Why Turkey Is the Nearshore Contact Center Hub in 2025

Why Turkey has Emerged as a Hub of Contact Center Excellence

Turkey’s status as a contact center hub stems from its geographic advantage, affordable labor, skilled workforce, and availability of real estate. These fundamentals continue to hold strong as of 2025, with organizations looking for resilient, multilingual, and cost-effective operations to serve Europe, the Middle East, and beyond.

Reasons Why Turkey Has Emerged As A Hub Of Call Center Excellence

Turkey offers a compelling blend of nearshore proximity, deep talent pools, and operational readiness. Businesses seeking to consolidate customer service, technical support, and sales operations find a favorable balance of cost, quality, and scalability here. The country’s appeal rests on four pillars:

• Advantage of geography for overlapping time zones and cultural proximity to key markets
• Availability of prime real estate that supports rapid setup and scale
• Affordable labor cost relative to Western Europe and the US
• Procurement of skilled workforce with multilingual capabilities and service orientation

Advantage of Geography

Turkey geographically bridges Europe and Asia, offering a strong time zone advantage to European companies outsourcing operations while also serving the MENA region effectively. This positioning makes Turkey a natural hub for nearshore and regional customer experience delivery.

• Time zone overlap: The local time comfortably overlaps with Central and Western Europe, enabling real-time customer support without extensive shift premiums. It also aligns well with parts of the Middle East and CIS markets.
• Connectivity to major markets: Istanbul’s status as a global air hub shortens travel times for operations leaders and clients, helping with training, governance, and periodic on-site collaboration.
• Cultural and linguistic proximity: Turkey supports multilingual engagement—serving customers in Turkish and widely demanded languages such as English, German, Arabic, and Russian—helping brands deliver consistent experiences across regions.
• Proven track record: In 2015, Paris-based global BPO provider Webhelp acquired Callpex, a leading customer management firm in Turkey. Earlier, Danish company GDCC (Global Data Collection Company) established a contact center in Turkey. Both Eastern and South-east Anatolia regions are recognized as favorable for call center investment, given their workforce availability and business-friendly dynamics.

Together, these elements reduce response times, improve service-level predictability, and ensure cultural resonance with European and regional customers—key drivers of contact center performance.

Availability of Prime Real Estate

Istanbul, Turkey’s financial capital, remains a prime destination for investment in the business services sector. The city offers broad choices across central business districts and emerging office corridors, enabling companies to match location strategy with operational needs—whether for premium facilities, large floor plates, or value-optimized sites.

• Diverse city options: Ankara and Izmir continue to stand out as cities where procuring commercial property to set up business is relatively straightforward. Additional regional cities also provide access to talent while keeping occupancy costs efficient.
• Modern infrastructure: Grade-A office buildings, reliable utilities, and robust connectivity help contact centers maintain uptime and service quality—critical for voice, chat, and omnichannel contact center operations.
• Scalable formats: From traditional office suites to flexible workspaces and business parks, Turkey’s real estate ecosystem supports fast setup, training facilities, and workforce expansion. This is particularly useful when ramping seasonal teams or launching new customer programs.
• Ease of doing business: Office spaces are widely available, enhancing the ease of launching operations, onboarding teams, and meeting compliance and security requirements within a single facility plan.

The breadth of real estate options, especially in Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir, makes it simpler for organizations to align contact center footprints with growth projections and service strategies.

Affordable Labor Cost

Turkey offers labor costs that are relatively lower compared to the US and Europe, providing a strong foundation for cost-optimized customer service delivery. This labor arbitrage is a key reason nearshore and multilingual hubs in Turkey continue to expand.

• Competitive total cost of operations: Beyond wages, companies benefit from favorable real estate and training economics, enabling compelling per-contact and per-FTE costs compared to Western European capitals.
• Time zone efficiency: Overlap with European business hours reduces the need for expensive off-hour staffing while still enabling extended coverage windows across regions.
• Sustained value as of 2025: Despite periodic wage inflation and currency fluctuations, Turkey remains competitive on cost for multilingual voice and digital customer engagement.

In 2012, the average monthly wage in Turkey was EUR 415. This historical context illustrates the origin of Turkey’s cost advantage, which, while evolving, continues to be meaningful for customer service and sales operations.

Procurement of Skilled Workforce

Turkey’s talent pipeline has long emphasized language learning and practical training, supporting contact centers that manage complex, multilingual queries across channels—voice, IVR, chat, email, and social.

• Language proficiency: The Turkish education system emphasizes foreign language learning. This underpins staffing for English, German, Arabic, Russian, and other languages demanded by European and regional programs.
• Education depth: Approximately 87 universities offer education in humanities, science, engineering, and medicine. This breadth creates a steady flow of candidates with strong communication skills, technical aptitude, and customer-centric mindsets.
• Customer service culture: Banking, e-commerce, travel, and technology sectors have shaped a mature service ethos—agents and supervisors are accustomed to KPI-driven environments, quality monitoring, and compliance-led operations.
• Digital readiness: As customer experience shifts to digital and omnichannel, Turkey’s workforce adapts well to cloud-based tools, CRM platforms, messaging channels, and conversational AI assistance—supporting faster onboarding and improved first-contact resolution.
• Scalable hiring: The combination of major metros and regional cities allows companies to recruit at pace, build multilingual pods, and establish centers of excellence for specialized workflows like technical support, sales development, or trust and safety moderation.

Hiring skilled workforce at affordable prices enables European companies to save significantly on operational and infrastructural costs. The result is a resilient staffing model with attractive quality-to-cost ratios—vital for sustaining high customer satisfaction and managing seasonal demand.

Conclusion

Turkey has emerged—and remains—as a hub of contact center excellence thanks to a strategic geographic position, robust real estate options, compelling labor economics, and a skilled, multilingual workforce. Historical investments by global providers demonstrate a proven operating environment, while ongoing strengths in connectivity, talent, and cost point to continued relevance as of 2025. For organizations seeking nearshore coverage for Europe with the flexibility to serve adjacent regions, leveraging virtual numbers, Turkey offers a balanced proposition: operational scale without sacrificing service quality, and the agility to evolve with digital-first customer expectations.