Finding a New Base: Building a Sustainable European Support Centre

The challenge: a scaling operation outgrowing its initial talent hub

As an Australian company’s global footprint expanded, so did the demands on its European customer support and service operations. The existing hub had served the business well in its earlier stages, but as inbound support needs and outbound sales opportunities grew, the limitations of the location became harder to ignore. Talent was becoming difficult and expensive to source. Salary inflation in the local market was eating into margins faster than the business could support. And critically, the existing location simply didn't have the depth of multilingual talent the organisation needed to properly service customers across the breadth of European markets it now operated in.

The leadership team recognised this wasn't a problem they could solve by taking short-term local actions. What they needed was a genuinely sustainable long-term base for European support and service — one with access to the right skills, at the right cost, with manageable compliance and operational risk. Establishing a new entity in a country the business had no existing presence in is a complex undertaking and the organisation established a cross-functional project team to consider the options.

The project team needed HR consulting support to help navigate the decision and then bring it to life, which is where we came in.

What we did: rigorous research, then careful execution

We started where we always do — with the data. Choosing a new talent hub isn't a decision to be made on instinct or reputation alone, particularly when the outcome is a multi-year commitment to a new country, a new legal entity, and a new workforce.

• Location research and shortlisting. We identified key talent-related criteria to evaluate possible locations. This included the depth and availability of multilingual talent pools (critical, given the need to service customers across multiple languages), prevailing salary benchmarks and cost trajectories, the maturity of local outsourcing or in-house support sectors, and broader employment market dynamics like attrition rates and talent competition from other employers in the same industry.

• Compliance and risk assessment. Cost and talent availability were only ever half the equation. For each location, we considered the practicalities and risks of establishing a legal entity — employment law frameworks, the complexity and cost of entity setup, data protection and cross-border data handling requirements (particularly relevant for a customer support operation), and the broader regulatory and political stability of each market. This gave the executive and board a clear, evidence-based view of not just where would be cheapest but where would be sustainable and lowest-risk over the long term.

With the research complete, and further inputs from other workstreams including finance and IT, the organisation’s leadership was able to make a confident, well-informed decision on the new hub location — backed by data rather than assumption.

Then came the most important part: making it real.

Once the location was confirmed, we worked with the organisation to stand up the new operation from the ground up.  

• Local employment law and contracts. We worked with local legal experts to draft new employment contracts, and ensure all policies, and people practices were fully compliant with local labour law from day one — not retrofitted after the fact.

• Payroll and statutory setup. We supported the establishment of compliant payroll processes and registration for local tax and social security obligations, ensuring the organisation could confidently and accurately meet its employment and legal obligations from the outset.

• Recruitment and employer branding. Establishing a workforce in a market where the organisation had no prior presence meant building credibility as an employer from scratch. We supported the development of an employer brand and recruitment approach tailored to the local market, leveraging local media, tertiary institutions, and business advisory and networking groups to build awareness. We guided the investment in a modern and engaging workplace, and supported the hiring of a hands-on, talented leadership team (including the Regional Manager and Head of HR) to help the organisation compete for the multilingual talent it needed against more established local employers.  

• Benefits and market benchmarking. We benchmarked local market benefits practices to ensure the organisation’s offering was competitive enough to attract quality candidates without overpaying relative to the market — striking the balance that made the new European hub more cost-sustainable.

• Onboarding, culture, and language considerations. Bringing a multilingual, multicultural workforce into the organisation’s existing customer-focussed culture required deliberate thought. We helped design onboarding processes that introduced new employees to the organisation's ways of working while respecting local cultural norms. We assisted in the planning to second team members from other regional offices to deliver hands-on training, and ensured the right language capabilities were embedded across the team structure to properly service customers in their own language.  

Throughout the build, we worked closely with the organisation’s leadership and also provided strategic guidance and support to the newly hired local Head of HR who was responsible for implementing hiring, onboarding, and training plans for the new team.  

In parallel, we also advised on the closure of the support and service functions at the original hub – managing the transition in a way that was respectful, customer centric, commercially considered and legally compliant.

Establishing a new entity and workforce in an unfamiliar market carries real risk, and our role was to help ensure the organisation's executive team always had visibility and confidence in the decisions being made on their behalf.

The result: a hub built to last

The organisation now has a genuinely sustainable European support and service hub — one selected based on real data about talent availability and cost, built on solid legal and compliance foundations, and resourced with the multilingual capability needed to properly serve its customers across the continent.

The new operation gave the organisation access to a far deeper talent pool than its previous base could offer, at a more sustainable cost structure. Just as importantly, it gave the business a platform it could continue to scale from with confidence, rather than running into the same capacity and cost ceiling issues a second time.

Since establishment of the new European hub, the organisation has continued to grow, and have used the work we supported in Europe to select and open new global office locations in subsequent years to service their growing customer base.

For us, this project captured what we love about this kind of work: combining rigorous, evidence-based strategic thinking with genuinely hands-on delivery in organisations dealing with complex change. It's one thing to recommend a location based on desktop research or prior operational experience. It's another to walk alongside a leadership team through entity establishment, compliance, recruitment, and culture-building until a fully functioning, multilingual support centre is up and running — and thriving.

Thinking about where your next talent hub should be?

Whether you're exploring new markets, in the midst of international expansion or trying to make an existing operation more sustainable, we'd love to help you find the answer — backed by our experience and evidence, not guesswork. Get in touch with the Rutherford HR team today.

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