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Contact centres in Spain: structure, roles, training

How Spain's contact centre sector is organised, which languages it serves, how agents progress under the sector agreement and what Law 10/2025 means.

Spain has the EU's largest outsourced contact centre workforce, a national collective agreement for the sector and, since December 2025, a law on customer service. For anyone running or training teams, that means written rules on job levels, training and languages. This guide brings the official sources together and explains what to practise.

How the sector is structured

As across the EU, Spain has two kinds of contact centre, and the statistics count them separately.

  • In-house teams. A bank, utility, telecom operator or insurer serves customers with its own staff, counted in the parent company's industry.
  • Service providers. A specialist company handles calls on behalf of others. In the Spanish CNAE classification this is class 82.2, call centre activities.

Eurostat's structural business statistics show 517 enterprises in class 82.2 in Spain in 2024, with 125,353 persons employed. That is about 240 people per firm, and roughly a quarter of Eurostat's estimate for the whole EU (about 500,000 people). No other EU country employs as many people in this class; Germany is second with 99,253.

The national collective agreement for the contact centre sector applies to companies that provide contact centre services to third parties (article 2). The third agreement, published in the Official State Gazette (BOE) on 9 June 2023, runs until 31 December 2026 and is extended year by year unless terminated.

The sector's professional association is AEERC (Asociación de Expertos en la Relación con Clientes).

Languages served

Spanish (Castilian) is the base, but not the only language. Article 3 of the Constitution makes the other Spanish languages co-official in their autonomous communities.

Law 10/2025 of 26 December, which regulates customer service, puts that into practice. In regions with more than one official language, service must be given in the language the consumer asks for, if the company operates there (article 8.6), and a complaint must be answered in the language it was filed in (article 13.6). The sector agreement also sets a language allowance: EUR 123.19 a month in 2024 (annex II).

For foreign languages the base is narrow. In Eurostat's Adult Education Survey (2022), 43.1% of Spanish clerical, service and sales workers aged 25 to 64 knew no foreign language, against an EU average of 23.5%. Only 5.6% knew three or more.

Roles and career paths

The third agreement describes the levels of the operations group (article 40):

LevelWhat it does under the agreement
Teleoperador/a (agent)Standard contact centre tasks after prior training, following set procedures
Teleoperador/a especialistaAutomatic after one year of effective service
Gestor/aSpecialised work: outbound sales, technical support, unpaid-debt handling, billing issues
Coordinador/aCoordinates a group of agents or gestores and answers for their work
Formador/a (trainer)Runs the training courses for operations staff
Agente de calidad (quality agent)Checks the quality of agents' and gestores' work

Supervisor levels A and B sit above. The gestor level is consolidated after one year of continuous work on those activities. The EU classification ESCO uses equivalent names: call centre agent, customer contact centre information clerk, call centre quality auditor, call centre supervisor and call centre manager.

Training challenges

Training before the first real call. The agreement states that the pre-hire training period ends when the person takes real calls, and that compulsory courses are paid at the agreement's hourly rate (article 80). Every training hour has a visible cost, which pushes teams onto real calls early.

The law requires specific training. Article 9.2 of Law 10/2025 requires staff giving personal attention to have adequate, ongoing training, including "specific prior training in co-official languages and universal accessibility". Companies have twelve months from entry into force to adapt, which means until the end of December 2026.

A human on demand. The same law requires service by a person when the customer asks for it, and sets that 95% of calls must be answered within three minutes on average (article 10.3). The agent who picks up after a bot may meet a customer who has already been trying for a while.

Short courses. In the 2020 Continuing Vocational Training Survey, 73.2% of Spanish enterprises provided training, but participants spent an average of 8.5 hours in courses, against 22.5 in the EU (2020 was a pandemic year). There is little time to rehearse the same conversation several times.

One line to practise

For the customer who reaches you after a bot:

"Thank you for waiting. I'm looking after this personally now. Tell me what happened and, if it's in my hands, we'll fix it on this call."

Say it out loud five times until it sounds like you.

Practising these calls with DIRI AI

With DIRI AI an agent 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 Spanish, 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 customer support de-escalation training.

Sources

All sources were read on 9 November 2026.

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