By Georgina Barrick, Group Head of Marketing and Sales, Resourgenix Group of Companies
Ask a UK operations director what offshoring looks like and the picture tends to arrive fully formed: a large floor of headsets, a script on every screen and a queue of calls about delivery slots and forgotten passwords. That picture was accurate once. Where South Africa is concerned, it is now about ten years out of date.
Some of the most interesting roles we fill from South Africa for UK businesses have nothing to do with a contact centre. We place researchers who build the evidence a UK team sells and advises from. We place insurance sales specialists who carry a client conversation from first call to signed policy. Neither job runs from a script.
How has offshoring to South Africa changed?
Offshoring to South Africa has moved from high-volume contact centre work towards skilled roles in technology, research, sales and recruitment. In its first form, offshoring was a logistics exercise. A company found work that could be written down as a process, measured by volume and handed over with a manual. Payroll runs, claims capture, inbound customer service and data entry all qualified. The model rewarded repeatability, and the location with the lowest cost per transaction usually won the contract.
South Africa does well in that area, mostly in voice work for British and Australian customers, and the sector has grown quickly. Business Process Enabling South Africa (BPESA), the industry body, puts headcount in globally focused business services at about 65,000 in 2019 and an estimated 150,000 in 2024. Roughly half of that workforce serves the UK, which remains the largest single market by some distance.
What has shifted more than the volume is the mix of work. Recruitment group Robert Walters reports that technology and IT accounted for 53% of new offshore roles created in South Africa in its research, and it projects the country's offshoring sector could be worth $6.8 billion by 2030. Those are a recruiter's forecasts, so treat them as a direction of travel rather than a promise. The direction does match what we see in our own briefs: fewer requests for people to follow a process and more for people to exercise judgement.
Why are UK companies offshoring roles that need judgement?
UK companies are offshoring judgement roles because South Africa now supplies professionals who can make sound decisions on their behalf, during UK hours, without close supervision. The person in these seats decides things many times a day, and nobody checks each decision. A researcher chooses which sources to trust and which to discard, and what to leave out of a briefing because the reader will not have time for it. A salesperson in insurance judges, within a minute or so, whether the customer on the line wants reassurance, a lower premium or simply to be listened to.
A miskeyed invoice gets found and corrected at month end. A poor judgement call usually reaches the client before anyone inside the business sees it, so the quality of the work rests almost entirely on who was hired.
This changes the question a UK employer should be asking. When you offshore a process, the question is whether a provider can run it reliably at a lower cost. When you offshore a role that needs judgement, the question is whether this particular person will make the calls you would have made, on your behalf, in front of your clients. That gets answered at the hiring stage, which is where most offshore arrangements are won or lost.
What makes a good offshore researcher or insurance salesperson?
A good researcher is sceptical by temperament. She checks where a number came from before she repeats it, notices when two sources are quoting the same original, and writes for a UK reader who will act on her work without the time to question it. She is comfortable with a brief that is half formed, because most research briefs are. Subject knowledge comes within weeks; the curiosity, and the nerve to report what the evidence says when the client hoped for something else, needs to be there on day one.
Sales in insurance asks for something different. UK customers are quick to detect a scripted pitch and quicker to end the call, so the salesperson needs to listen more than she talks, explain cover plainly and know where a conversation must stop. Regulated selling adds a further layer. The UK firm keeps responsibility for how its customers are treated, so an offshore salesperson works inside the firm's compliance framework, with the same call monitoring, training records and conduct standards as anyone sitting in its UK office.
Neither profile shows up on a CV in any reliable way. Finding these people depends on structured assessment, references that are actually probed rather than collected, and interviews designed around the decisions the person will make in the role. We apply the same discipline to the software developers we place with UK clients, whose technical assessments we share with the client before anyone is engaged.
Why is South Africa a good offshoring location for UK companies?
South Africa suits UK companies because its working day matches theirs, its business culture is familiar, and its pool of skilled graduates is deep. Start with the clock. South Africa sits one hour ahead of the UK in summer and two in winter, so a team in Johannesburg or Cape Town covers the UK working day in its own daylight. A team in Manila covering nine to five in London is working from late afternoon until around midnight or later, every day. Fatigue is tolerable in a process role, where the steps carry the person through. In judgement work it shows up first, in the research summary that misses the point or the sales call where the salesperson stops listening.
Language and habit count for more than most buyers expect. English is the language of South African business, and commercial life follows conventions a UK manager will recognise, from how contracts are read to how meetings are run. Offshore teams we place work UK hours and observe UK public holidays, which removes a surprising amount of friction from the first few months. Infrastructure has caught up too. Since the pandemic pushed professionals to work from home, fibre connections and backup power have become standard for the people we place, and the power cuts that once dominated headlines have not been a factor for more than a year.
Then there is the talent itself. South Africa produces graduates in numbers its own economy has not been able to absorb, which means capable people competing hard for good roles. A well-structured position with a UK employer is a serious career option for them, and they tend to treat it as one.
What do UK employers need to do to make an offshore team work?
When an offshore judgement role disappoints, the cause is usually the one that sinks an onshore hire: an unclear brief, a manager too busy to notice drift, and a new person left outside the conversations where context is shared.
A researcher who never hears how her last report was used cannot calibrate the next one. A salesperson who is not invited to the Monday pipeline meeting will sell competently and still miss what the business is trying to push this quarter. Neither costs anything to fix, yet both are common reasons a capable offshore hire drifts away within the first year.
The employers who get the most from South African teams name one manager who owns the relationship, give the offshore team the access and feedback everyone else in the business gets, and judge performance on outputs agreed at the start rather than on how often someone appears on a video call.
Which role should a UK company offshore first?
The best first offshore hire is a role with outputs you can see and measure, and one that does not depend on knowledge locked inside your office. Research fits, since the work arrives as a document someone can assess, and so does outbound sales, where the pipeline shows within a quarter whether the hire is working. Development against a defined backlog fits for similar reasons.
Start with one or two people rather than a team. Agree in advance what three months of good performance looks like and review it honestly at the end. If the role works, you will have learnt more about your own management habits than about South Africa, and the second and third hires become far easier to get right.
UK companies that do this well choose a location much as they would choose a senior hire, by asking who can be trusted to think on their behalf during their working day, for years rather than months. For research and sales roles, South Africa is answering that question more often than most UK boards realise.
If you are weighing which role could go first, Cathie Kirk, Account Manager at Resourgenix UK, would be glad to talk it through with you.
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