Australian-hours customer support for a UK software company's APAC base

The client's support was run entirely out of the UK, with a small overnight-shift team covering APAC as a stretch assignment. APAC customers, particularly in Australia and New Zealand, were getting responses timed to UK business hours, often overnight from their own perspective. The client had looked at stitching together several offshore vendors for volume and a separate local partner for escalations, but did not want to manage multiple contracts and multiple points of contact for one region. It wanted a single Australian point of contact, a single contract, and coverage that actually matched AEST or AEDT business hours, without incorporating in Australia itself.

The engagement started with two senior support leads in Sydney handling escalations and account governance, supported by ten front-line agents in Manila handling first-contact tickets, chat and routine account queries. As the client's APAC customer numbers grew, the Manila team scaled to 28 agents across two shifts to maintain AEST and AEDT coverage, while the Sydney escalation team grew to four to keep pace with more complex accounts. Corpshore Australia runs the Sydney-based account management and escalation team as the client's single point of contact, backed by the Manila hub for front-line volume.

Blended delivery, a Sydney-based account management and escalation team as the single point of contact, backed by an offshore Manila team for front-line volume compatible with AEST and AEDT hours.

Because the client's APAC customers include Australians, and personal information about those customers is disclosed to an overseas team in the Philippines for processing, the arrangement is structured around Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) APP 8 and section 16C: reasonable steps are taken to ensure the Manila team does not breach the Australian Privacy Principles, including contractual data handling terms and restricted system access, and the Sydney entity retains accountability for the offshore team's handling of that data, since accountability does not transfer under section 16C. Corpshore's security controls across both sites are designed to align with the Essential Eight framework, not a claimed certification. The client's own compliance team reviewed the cross-border handling approach before go-live.

Average first-response time on APAC tickets fell from around 14 hours under the UK-only model to under 90 minutes once the blended Sydney-Manila model was fully live. The client estimated the blended model cost around 45 percent less over the first year than building an equivalent onshore-only Australian team would have, while still giving APAC customers a local point of contact. Customer satisfaction scores for APAC tickets, tracked by the client's own survey tool, rose from the low 70s to the high 80s within four months of full rollout.

One Australian point of contact and one contract, rather than a patchwork of offshore vendors and a separate local partner, is what the client actually wanted, and the blended model delivered that without requiring a local entity.