Peak season
Customer service
E-commerce
Nearshoring
Outsourcing
Expanding across Europe creates a customer service operational challenge that often appears much earlier than companies expect.
A business enters Germany and needs German-speaking customer service. France follows, then the Netherlands, Italy, Spain or the Nordics. Different markets bring different languages, processes, regulations and service requirements.
The intuitive response is to build local teams in each market.
But that is not the only model.
European customer operations can increasingly be centralized in one nearshore location, with multilingual customer service, back-office processes, technical support and other BPO functions managed from a single operational hub.
Poland is one of the locations where this model can work particularly well.
The country has developed one of Europe’s largest business services ecosystems. At the end of Q1 2026, Poland had 2,179 business service centres operated by 1,303 companies, while the sector employed around half a million people. More importantly, the market is moving beyond transactional outsourcing toward complex, knowledge-intensive and globally managed processes.
The question for companies expanding across Europe could be which European operations can we manage centrally?
One European operation instead of multiple local teams
Building customer service separately in every market creates duplication.
Each country may require its own recruitment, management structure, training, quality assurance, workforce planning, reporting and technology setup.
As the number of markets increases, companies can end up managing several relatively small operations that perform very similar functions.
A centralized nearshore model approaches the problem differently.
Instead of building separate teams for Germany, France, Italy or other European markets, multilingual teams can operate from Poland within one operational structure.
The same principle can extend beyond customer service to processes such as:
- back-office support,
- order management,
- data processing,
- customer verification,
- claims or case administration,
- technical support,
- sales support,
- quality assurance,
- reporting and analytics.
This is already characteristic of Poland’s business services market. ABSL data show that a majority of centres provide more than one business function, reflecting the move toward multifunctional service environments rather than narrowly defined outsourcing operations.
Why Poland works as a nearshore location for European operations
The argument for Poland is no longer simply lower operating costs.
The more important advantage is the maturity of the business services ecosystem.
Poland has spent decades developing BPO, SSC, GBS, IT and R&D capabilities. The country’s business services sector generated an estimated $48.4 billion in exports in 2025, while knowledge-intensive work now represents nearly 60% of operations.
That matters because current European customer operations require much more than access to agents answering calls.
Companies increasingly need multilingual recruitment, operational management, quality assurance, training, workforce management, analytics, automation, AI-supported workflows and specialist knowledge within the same delivery environment.
The Polish market has increasingly developed around precisely this type of complex service delivery.
Warsaw alone had 418 business service centres and 111,200 employees in the sector in 2025, with almost 60% of work classified as knowledge-based.
And Poland is already being used explicitly as a hub for European customer operations. For example, Maersk opened a Warsaw shared service centre to support European customers and different parts of its business in multiple languages.
Nearshoring does not mean that everything has to be delivered by one team
Centralization is sometimes misunderstood as putting every process into one large operation.
That is not necessarily the goal.
A European operating model can be centralized while still using different types of expertise.
One provider may be able to manage multilingual customer service, back-office operations, quality assurance and selected automation within an integrated model.
Other processes may require specialist capabilities that make a multi-provider model more appropriate.
For example, an operation may require a combination of:
- a specialist technology provider,
- local legal or regulatory expertise,
- highly specialized technical support,
- market-specific partners for selected processes.
The important question is not whether one provider should do everything. We should ask whether the company needs to build and manage a separate operational organization in every European market.
Those are two very different questions.
One primary partner can simplify operational ownership
Where the required capabilities exist within one provider, consolidating operations can significantly reduce fragmentation.
Instead of coordinating separate vendors for customer service, back office, workforce management, QA, analytics and automation, organizations can establish one operating model with shared governance and accountability.
This can make it easier to standardize:
- knowledge management,
- reporting,
- escalation procedures,
- technology,
- workforce planning.
Local market requirements can still be incorporated without recreating the entire operating structure in every country.
This is particularly important when a business operates across many relatively small European markets. Maintaining a complete local structure for each language may simply not be operationally efficient.
But centralization should not eliminate local market knowledge
A centralized European model does not mean treating Europe as one homogeneous customer market.
German customers are not French customers translated into German. And a process designed for Poland cannot automatically be copied into another market without considering local requirements.
Centralized operations still need to account for:
- regulatory requirements,
- product differences,
- delivery and payment models,
- customer expectations,
- cultural context.
The advantage of nearshoring is therefore not standardization at all costs.
It is the ability to centralize the operational infrastructure while preserving market-specific knowledge where it matters.
Customer service and BPO can operate from the same nearshore ecosystem
Another advantage of the Polish market is that nearshoring does not have to stop at front-office customer service.
As operations mature, companies often discover that customer-facing and back-office processes are closely connected.
A customer contacts support about a refund. The interaction itself is front office, but resolving the issue may require payment verification, documentation, data updates or another administrative process.
If those processes sit in completely separate operating environments, every handover introduces additional complexity.
A broader BPO model can connect front-, middle- and back-office processes within the same delivery ecosystem.
This reflects the wider development of Poland’s business services sector. In 2024, more than half of processes delivered by Polish centres were already classified as mid-office, while the sector continued moving toward more complex front-office and knowledge-intensive work.
When a multi-provider model makes more sense
Not every European operation should be consolidated with a single provider. There are situations where combining specialized partners creates a stronger model.
This may be the case when a company requires rare languages, highly regulated expertise, niche technical capabilities or services that fall outside the core competencies of the primary BPO provider.
In this situation, Poland can still function as the operational centre of gravity.
The core European operation can be managed from Poland, while specialist providers support selected markets or processes.
The objective should be to avoid unnecessary fragmentation without forcing every capability into the same delivery model.
How Axendi supports European operations from Poland
At Axendi, we support organizations that want to manage multilingual customer service and BPO operations from Poland rather than building separate operational structures across multiple European markets.
Our model combines customer service and BPO delivery with operational advisory and technology, allowing organizations to centralize not only teams but also the processes that support them.
Depending on the project, this can include multilingual customer service, back-office processes, sales support, quality management, analytics, AI-supported operations and automation.
Where a project requires capabilities outside the scope of one provider, the operating model can also incorporate specialized partners rather than forcing every process into a single structure.
The objective is not simply to move work to Poland.
It is to build a European operating model in which the right processes are centralized, market-specific requirements are preserved, and operational ownership remains clear.
One location does not mean one-size-fits-all
Supporting customers across Europe does not necessarily require customer service teams in every country where a business operates.
A mature nearshore model can centralize multilingual customer care, BPO processes, technology and operational management in Poland while retaining the flexibility to incorporate local or specialist capabilities where they are genuinely needed.
That changes the expansion question. Organizations can ask: How much of our European customer operation can we manage from one nearshore hub?
For companies expanding across multiple European markets, that can create a fundamentally more scalable operating model.
