Spain's customer service law and your outsourced operation: what it requires before 28 December 2026

The law applies to companies with 250 or more employees, or with turnover above 50 million euros. Meeting either criterion is enough.

It also applies, regardless of size, to providers of basic services of general interest: water, gas, electricity, transport, financial services, electronic communications and postal services. A small energy retailer is in scope; an industrial company of a hundred people and twenty million in turnover is not.

If your company falls outside the mandatory scope, the law still matters as a market benchmark. Your customers will experience these standards from their energy provider, their bank and their telecoms operator, and will carry the expectation across to their other suppliers.

The most discussed obligation, and the one that gave the law its popular nickname, is that companies must answer 95 percent of calls in an average time of under three minutes.

It is worth reading that precisely, because two parts of it are often confused. It is not that every call must be answered within three minutes, but that average waiting time must sit below that threshold for 95 percent of calls. The indicator that matters is therefore no longer the overall average, which a well-managed queue can flatter, but the full distribution.

For a customer service operation, the practical consequence is about capacity. Meeting an average is relatively easy; meeting it at the 95th percentile forces you to size against the peak rather than the mean. It is exactly the scenario where a rigid internal model becomes expensive and an elastic one performs well.

No. The law prohibits the exclusive use of automated or artificial intelligence systems as the means of support. Where communication is by telephone or electronic means, if the user requests it, human intervention must be guaranteed from the outset and at any point in the resolution process.

That sets a clear limit on a trend sold with considerable enthusiasm through 2025 and 2026. An AI agent can still be the first layer of support, can resolve repetitive enquiries, and can cut volume significantly. What it cannot be is the only option available to a customer who asks to speak to a person.

From an operational design point of view this does not invalidate automation, it constrains it. The system has to be able to hand over to a person without friction and without making the customer repeat what they have already explained, and that person has to exist and be available during the hours the customer calls.

The maximum period for resolving a complaint becomes fifteen working days, half the thirty-day period that generally applied before the law.

For complaints about incorrect billing the deadline is shorter still: five days. That is a significant difference for the utilities and telecommunications sectors, where billing accounts for a large share of complaint volume.

Shorter deadlines change the design of the back office process as much as the telephone operation. A file that could previously wait for the next weekly review now consumes a third of the available window if it waits three days.

Responsibility towards the end customer and towards the authorities remains with your company. Outsourcing execution does not outsource the legal obligation, in the same way that appointing a processor does not release a controller from its obligations under GDPR.

What you can and should do is push the requirement into the contract. If your current agreement with your provider sets an average response time, that indicator is no longer sufficient: you need a percentile indicator, because that is what the law measures. If your agreement says nothing about human support being available on request, it needs to.

It is also worth reviewing contracted capacity. A provider billing per full-time equivalent seat who has sized against the average will have a structural problem at the 95th percentile, and that problem will show up during peaks, which is precisely when the end customer is most sensitive.

Finally, review hours of coverage. The obligation to provide human intervention on request is hard to sustain if the only window with people available is the Spanish working day and your service is advertised as available beyond it.

First, establish with certainty whether your company is in scope. The 250-employee or 50-million-euro test is objective, but inclusion through providing basic services of general interest catches companies that do not always identify themselves that way.

Second, measure your actual position against the 95th percentile rather than the average. Many operations that appear compliant in aggregate are not compliant across the distribution, and the difference only appears once you measure it.

Third, review the contract with your customer service provider and update the service indicators before the deadline rather than after it. A contract signed in 2024 almost certainly measures something the law no longer considers sufficient.