Centro sells outsourced customer experience, including to direct sellers, so read the final section knowing that. Everything before it is written to be useful whether you choose Centro, a competitor, or nobody.

What direct selling support actually covers

The first mistake in most scoping conversations is agreeing a seat count before agreeing a scope. Seats are the output of the scope decision. These are the workstreams, and they have genuinely different profiles.

Workstream	Who it serves	Outsources well?
Customer order and delivery support	Customers	Yes, and usually first. Closest to ordinary ecommerce care
Returns and refunds	Customers	Yes
Consultant onboarding and back office	Consultants	Yes, with plan training. Highest volume inside the field
Commission and qualification queries	Consultants	Yes, but only with period-level system access. The hardest workstream to do well
Party and host support	Both	Yes, for party-plan businesses. Needs host reward and booking mechanics
Enrolment and replicated site issues	Consultants	Yes
Field compliance contact and verification	Consultants	Yes. Detection is a technology purchase; the contact work is support
Discipline decisions	Consultants	No. Commission holds and terminations are company decisions
Policy and plan design	Internal	No

When it fits, and three times it does not

Outsourcing usually earns its place in one of four situations: a field that swings hard with recruiting events, a coverage window you cannot staff because your consultants work evenings, markets or languages you do not serve, or a support cost that stopped being defensible as the field shrank.

1. Your support team is your field intelligence

Some companies run plan changes, product decisions and field communications off what support hears. If your field operations team sits in on consultant calls and changes the incentive because of them, moving that conversation to a third party severs something worth more than the saving. Outsource the customer side and the first thirty days of consultant onboarding, and keep the tenured field conversation.

2. Your field is below a vendor's minimum

Below roughly ten full-time equivalents of steady volume, most arrangements stop making sense. You pay a minimum commitment and receive shared agents supporting several accounts, which is exactly the wrong model for a queue where plan fluency is the whole job.

3. The volume is a symptom of the plan

If commission queries are climbing, outsourcing moves the cost without fixing the cause. A plan with a rolling qualification window that nobody understands will generate the same contacts at a lower hourly rate. Diagnose first. Then decide what should move.

What it costs

Two pricing units dominate, and the choice matters more in this vertical than in most.

Model	How it works	Where it fits in direct selling
Per agent hour	A rate per productive or per paid hour, usually for a dedicated team	Fits the consultant queue, where handle times are long by nature and per-contact pricing punishes the right behaviour
Per resolution	A fee per resolved contact	Fits the customer queue. Be careful applying it to commission queries, where a fast close is not a good outcome
Blended	Per hour for the field queue, per resolution for customer care	Usually the right answer, and worth asking for explicitly

Whichever unit you choose, settle three definitions in the contract before signing.

• What counts as a resolution. Three contacts about one commission period are one problem, not three.
• Who decides it is resolved. Absence of a follow-up contact inside a defined window is the only definition that is hard to game.
• What happens to escalations. A contact escalated to your team is a cost to you and should not also be a billable resolution to them.

The SLA set worth contracting

Metric	Contract it?	Why
First contact resolution, split by audience	Yes, primary	One blended number hides a consultant queue performing badly behind a healthy customer queue
Repeat contact rate inside 7 days	Yes	The honest counterweight, and the single best measure of whether commission explanations are landing
Speed of answer, per queue	Yes	Set separately. A blended target pushes the vendor to prioritise the easy queue
Attrition on your account	Yes	Rarely contracted and it should be. Plan fluency takes months to build and walks out with the agent
Average handle time	Watch, never contract	On the consultant queue it rewards rushing an income conversation
Field compliance case closure with verification	Yes, if in scope	Closure without verification is not closure
Ninety-day survival of new enrolments	Yes, as a shared goal	Ambitious, imperfectly attributable, and the number that actually matters

Twenty questions for every vendor

Print this and score each vendor from 1 to 5. Five categories, four questions each. A vendor strong on commercial terms and weak on plan fluency is the expensive mistake in this category.

