A buyer's checklist for outsourcing customer service in Australia

Write down four things before you talk to providers: contact volumes by channel and hour, the hours you need covered in AEST, what stays in-house, and your service numbers today. Everything else on this list follows from those four.

This is the checklist to take into vendor calls, in the order you'll need it. It runs from the brief and the first call through proof, the pilot and the contract to the first 90 days. Each item comes with its reason, so you can drop the ones that don't apply to you.

Serkan Honeine, Co-founder, CoSauce

Published 8 November 2026 · Last updated 8 November 2026

Before you brief anyone

Count contacts a month by channel, then by hour of the day for a typical week. A provider can only size and price a team from this, and a guess here turns into the wrong team size later.
Decide the hours you need covered, in AEST, weekends included. A team in another time zone covers some of your hours well and others only with a night shift, so this decides which countries are even in the running.
Write down what stays with your own team, at least to start. Escalations that need someone with authority, your largest accounts, and anything where a wrong answer has legal or safety consequences all belong on that list.
Look at what's in the queue. If a third of your contacts ask where an order is, fixing the order emails costs less than paying anyone to answer them.
Record your current numbers: first response time, time to resolve, quality score, repeat contacts and customer satisfaction. Without a baseline, the pilot becomes a matter of opinion.
Name one person on your side who owns the relationship and has the hours for it. In the first weeks that's a real job.

Check whether the Privacy Act covers you, because the contract items below depend on it. Organisations with annual turnover above $3 million are covered, and so are some smaller ones, including private health service providers and businesses that sell or buy personal information (OAIC).

If you're still deciding whether to outsource at all, read the pros and cons of outsourcing customer service and the ten signs you need to first.

What goes in the brief

Keep it to a page or two. Include:

The volumes and hours from above, by channel.
Your tools by name (helpdesk, phone system, CRM) and that the team will work inside them. Your data stays where it is, and the history stays yours if you ever leave.
The contact types you want handled, each with a few real tickets attached, names removed. Examples tell a provider more than a category name does.
Your tone guide and quality scorecard if you have them. If you don't, say so. A good provider will ask for them, and the free QA rubric builder below gets you a first draft.
The data the team will see, and what it must never see, such as card numbers or health information.
What you want quoted: a price for handling the work you have described, with the team size and hours shown, and what changes when volume moves. Comparing per-head rates hides the difference between a provider that shrinks the queue and one that only staffs it.
When you want to start, and that you want to begin with a pilot.

The free QA rubric builder drafts a scorecard from your own contact types. Send the result with the brief.

Questions for the first call

Walk me through your first four weeks with us.

A provider that has done this answers with steps and dates. One that hasn't answers with a slide.

Who runs our account day to day, and are they on this call?

You want to have met the person who stays after the salesperson moves on.

Where will the team sit, and what are their hours in Sydney time?

Make them say it in AEST. A standard South African day, for example, runs 5pm to 1am in Sydney, which suits evenings and needs a night shift for mornings.

What would you take out of our queue before you staff it?

A provider paid per head has no reason to make the queue smaller. Listen for a method.

How do you hire for our account, and what training happens before someone touches a live ticket?

Hired to your brief, or whoever is on the bench? The answer is usually in the training plan.

What is in the weekly report, and who from your side attends the review?

If the answer is a dashboard link and nobody from their side, expect to manage the team yourself, which is the job you were paying them to do.

The questions about attrition, shared agents and who pays for tool seats are in how to outsource customer service without losing quality. Ask those too.

References and proof

Ask every provider for the same four things, us included:

A reference client in your time zone and roughly your size. Ask them about the first 90 days and about one thing that went wrong. Every referee says it's fine; the story of the fix tells you how the provider behaves under pressure.
A real quality scorecard and a real weekly report, with the client's name removed. If they can't produce one, the weekly review they promised doesn't exist yet.
The ISO 27001 certificate itself, not the logo. Read the scope: which sites and which services it covers. If you take card payments, ask about PCI DSS too.
Case studies with results you can check, and a named client who will take a call.

Ours are on the customer teams page, which is the source for the one figure we quote: about 60% lower cost than an onshore team. The red flags that should end a conversation early are in how to choose a customer service outsourcing provider.

The pilot

One channel and one contact type, run long enough to cover your busy days and your quiet ones.
Pass criteria in writing before it starts: quality score, first response time and repeat-contact rate, against the baseline you recorded earlier.
Your own team keeps working the same kind of ticket, scored on the same scorecard, so the comparison is fair.
What happens at the end, either way. If it passes, what gets added. If it fails, what each side owes. A pilot without an exit is a contract in disguise.

