When a retailer’s tills stop on a Saturday morning, nobody cares about our sourcing model. They care about who picks up the phone, how fast that person understands the problem, and whether it is fixed before the queue reaches the door.
That is why we brought Client Services at Extenda Retail back in-house. Outsourcing gave us capacity, but it put distance between our customers and the people who know our products best. Closing that distance has made us better, cheaper and easier to work with. Here is how we did it, and what changed.
Where we started
In 2021 we moved a large part of our support and delivery capacity to a global IT services partner. The logic was sound at the time: flexible capacity, offshore cost levels and a partner with scale.
In practice, the model showed its limits in a business like ours. Retail software is deeply tied to each customer’s stores, integrations and peak periods. Knowledge sat with a rotating pool of people one step removed from our product teams. Tickets bounced between tiers, root causes stayed unresolved, and our customers felt the handovers.
The commercial structure also worked against us. A capacity-based contract rewards hours delivered, not problems eliminated. We were paying for a steady flow of incidents rather than for fewer of them.
What we changed
Insourcing was not a matter of moving people from one payroll to another. We rebuilt the operating model around four ideas.
- Keep the knowledge, change the ownership. We invited key engineers from the partner team to join Extenda directly, so years of customer and product knowledge stayed with us rather than walking out the door.
- One accountable owner per customer. Every large account now has a named Client Operations Lead who runs its governance, SLA reporting and business reviews.
- Fix problems, not just incidents. We put real effort into problem management and root-cause analysis, with our own engineers working side by side with product teams.
- Proactive and AI-assisted operations. We invested in monitoring that spots issues before customers do, and in AI tools that help our team triage, analyse and resolve faster.
The transition ran account by account, timed around customers’ freeze periods, so no retailer had to absorb disruption during a peak.
The results
Quality went up. Owning the work meant owning the root causes. Our problem backlog fell by 25% in the first five months of 2026, SLA performance has held steady across the portfolio, and our largest global fashion account recorded its lowest-ever number of new problems in June.
Cost came down. Replacing a capacity-based contract with a leaner in-house team, supported by automation, delivered roughly SEK <confidentifal> million in annual EBIT improvement. Client Services now runs at around <confidentifal> gross margin.
Customers noticed. Retailers now deal with people who know their estate, their integrations and their calendar. We have received direct positive feedback on support delivery from major grocery accounts, and escalations reach the right expert in one step.
What we learned
For other leaders weighing the same move, three lessons stand out.
- Outsourcing is a tool, not a strategy. It works for commodity work. It struggles where knowledge of the product and the customer is the service itself.
- People make or break the transition. Retaining the engineers who already knew our customers did more for continuity than any process document.
- Insourcing is only worth it if you change how the work is done. Bringing the same model in-house just moves the cost. The gains came from problem management, clear account ownership, proactive monitoring and AI-assisted ways of working.
What comes next
We are not done. The next step is to let AI take on more of the routine work, from automated account review packs to smarter incident triage, so our experts spend their time where retailers need them most.
The principle stays the same: the people who support our customers should be the people who know our products best. Bringing Client Services home made that possible.