Plan fluency

Plan fluency	Score 1 to 5
How long is training on our compensation plan, separate from product and tools training?	1  2  3  4  5
Who writes that training, and how fast is it updated when the plan changes?	1  2  3  4  5
Can an agent see period-level commission detail, or only the payout total?	1  2  3  4  5
Give an example of a commission explanation your agents gave, and the rule it turned on	1  2  3  4  5

Direct selling experience

Direct selling experience	Score 1 to 5
Name direct selling clients of similar field size, and what you do for them	1  2  3  4  5
How do you handle the January commission and year-end statement peak?	1  2  3  4  5
What is your experience with party and host mechanics, if we are a party-plan business?	1  2  3  4  5
Have you done field compliance contact work, and what did the escalation ladder look like?	1  2  3  4  5

People and retention

People and retention	Score 1 to 5
What is agent attrition on accounts of our size, and will you contract to it?	1  2  3  4  5
What is average tenure on the account, and how long before an agent is plan-fluent?	1  2  3  4  5
What is your supervisor to agent ratio, and does it change during recruiting peaks?	1  2  3  4  5
How do you staff evenings and weekends, when our field is actually working?	1  2  3  4  5

Systems and access

Systems and access	Score 1 to 5
Which of our systems will agents have access to: genealogy, commission engine, orders, enrolment?	1  2  3  4  5
How do you handle the fact that no platform offers a unified agent console?	1  2  3  4  5
What reporting do we get, split by audience, and can we query it ourselves?	1  2  3  4  5
How is consultant history surfaced to the agent at the point of contact?	1  2  3  4  5

Commercial and transition

Commercial and transition	Score 1 to 5
What is the minimum commitment, and what happens if our field keeps shrinking?	1  2  3  4  5
How is burst capacity priced around conventions and recruiting pushes, and with what notice?	1  2  3  4  5
Which SLAs carry a financial remedy, and what is the remedy?	1  2  3  4  5
Walk us through a transition you delivered, including what went wrong, and what it required from the client team	1  2  3  4  5

How to read the scores

Score each category out of 20. A vendor below 12 on plan fluency should not proceed regardless of their total, because every other number depends on whether the agent can explain a commission.

The last question in the final category is the one most often skipped and most often fatal. Outsourcing is never zero effort for the buyer, and a vendor who says it is has not done it.

How Centro delivers this

Centro is a global business process outsourcing and technology provider, founded in 2009, with delivery centres in Egypt, the Philippines, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the United States. That footprint gives European and Gulf coverage from Egypt, US hours from the Philippines, and multilingual support from a single account structure, which matters when a field works evenings across several markets.

On the question above about naming direct selling clients, here is Centro's answer. The Pampered Chef, a Berkshire Hathaway company and one of the largest direct sellers of housewares in the US, has been a Centro client since 2019. The engagement started at 30 agents when a pandemic surge in orders and customer inquiries pushed hold times up, grew to 150 agents within the first year, and has since become a full-service global partnership, with a 90% faster response time and CSAT above 90% for seven consecutive years. Their Chief Executive Officer is on the record: "Centro has been a critical partner in our international expansion efforts."

Score Centro on the same twenty questions. A vendor who objects to being measured against a framework they did not write has told you something.

Sources

• Centro, direct selling client case study. Engagement dates, agent numbers, response time and CSAT figures, client quote. https://centrocdx.com/case-study-direct-selling-brand/
• Berkshire Hathaway, acquisition of The Pampered Chef, September 2002. https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/news/sep2302.html
• Direct Selling Association and DSEF, 2026 Growth and Outlook, 2025 US data. https://dsef.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/DSEF-2026-StateStatsFactSheet.pdf
• Exigo and InfoTrax platform overviews, for the systems an agent must reach. https://www.exigo.com/exigo-solutions/
• Acquire BPO, direct selling industry page. https://acquirebpo.com/us/industries/direct-selling/