In Hungary most customer service work happens in companies' own teams, not in outsourced call centres. Foreign-language skills are also narrower than in most EU countries. For a team lead or trainer, that means small teams and few colleagues who will take a difficult call in a foreign language. This guide sums up Eurostat data and the EU occupation classification ESCO and shows what is worth practising.
How the sector is structured
As across the EU, Hungary has two kinds of contact centre, and the statistics count them separately.
- In-house teams. A bank, telecom operator, energy company or online shop runs its own customer line. Its staff are counted in the parent company's industry.
- Outsourced providers. A specialist company handles calls on behalf of other firms. In the classification of economic activities (TEÁOR) this is group 82.2, call centre activities.
Eurostat's structural business statistics show 293 enterprises in this group in Hungary in 2024, with 3,662 persons employed. In 2021 there were 343 enterprises and 2,947 persons. The average firm therefore has about 12 to 13 people.
Far more people work in in-house teams. The EU Labour Force Survey shows 66,700 people employed in Hungary in 2024 in ISCO sub-major group 42, customer services clerks (59,400 in 2022). The group includes contact centre staff as well as receptionists, enquiry clerks and travel staff, so it is not an exact operator headcount. Telephone sales belong to a separate group (ISCO 5244). The two series do not measure the same thing, but the gap shows that Hungarian customer service work happens mostly in-house.
Languages served
Hungarian is the base. In Eurostat's Adult Education Survey (2022), 51.8% of Hungarian clerical, service and sales workers aged 25 to 64 knew no foreign language, against an EU average of 23.5%. That is the highest share among the countries in this series. There is no sufficiently reliable Hungarian figure for three or more languages.
In practice, an English or German customer line rests on few people who are hard to replace. They need to handle the routine call in that language, and also the complaint and the cancellation.
Roles and career paths
ESCO is based on the international ISCO-08 classification and gives the role names in Hungarian:
| Step | Role (ESCO) | ISCO-08 group |
|---|---|---|
| Entry | Call centre agent (sales) | 5244 |
| Entry | Customer contact centre information clerk (service, information) | 4222 |
| Specialist | Call centre quality auditor, call centre analyst | 3341 |
| Team lead | Call centre supervisor, contact centre supervisor | 3341 |
| Management | Call centre manager, contact centre manager | 3341, 1439 |
Following these roles, the path runs from operator through quality assurance or analytics to team leadership. Someone who also speaks a foreign language well has an advantage, because they can assess and coach calls in other languages.
Training challenges
Few firms train. In the 2020 Continuing Vocational Training Survey, 37.7% of Hungarian enterprises provided continuing vocational training, far below the EU average of 67.4%. Participants spent 32.2 hours in courses on average (EU: 22.5; 2020 was a pandemic year and the Hungarian hours series has a break). Training reaches few people, but goes deep where it happens.
Small teams, no dedicated trainer. At about twelve or thirteen people per provider, a dedicated trainer is rare. Onboarding falls to the team lead, between calls.
A foreign language under pressure. Someone who speaks good English in everyday situations may still struggle with an upset customer who speaks fast. That can only be practised out loud.
The complaint that repeats. The hardest call is the one where the customer is calling for the third time about the same thing. A colleague can rarely play that realistically.
One line to practise
For a customer calling for the third time with the same complaint:
"I understand this is your third call about it, and that's annoying. I'm taking it over now, and at the end of this call I'll tell you exactly what happens and when."
Say it out loud five times until it sounds like you and not like a script.
Practising these calls with DIRI AI
With DIRI AI an operator practises a call by voice with an AI customer that is clearly labelled as AI and fictional, then reads a report on what to say better. In Hungarian, practice uses prepared scenarios, including customer service and complaint calls. There is a Free plan; see the pricing page.
Related pages: sales call centre team training, complaint handling call training and foreign-language sales call practice.
Sources
All sources were read on 9 November 2026.
- Eurostat, Enterprises by detailed NACE Rev. 2 activity (sbs_ovw_act), group N82.2, 2021 and 2024. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/sbs_ovw_act/default/table
- Eurostat, Employed persons by detailed occupation, ISCO-08 two digit (lfsa_egai2d), OC42, 2022 and 2024. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/lfsa_egai2d/default/table
- Eurostat, Persons knowing foreign languages by occupation (edat_aes_l25), 2022. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/edat_aes_l25/default/table
- Eurostat, CVTS 2020 (trng_cvt_01s, trng_cvt_25s). https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/trng_cvt_25s/default/table
- European Commission, ESCO, call centre occupations. https://esco.ec.europa.eu/en/classification/occupation?uri=http://data.europa.eu/esco/occupation/0ededdc2-050a-4ec3-8e70-6295105fcd19