Marty Stern Discusses FCC’s Proposed Call Center Onshoring Rules and Potential Industry Impacts

Womble Bond Dickinson Partner Marty Stern recently appeared as a panelist on an AccountsRecovery webinar speaking on “Dissecting the FCC’s Proposal for Onshoring Contact Centers”.  

The panel focused on a recent Notice of Proposed Rulemaking released by the FCC that would place significant limitations on the use of offshore call centers by various communications providers.  

Stern and the panelists discussed the FCC’s proposed call center onshoring rules, which would be applicable in the first instance to various communications providers, but would have significant potential impacts on consumers, as well as outside account and customer service vendors serving the communications sector.

Among other things the proposed rules would require that offshore customer service reps be proficient in “American Standard English,” require that customer service calls involving sensitive customer information be handled by CSRs in the U.S., and would limit the percent of calls that a provider can handle offshore.  

The FCC is also considering whether to require calls and other communications (e.g., online chat, email, and text) involving sensitive consumer information to be handled by a U.S.-based CSR. In his remarks, Stern highlighted early concerns being raised about the proposal, including questions regarding the FCC’s authority to adopt the proposed rules, as well as the cost impacts of the proposal on providers that could potentially flow through to consumer rates for communications services.

A clip of Stern’s remarks are available here.