between locations. Retailers investing in forecasting and agent-assist technology generally aren't doing it to cut headcount so much as to make the geography and ownership mix work harder: automation absorbs the routine volume so the onshore core can stay focused on the calls where the sale is actually at risk.

The risk sits at either extreme. Outsourcing everything to chase cost savings weakens control over the calls that protect the highest-value sales. The agent who can't resolve a large appliance dispute without three transfers costs more in lost customers than the outsourcing arrangement ever saved. Insourcing everything to chase control leaves a retailer carrying fixed capacity that sits idle outside peak season, which shows up directly on the balance sheet. The retailers getting this right revisit the mix regularly, not just once, as e-commerce growth or a shift in average order value changes what the call volume actually looks like.

Where SSG Fits In

Contact center strategy doesn't happen in isolation from the rest of a retailer's real estate footprint, and that's usually where SSG comes in. We work with retailers on where to locate their stores, and separately on where a contact center operation should sit geographically—onshore, nearshore, or offshore.

From there, we help retailers execute whichever ownership path makes sense: building out an in-house operation or identifying and vetting BPO partners on their behalf. A retailer's store footprint says a lot about its brand sensitivity and customer expectations, which feeds directly into how much of its contact center volume belongs onshore versus outsourced elsewhere.

A retailer with a premium, service-heavy store experience tends to need that same standard carried through on the phone, which argues for more onshore, insourced capacity than a purely price-driven retailer would need.

The evaluation we run maps call complexity and sale value against seasonality and cost structure to land on the right geography and the right ownership model for each piece of volume, instead of one answer applied across the board. If you're weighing where that work should sit, or whether to build it in-house or bring in a BPO partner, that's worth a conversation before capacity or partner contracts lock in.