BPO
Customer support
Contact centre operations in Portuguese, English and more than thirty languages, across voice, email, chat and social.
What is delivered
Dedicated or shared teams, with response and resolution SLAs
Per-variant tone guides, scored in quality assurance
Reporting split by variant and market, never a single blended average
What changes between a team in Lisbon and one in Sao Paulo?
Cost and variant. A team in Lisbon speaks native European Portuguese, sits in European Union jurisdiction and requires no data transfer instrument at all. A team in Sao Paulo costs substantially less, speaks Brazilian Portuguese and requires standard contractual clauses with a transfer impact assessment if it handles European customer data.
For many companies the right answer uses both. The Portuguese market is served from Lisbon, the Brazilian market from Sao Paulo, and management, systems and reporting are shared. What is never shared is the script.
How is quality measured rather than merely promised?
By sampled scoring against a rubric we agree with you before the operation opens. Reviewers are native to the variant they assess rather than merely Portuguese speakers, because a Brazilian reviewer does not reliably catch a register that is wrong for a Portuguese customer.
Results are reported by variant and by market. If the operation serves Portugal and Brazil you receive two sets of numbers rather than an average, precisely because the average tends to hide the smaller market.
How do you size a support operation?
By volume per interval rather than by daily average, because support volume arrives in predictable peaks and a team sized to the average misses the service level in half the intervals. The pattern by hour and by weekday is stable enough to plan with and is rarely used for that.
With explicit reserve capacity. Holidays, public holidays and the typical six per cent absence do not all fall on the same day but they do happen, and an operation needing ten people on the floor employs eleven or twelve. Sizing to nominal need is how a service level gets missed with a full team.
And with the learning curve counted. A new person reaches team performance around the sixth to eighth week, which means adding five people does not add five people of capacity for two months. Planning without that curve reproduces the same error at every expansion.
Which channels should the operation cover?
The ones your customers already use, which rarely coincide with the ones the company would prefer they used. Closing a channel because it is expensive pushes volume to another rather than removing it, and frequently to the most expensive of all, which is the phone.
Voice remains the channel for urgent and emotional situations, and it is where the Portuguese variant shows most. Real-time messaging serves transactional matters well. Email tolerates longer deadlines and is where writing quality becomes the entire product.
A multichannel operation needs unified history, which sounds obvious and frequently fails. A customer who wrote yesterday and calls today expects the person answering to know, and the alternative, asking them to repeat themselves, undoes the value of having several channels.
What do you do when volume rises without warning?
First, distinguish a spike from a trend. A one-day spike caused by an incident is handled with temporary capacity and a proactive message that reduces volume at source; a three-week trend requires recruiting, and confusing the two produces the wrong response in both cases.
Then, look for the cause before adding people. A volume increase is almost always a symptom of something that changed elsewhere: a product change, a badly received communication, or an upstream process that started failing. Adding capacity treats the symptom and leaves the cause.
And communicate. An operation that warns waiting times are above normal and says why receives substantially fewer complaints than one that leaves the customer to discover it, and the cost of that communication is practically nil.
What do we ask from your side?
Access to whoever knows the product during training, not only to documentation. A team trained on manuals knows what is written and fails on the first question the manual did not anticipate, which is usually the second or third call.
And a channel for feedback to travel back. The operation sees patterns before any aggregate analysis shows them: three customers with the same difficulty at the same step are worth more than a satisfaction survey, and an organisation with no channel for that information to reach whoever can fix it is wasting it daily.
Where customer support can be run from
Not every delivery model suits every service. The table shows only those that make sense for this work, with the data residency position of each.
| Model | Where | When it makes sense | Personal data |
|---|---|---|---|
| Onshore Portugal | Lisbon, Porto, Braga, Coimbra, Aveiro, Faro, Funchal and Ponta Delgada | When data cannot leave the EEA, or when the end customer is Portuguese | Stay inside the EEA. No transfer. |
| Nearshore in Portugal | Lisbon and Porto, for foreign buyers | When you need a multilingual European base without incorporating | Stay inside the EEA. No transfer. |
| Brazil | Sao Paulo | When scale and cost are the priority, or the market served is Brazilian | No adequacy decision. Requires standard contractual clauses and a transfer impact assessment. |
| Lusophone corridor | Coordination in Lisbon, operations in Luanda, Maputo and Praia | When you operate in Angola or Mozambique and need European governance | The Lisbon tier stays in the EEA. Local operations require standard contractual clauses. |
| Global network | Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Poland, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Colombia, Turkiye and Africa | When you need continuous cover, specific languages or the lowest cost | Poland is inside the EEA. The others require standard contractual clauses. |
The data column describes the applicable framework and is not legal advice. The detail is in international data transfers.
This service carries a variant decision
Are you serving customers in Portugal, in Brazil or in both? The answer changes the operating design, the scripts, who reviews quality and how results are reported.
Related services
- Technical supportLevel 1 and 2 support for software, telecoms and hardware products, with structured escalation.
- Back officeAdministrative processing, document management, data entry and internal operations support.
- Finance and accountingAccounts payable and receivable, reconciliations, invoicing and close support, alongside your own accountants.
- Data processingExtraction, classification, validation and enrichment of data at volume, with measured quality control.
Frequently asked questions
Which channels do you cover?
Voice, email, live chat, forms, WhatsApp and social. The mix follows your customer rather than what is cheapest to run.
Can you cover 24 hours a day?
Yes, across several hubs in different time zones rather than night shifts in one place. The second option degrades quality within months.
Do you use our systems or yours?
Yours, wherever they exist. The team works in your CRM and your ticketing platform, so the history stays with you.
What is the minimum size?
Three full-time people for a dedicated team. Below that, holiday and absence cover stops working.
How long does it take to start?
Four to eight weeks in Portugal and three to six in Brazil or the global hubs, from a signed proposal.
How is seasonality handled?
With a base sized for steady volume and an agreed reserve for the peak, so you do not pay for idle capacity eleven months a year.
Can we listen to calls and read tickets?
You can and you should. Access is yours by default, and we recommend a joint calibration session each month for the first six months.
What happens if quality drops?
There is an agreed threshold below which we enter a recovery plan, with identified causes and a deadline. It is not a conversation that starts when the client complains.
Let us look at the numbers for your case
Tell us which processes you want to outsource, in which languages and at what volume. We come back with a euro estimate and an operating design, with no commitment.
We reply within 6 hours on working days. If you would rather write: info@corpshore.solutions