The contract looked clean. A software company serving freelance accountants moved its six-person Canadian support team to an offshore provider at a blended rate saving about $220,000 annually. Response time targets were written into the agreement. Quality metrics were defined.
Where the contract ended and the problem started
The offshore agents followed scripts precisely. Complex queries about tax-year data imports or multi-currency reconciliation required product knowledge that took the original team months to build. The new agents escalated these to a backlog that no one owned clearly.
Average resolution time for technical issues went from 1.2 days to 6.8 days within the first quarter. Customers on annual plans renewed at a lower rate. Customers on monthly plans cancelled faster. Neither metric was directly tied to support quality in the original business case.
What the transition plan missed
The company had documented FAQs and a knowledge base. It had not documented the judgment calls. When a client asked whether a specific CRA filing workaround was safe, the original team knew to say nothing definitive and flag it to the product manager. The offshore team either gave confident wrong answers or deflected entirely.
Dariusz Kowal, the operations lead, spent four months rewriting escalation paths and building a secondary review layer. That added approximately $60,000 back into annual costs, reducing the net saving to around $160,000 while churn losses from the transition period were still being calculated.
A narrower read on the lesson
Offshoring support can reduce costs. The gap is usually not in the vendor but in what the buying company failed to transfer before the handoff. The knowledge that lives in experienced agents is not in any FAQ document, and rebuilding it after the fact is slower and more expensive than capturing it first.