How an international manufacturer achieved a 94% customer service rating with their offshore team

When Kane International needed to grow its customer service team without sacrificing the service it is known for after sixty years in its market, it faced a challenge familiar to UK SMEs: how do you compete for talent against London salaries while keeping world-class service standards? Our answer was a two-person pilot in Cape Town that has grown into nine roles across customer service, procurement and finance. Kane has a 94% success rating on Trustpilot, and it says the South African team has made a meaningful contribution to its overall success.

Who Are Kane International and Why Does Customer Service Matter to Them?

Kane International has spent sixty years designing and manufacturing hand-held exhaust emissions testing equipment sold across global markets. A family business headquartered in Hertfordshire, Kane prides itself on award-winning, world-class technical customer service.

The reason is commercial. In specialist manufacturing equipment, where a single customer relationship can be worth a great deal over its lifetime, the quality of after-sales support directly affects retention, referrals and long-term revenue. Kane's challenge was structural: it knew exactly what excellent service looked like, but it was struggling to find the right people at the right cost from its Hertfordshire base.

What Was the Talent Problem Facing Kane's Customer Service Team?

Kane was increasingly competing for talent with higher-paying London firms, and finding the right people locally was proving difficult.

Kane needed experienced customer service representatives who would embody its ethos of "professional empathy": committed to customer service excellence, willing to help and ready to take personal accountability for resolving customers' issues.

Conventional outsourcing did not look like the answer either. ContactBabel's 2024 UK research on outsourcing finds that outsourced contact centres usually report higher attrition than the industry as a whole, and for a company whose service depends on technical product knowledge, every departure means training someone new.

Why Was Philip Judd Initially Against Offshore Customer Service?

Philip Judd, Senior Manager at Kane International, was averse to outsourcing customer service because of a poor previous experience. Above all, he did not want to lose control of this key part of the business or put Kane's hard-won reputation at risk.

This is a rational response. In a conventional outsourcing contract, the provider usually recruits, trains and manages the agents, and the client manages the contract. For a function that carries a company's reputation, that is a real loss of control. Philip's scepticism is exactly the challenge our model is designed to answer.

How Did We Select Cape Town as the Right Location for Kane?

Charles Fenton, one of our founding directors, evaluated the options against four criteria: capability, availability, cost and cultural fit. For a UK manufacturer needing English-language customer service with professional empathy at its core, Cape Town was the right choice.

South Africa scored 602 and ranked 13th globally in the EF English Proficiency Index 2025 (EF EPI 2025), inside the "Very High" proficiency band, with the Western Cape scoring 608. Cape Town is on UTC+2, so a 9 to 6 day there runs from 8am to 5pm UK time in British Summer Time and 7am to 4pm in winter, covering most of the UK working day without unsociable shifts. We recruited against Kane's own standard of professional empathy rather than a generic job specification.

The cost differential is significant. In our experience, labour cost savings in Cape Town and Johannesburg typically run at 30 to 50% against the UK.

Our multi-hub model, five hubs across South Africa, Romania, India and Brazil, means location selection is never one-size-fits-all. For Kane, Cape Town delivered the right balance, and Kane has also considered our other locations: Romania for its language skills as it grows in Europe, and India for roles that need the right skills at a very cost-effective rate. It is the same playbook our founders used to scale EnergyQuote JHA to more than 300 people, about 60% of them offshore, before its exit to Accenture. For how we match hubs to client services work, read how we choose the best offshore location for sales, client services and marketing teams.

How Did the Pilot Programme Give Kane Control Over the Process?

Rather than proposing a full-scale deployment, we recommended a pilot of two Customer Service Consultant roles in our Cape Town office. That addressed Philip Judd's legitimate concerns by providing evidence before commitment.

Critically, Kane stayed in control throughout. It controlled the selection of its team and the management of its staff, and it set the standard every candidate was measured against. We provided the office, local HR and the talent acquisition team, and the team reported to Kane as part of its Hertfordshire operation.

