Why your IT service desk in Poland performs poorly
Has your company outsourced its IT service desk to a nearshore or offshore operation center to reduce costs ? It doesn't deliver and you wonder why. You can't get answers when you demand explanations.
Your case is far from being isolated. This page is currently being updated and will be accessible in the next few days with an in-depth analysis by consultant Lionel Fouillen who has been navigating between Western clients and nearshore service desks for the past 15 years, working both in Belgium and Poland.
Briefly said
There are three reasons why an outsourced service desk doesn't meet the client's expectations :
1. The ill-conceived model of tiered support. Solution: replace tiered support with swarming support handed over to more skilled, true IT engineers, and replace the L1 or Tier 1 support with a self-service process where users can log their own tickets, talk to chatbots and browse the knowledge base.
2. The drawbacks of low-cost. Solution: pay the appropriate price for resources and serice model.
3. Adverse local culture. Solution: have a manager from your country and headquarters supervise local operations in the country of service desk operations, and supervise the recruitment of local resources.
In-depth analysis
The article below is being updated.
1. The ill-conceived model of tiered support
Most of the time, IT support is devided in three intervention levels: Level 1 is ususally a helpdesk working as a first point of contact for users to have their incidents and requests registered in tickets. The call center staff usually has no technical competence and can easily get lost in the process of supplying basic service or remotely connecting to the user's PC to install software.
Level 2 service implies on-site support for software and hardware installation and maintenance, or remote software installation.
Level 3 (and sometimes 4) relates to in-depth engineering and sometimes involves collaboration between skilled IT engineers with hardware manufacturer and software editor.
Demanding KPIs tend to provoke botched-up service by support teams not managing to deak efficiency with service requirements, with team leaders forcing their team members to close tickets at the end of the month even if the problem is not solved. Also, a support agent may send a solution to a user in a message posted from the tickets management application while simultaneously closing the ticket. Frustration is big among users when they receive a solution that is sometimes not working, seeing that their ticket was closed.
Even if metrics are good thanks to such malpractice, users are dissatisfied, which results in what was coined as the "watermelon effect". Green outside, which looks good, but red inside because it's not working.
A solution to the problem is to replace the obsolete tiered-level support with "swarming support" and its variant "intelligent swarming". The idea is that the support team acts as a swarm of bees watching for tickets and jumping on the ones relating to their personal field of expertise. A support engineer is in charge of a ticket resoluton from beginning to end, without escalation to upper tiers. This requires a higher number of genuinely skilled IT people and is more expensive as it requires hiring better professionals. It's up to the customers to decide whether they prefer a good service or a cheap service.
2. The drawbacks of low-cost
In order to reduce costs or simply to find resources in sufficient quantity, outsourcing a service desk to nearshore or offshore suppliers has dramatically increased over the past 20 years with India, Central/Eastern Europe and the "Latam" (Latin America) regions as favourite destinations.
Suppliers ususally deliver services following a model that guarantees hiring cheaper people with less experience and trying to manage them appropriately to increase their competence. This has limits and often leads to micro-management, wasting big amounts of time on training people instead of hiring the right people in the first place. Micro-management is not a management method, it's a management error.
In Poland for example, observing job offers posted on Linkedin allows to see the profile sought by suppliers. Job offers such as "No experience required, First Job, Work in modern office, No dress code" is a red flag indicating that you, the customer, will be served on the phone by beginners with little or no comptetence.
Consequently, turn-over is important and may reach up to 40% of the staff annually in some companies. Moreover, young employees tend to find a better job as quickly as possible and will resign to accept a better salary elsewhere if the head office doesn't measure the impact of inflation on the cost of living and corresponding wages. This is now the year 2026. We are no longer in 2004 when Poland joind the European Union and you could get a call-center agent for 100 EUR per day excluding VAT. Some Western employers are in complete denial of the progressive rise of salaries in Poland and the rest Central Europe. At a financial company where I've worked in Cracow from 2015 to 2017, a department started to lose employees week after week, who would defect to a competitor offering, depending on position, from 30 to 45% more salary. That year, the annual turn-over rate of my client went sky-rocketing and ended at 38%. For the same reason of employers refusing to pay realistic salaries, an average of 20 to 25% annual turn-over rate is normal in many companies employing young people with less experience.
For a freelance IT support engineer, IT support manager or IT support team leader with competence, experience and real added value, in a large Polish city in 2026, be ready to pay a realistic price of 300 to 350 EUR per day, excluding VAT. If the consultant works as a subcontractor for a big IT company dispatching him on your premises, the intermediate company adds a commission bringing the final price to about 400 EUR. To be clear, this is 400 EUR in Poland where you would pay 600 EUR in Western Europe (in countries like Belgium or France).
The above-mentioned accepted price is for a competent freelancer most likely recruited directly by a Western recruiter aware that quality has a price. Besides this price range however, beware of cheap offers! Polish recruiters tend to work only with native Polish employees or freelancers constituting an abundant workforce which they underpay (probably out of nostalgia for the older communist times), accepting to pay no more than 200 EUR per day for a freelancer.
In 2009, when I was preparing the setup of my company ITYGRYS in Cracow, I came several times to Poland to analyse the costs of local services including competition (office rental, accountant, lawyer, social security premiums, tax rates), and I could see that the normal price asked for by a Polish IT freelancer was already 200 EUR per day excluding VAT. In 2026, this range of fees doesn't allow to pay for a comfortable "normal" lifestyle typically desired by a college-educated, middle-class consultant, and this includes professional expenses logically associated with running a business. Please understand that if a Polish freelancer accepts to work at such a low price in 2026, you're being sold a very underperforming service.
Consequently, as said above, the normal fees in 2026 for a competent freelance consultant in support delivery or management is 400 EUR per day excluding VAT. As a comparison, for jobs such as senior software developper or top network administrator, employee salaries (not freelance) can be as high as 6000 EUR brutto per month, which is enough to give an idea on how salaries increased over the past few years.
Last but not least, the high demand of human resources sometimes results in having the wrong people climbing the ladder. A typical example is with IT support team leaders being too young, showing a blatant lack of professional maturity, being promoted too quickly by unappropriate HR policies. This doesn't only affect IT service desks but may be seen in all departments of a Western company's Polish branch, where people with the appropriate business mindset or required SDO (social dominance orientation) are sometimes difficult to find to fulfill managerial positions.
3. Adverse local culture
Are you having issues with your service desk in Central or Eastern Europe ? Performance is not good and you don't understand why you are facing a wall when asking for explanations or accountability. You're not the only one, I often heared such complaint. Not all people are business-oriented or keen to openness. There are people, more it seems among certain nations than others, for whom it's difficult to be accountable to foreigners, to be submitted to foreign managers, and who place the protection of their cultural territories above customer satisfaction.
There are behaviours often met in Central or Eastern Europe to which we are not accustomed in Western Europe. This is not the case everywhere but it only takes one narrow-minded idiot at a manager's position to screw a whole service and leave the customer puzzled.