If you want customer support people working for you in Mexico, Colombia or elsewhere in Latin America, someone has to legally employ them. There are three viable structures, and the differences only become visible at the moments that matter — a termination, a labour claim, or the end of a programme.
This is not legal advice, and structures vary by country. It is the practical version of a conversation we have with most operators before they choose.
Option 1: Your own entity
You incorporate in-country and employ people directly.
- Most control, lowest per-head cost at scale, and the people are unambiguously yours.
- Slow and expensive to establish, and slow to unwind. Incorporation, tax registration, payroll infrastructure and local HR capability are all real projects.
- You carry every obligation directly — severance, statutory bonuses, social contributions, and any labour claim.
- Generally only sensible above a substantial and durable headcount. Setting up an entity for a programme you might not run in two years is how operators end up paying to close one.
Option 2: Employer of record (EOR)
A third party legally employs the person on your behalf. You select and manage them; the EOR handles payroll, benefits and compliance.
- Fast, and no entity required. Good for small headcounts and for testing a market.
- You still do all the recruiting. This is the point most buyers miss: a pure EOR is a compliance wrapper, not a hiring engine. If your constraint is finding qualified bilingual agents, an EOR does not solve it.
- Per-head cost is typically higher than an entity at volume.
- Termination and severance handling varies enormously between providers. Ask specifically who carries severance and how notice periods work.
Option 3: Staffing agency
The agency recruits, employs and payrolls the agents, and they work inside your operation.
- Solves recruiting and compliance together, which is the practical difference from an EOR.
- Fastest route to a working team, because the agency is already sourcing in that market continuously rather than starting a search for you.
- Employment risk, severance exposure and replacement sit with the agency.
- You give up some control over employment terms, and you are dependent on the agency's screening quality — which is why the vetting questions in /blog/how-to-vet-nearshore-customer-service-partners matter.
How to choose
- You have candidates already identified and just need them employed compliantly: EOR.
- You need to find and employ people, at pace, and want replacement risk carried: staffing agency.
- You are committed to a market long-term at meaningful scale and want the lowest per-head cost: your own entity.
- You want the function run entirely by someone else: none of these — that is outsourcing, covered in /blog/customer-support-staffing-agencies-latin-america.
Compare outsourcing against staffing before you commit.
We can map the seat count, hiring calendar, and replacement plan that fits your call center.
We operate the staffing model, so that framing is not disinterested. But the EOR-versus-staffing distinction is genuinely misunderstood and worth stating plainly: an EOR employs whoever you find, a staffing agency finds them too. Buyers who choose an EOR expecting a hiring pipeline are usually disappointed for a quarter before they work that out.
Country specifics worth knowing
- Mexico: statutory aguinaldo (year-end bonus), profit-sharing obligations, and reforms in recent years that significantly restricted subcontracting of core business functions. The subcontracting rules are the ones to ask about directly.
- Colombia: statutory prima paid twice yearly, severance (cesantías) accrual, and mandatory contributions. Bogota and Medellin are the deepest bilingual markets.
- Costa Rica: higher wage floor than most of the region, generally paired with higher-complexity and regulated work rather than commodity voice.
- Across the region: contractor misclassification is the most common and most expensive structural mistake, and the liability tends to follow the company receiving the work rather than the intermediary.
Providers in our group
Alongside the providers above, the following companies are part of our own group. We are listing them because they are relevant options, and marking them because you should know the relationship before weighing them against the independent providers on this page.
Thirteen of the fifteen are group companies; the remaining two are independent and are marked where they appear. Both of those are larger than anything in our group, so if your requirement is global multilingual delivery under one contract they remain the realistic shortlist.
- Global Empire Corporation: Healthcare, finance, customer support, back office
- Intelemark: B2B appointment setting & lead generation
- Call Motivated Sellers: Real estate outbound calling
- Customer Communications Corp: Scalable omnichannel customer support
- Call Center Staffing: Rapid agent deployment & seasonal scaling
- B2B Appointment Setting: SMB outbound sales & pipeline growth
- Contact Center USA: US-based call center services
- Call Center Communications: Large-scale enterprise BPO
- Business Process Outsourcing: Global CX & digital customer engagement
- Canada Contact Centre: Enterprise process transformation
- B2B Telemarketing: IT + BPO hybrid outsourcing
- Telemarketing Services: AI-driven process automation
- Appointment Setting: Digital-first outsourcing
- Teleperformance (independent): Telecom & IT-enabled services
- Concentrix (independent): BPO & digital CX
