In March 2026, the Federal Communications Commission voted to open a formal rulemaking on offshore call centers. The proposed measures include English proficiency standards for agents at foreign call centers, caps on the percentage of customer service calls that can be handled offshore, and a consumer right to request transfer to a U.S.-based agent. The proceeding also explores financial penalties to deter illegal robocalls originating abroad.
For telecom operators, BPOs, and PE-backed contact center businesses, the practical question is what this actually requires, and what it doesn’t address.
What the Proposal Covers
The FCC’s rulemaking seeks comment on ways to encourage and facilitate the onshoring of call centers, steps to improve customer service and data security, ways to combat illegal robocall scams originating from foreign call centers, and the scope of the FCC’s legal authority on these fronts. Goldrush Cam
The draft NPRM would propose to limit the percentage of customer service calls that covered service providers may make from or answer at foreign call centers to a specified percentage, and would require that all calling staff at offshore call centers be proficient in both written and spoken American Standard English. Wiley
The providers in scope include telecommunications service companies, cable television operators, DBS providers, and their affiliates. This is not a broad cross-industry mandate — at least not yet — but the directional signal is clear.
What It Doesn’t Fix
Regulatory pressure on offshore operations is real. But the compliance conversation that follows tends to focus on geography: how much of the operation is domestic, where agents are located, what percentage of calls route onshore.
That framing misses where revenue actually erodes.
In contact centers that serve subscription businesses — telecom, fiber, healthcare brokerage — the customer attrition problem is not primarily a location problem. It’s an execution problem. Agents operating in fully domestic environments lose customers at rates that have nothing to do with language barriers. They lose them because objections aren’t handled with credibility. Because the conversation moves to an offer before the agent understands what the customer is actually unhappy about. Because supervisors are coaching to QA compliance rather than to the quality of the decision the customer reaches.
QA scores can look fine while save rates slowly deteriorate. Handle time can be on target while inbound conversion quietly drops. These patterns are difficult to detect through standard dashboards and don’t become visible in financial results until the erosion is already significant.
What Operators Should Be Doing Now
The significance of the FCC proposal extends beyond its specific provisions. It signals a market evolution toward higher operational standards – where compliance and governance are becoming central to how outsourcing decisions get made.
That’s accurate. But governance frameworks are upstream of the actual problem. A centralized oversight structure doesn’t change what happens in a conversation between an agent and a customer who is about to cancel.
Operators and PE sponsors reviewing their contact center operations in light of this regulatory development should be asking a more specific set of questions. Not only where calls are being handled, but how agents are performing inside the calls that matter most – retention, inbound sales conversion, winback. Whether supervisors are coaching to conversation quality or to activity metrics. Whether the coaching infrastructure in place is capable of producing durable improvement or just short-term score movement.
These are questions that an English proficiency requirement won’t answer. There are also questions that determine whether a contact center operation holds its EBITDA through a period of regulatory and market pressure — or quietly loses it one conversation at a time.
About RCDA
Robert C. Davis & Associates is an operator-led advisory firm focused on contact center performance, retention economics, and M&A execution for telecom, BPO, and subscription businesses.