This distinction matters. In a conventional outsourcing contract, the provider usually selects and manages the people; in the embedded model, the client does. Kane felt "in control" because it was in control. The offshore element simply expanded the geography of their talent pool rather than delegating responsibility to a third party.

Kane was particularly impressed with our HR team, whose local knowledge meant Kane felt confident and supported despite being thousands of miles away. Candidates were screened against Kane's own cultural and competency requirements before Kane made its choice.

What Results Did Kane Achieve with Its Cape Town Team?

Kane has a 94% success rating on Trustpilot, a 2024 rating for the company as a whole. Trustpilot scores companies on a TrustScore of one to five stars, based on recent customer reviews. For a business that prides itself on world-class technical customer service, that is a strong result.

In Philip Judd's words: "We have a 94% success rating on Trustpilot. You can't fake those kinds of reviews. It was vital that whoever Potentiam employed bought into that concept of a 'world-class company with world-class customer service'. The South African team has made a meaningful contribution to our overall success."

Beyond the headline rating, the growth of the team tells its own story. The two-person pilot has grown to nine roles spanning customer service, procurement and finance, and in 2022 Kane also started hiring sales and marketing staff, a move it had not previously considered.

What Is the Financial Case for Embedded Offshore Customer Service?

The financial case starts with salary. In our experience, labour cost savings in Cape Town and Johannesburg typically run at 30 to 50% against the UK, and for a five-person customer service team that saving has to be weighed against the cost of the partner, the cost of the transition and the training the team will keep needing. Other gains can follow, such as fewer recruitment agency fees and less retraining if people stay longer, but they depend on your situation and on how the team performs, so we model them with you rather than assume them.

Manufacturers work to tight margins and need to protect them while investing in growth. Kane went offshore to find the right people at the right cost, and the result was a team it trusts with its customer service.

How Does the Embedded Team Model Differ from Traditional Outsourcing?

What changed Philip Judd's view was a model that works on different principles. The Cape Town team came to feel like an integral part of Kane's Hertfordshire operation, part of the Kane family, and that changed his perspective on offshoring.

That is the fundamental distinction: with an outsourced service the provider runs the team, and with an embedded team you do. Kane chose what it saw as an insourced solution offshore, one it controls, and under our embedded offshore team model the team uses the client's systems, follows its processes, receives its training and reports to its managers.

In our experience, integration also helps retention. People who are trained on your products, work with your managers and have local HR support behind them have good reasons to stay, and every person who stays keeps their product knowledge and customer relationships inside your business.

The same structural approach has delivered results across multiple sectors. A Danish company used the model to scale their software development team, while others have applied it to finance, procurement, and operations functions. The principle remains constant: embed the team within the client's culture, systems, and management structure.

How Has Kane's Offshore Team Grown Since the Pilot?

The success of the customer service team led Kane to grow its Cape Town team to nine roles, including procurement and finance. Kane has also considered our other locations as options for future growth: Romania, whose language skills suit its growth in Europe, and India, for roles that need the right skills at a very cost-effective rate.

Different hubs offer different strengths, which is why we advise on location role by role. Cape Town and Johannesburg deliver English-language, customer-facing roles with close cultural alignment. Iași provides European language coverage for continental business. Bengaluru offers scale and cost efficiency for process-driven functions. São Paulo adds cover into the Americas working day.

Kane's progression from two pilot roles to nine across three functions shows how an embedded team can grow once it has proved itself: the office, HR support and ways of working are already in place for the next function. Our founders followed a similar path when building their own business past common growth inhibitors.

How Can Other UK Manufacturers Replicate Kane's Success?

Kane's journey from scepticism to advocacy offers a playbook for UK manufacturers facing similar talent and cost pressures. The implementation follows a structured sequence that de-risks each stage before progressing to the next.

Philip Judd admits he was hesitant about offshoring at first, and the success of the Cape Town team changed his perspective. For operations leaders carrying similar scepticism from poor previous experiences, Kane's story is evidence that a different model delivers different results. You can read the full Kane International case study or download it as a PDF.

Explore how our embedded team model applies to your operational challenges on our solutions page.