The contract

Read the contract against the sales call. Where they differ, the contract wins. This is a summary, not legal advice, so check the details with your adviser.

Clause	Ask for	Why
Notice period	The same notice both ways, short enough that a team which fails after the pilot doesn't cost you a year.	Providers often quote a short notice period in sales calls and a longer minimum term in the contract. Read both.
Price when volume moves	What happens to the price when volume rises or falls, in writing, and how much warning each side gives.	Volume is the one thing you can be sure will change.
Personal information	A clause requiring the provider to handle personal information in line with the Australian Privacy Principles.	APP 8 says you must take reasonable steps before disclosing personal information overseas, and the OAIC says that usually means an enforceable contract. You stay accountable for the provider's handling either way.
Breach notification	The provider tells you about any suspected breach within a set number of hours, and the contract says who notifies affected customers.	You have at most 30 calendar days to assess a suspected breach, and where two entities hold the data the scheme leaves it to them to decide who notifies. Decide it now.
Access	Named logins in your systems, multi-factor authentication on, access removed the day someone leaves the account.	Shared logins make quality scoring and breach investigation impossible.
Service levels	Response and resolution times that match what you owe your own customers, reviewed weekly, with a remedy if they're missed.	The consumer guarantees under Australian Consumer Law, including due care and skill and a reasonable time, sit with the business selling the service. Who answers the phone doesn't change that.
Exit	Tickets, macros, help articles, recordings and reports stay yours and come back in a usable format, with handover help for a set period.	The team that knows your product will leave with the contract. The knowledge shouldn't.

The privacy items come from the OAIC's guidance. Under APP 8.1 you must take "such steps as are reasonable in the circumstances to ensure that the overseas recipient does not breach the APPs" (OAIC, APP 8 guidelines). Under section 16C you stay accountable for the recipient's acts even after taking those steps. On breaches, "an entity must take all reasonable steps to complete the assessment within 30 calendar days" (OAIC, NDB scheme). Where information is held jointly, "only one entity needs to notify", and the scheme leaves the choice to the entities. The consumer guarantees for services are listed by the ACCC (ACCC).

For the pricing models you'll see in the quote, and what each one hides, read how much it costs to outsource customer service.

The first 90 days

Week 1
Access is set up and tested. New agents shadow your team on live tickets. Questions go to one agreed channel so answers aren't lost in chat.
Weeks 2 to 4
Score every ticket. Once a week, a scorer from each side marks the same handful and compares. Where the marks differ, the scorecard wording is unclear, so fix it. Every correction is also a missing help article.
Day 30
Check the numbers against the pilot criteria. If they hold, add a second contact type or channel. If not, work out why before adding anything.
Every week
A review with named people from both sides: quality scores, repeat contacts, what changed in the product, and what the team should take on next.
Day 90
Compare against the baseline you recorded before the brief. Decide what moves next, and ask the provider what they would now take out of the queue altogether.

This is also how we run our own accounts. A co-founder joins your weekly review, and the question at the end of each one is what can move to automation next. The method is on our how we work page.

Questions

Do we need customer consent to send data to an offshore team?

Consent is one exception under APP 8. To rely on it you must expressly tell the customer that APP 8.1 won't apply, and that you won't be accountable for what happens overseas. Few businesses want to say that, so most rely on the reasonable-steps route instead: a contract binding the provider to the APPs, plus monitoring. The OAIC's guidance treats handing information to an overseas contractor as a disclosure in most cases, so plan on APP 8 applying (OAIC, APP 8 guidelines).

Should we ask for a price per agent?

Ask for a price for the work you described, with the team size and hours shown underneath it. A per-agent rate is easy to compare and tells you nothing about whether the provider will make the queue smaller. We price customer teams per team and quote after we've mapped the work, which is why we ask for the brief first.

How long does it take to go live?

Ask each provider for a date and for what they need from you to hit it. Our customer teams usually go live about four weeks after you decide, working on ISO 27001-certified infrastructure inside your tools and under your access rules. The part that slows go-live is almost always on the buyer's side: logins, help articles and a scorecard. The brief section above is there so it's ready before you sign.

Next step

If you're working through this checklist, book a call with me. Bring your contact counts and the hours you need covered. We'll tell you what we would take out of the queue before staffing it, what the rest would cost, and where our hours do and don't fit yours. If we're not the right fit, I'll say so. You can also read how our customer service outsourcing for Australian businesses works from South Africa.