The cost comparison people get wrong
In-house cost per seat is not salary. It is salary plus payroll taxes, benefits, recruiting, management overhead, workspace, telephony, QA tooling and the unproductive ramp weeks. In the US or UK that realistically lands $22–$40 per productive hour.
An outsourced seat at $7–$15 already includes recruiting, supervision, facilities and backfill. The gap is real, but it buys you a different operating model — you manage a vendor and a scorecard rather than people directly.
Where outsourcing genuinely wins
Spiky volume, seasonal peaks, night and weekend coverage, and any situation where you need trained agents on the phone within a month. Vendors absorb the hiring and attrition risk that would otherwise sit on your ops lead.
It also wins for tier-1 work with a documented playbook: order status, billing, password resets, appointment setting, basic troubleshooting.
Where in-house still wins
When support conversations feed the roadmap, when contacts require engineering-level context, or when a single mishandled call carries serious regulatory or revenue consequence. Also when volume is genuinely small — under roughly three full-time agents, vendor minimums and management overhead eat the savings.
The hybrid most teams land on
Keep two to four senior in-house agents owning escalations, quality and product feedback. Outsource tier-1 volume and after-hours coverage. You get cost efficiency without losing the customer signal that makes support useful internally.
If you want to price the outsourced half of that, Scaledesk shortlists vetted Indian teams free — with indicative seat costs before you talk to anyone.