Washington’s unnecessary push to control retail customer service operations

British writer and political commentator Ernest Benn wrote, “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it wrongly and applying unsuitable remedies.” 

That’s exactly what is happening with the latest push to “onshore” customer service operations. 

A handful of members of Congress and the Federal Communications Commission have suddenly fixated on the physical location of customer service representatives. Not service quality. Not fraud or scams. Not whether consumers’ problems are actually solved. 

Just the geographic location of the person at the other end of the line when consumers need assistance. 

The underlying premise appears to be that offshore call centers are inherently suspect, and that Washington regulators are best equipped to determine how companies should staff and execute basic business functions. Neither of these are accurate assumptions. 

The fact is that retailers live and die by customer experience. Poor service is punished instantly by consumers who have endless alternatives. 

As such, retailers continue to invest heavily in clearer calls, better training, fraud prevention, multilingual support and faster resolution times. Advancements include enhanced digital tools, self-service options and AI-enabled systems that resolve many issues without the necessity of a phone call. 

If the consumer decides a call is needed, retailers have instituted complex hybrid support models that combine U.S.-based teams with global partners to ensure coverage across time zones, handle holiday surges and meet the needs of a diverse customer base. These systems are already subject to extensive consumer protection and data security requirements. 

A new proposal from the FCC would needlessly burden retailers and other service providers with mandatory English-proficiency standards, caps on offshore handling, new disclosure requirements when a call is answered outside the United States, and a consumer right to demand transfer to a U.S.-based agent. A handful of members of Congress are proposing similar ideas including mandated disclosures of any global partnerships. 

On paper, it sounds “pro-consumer.” In practice, it reflects a stunning lack of understanding of how customer service actually works. Service quality is not improved by forcing needless transfers, capping staffing flexibility or turning routine customer interactions into complex federal regulatory compliance exercises. 

The actions of the FCC will only produce longer wait times, higher abandonment rates, duplicated work and frustrated consumers explaining the same problem twice. At the same time, these artificial increases in the cost of customer service could result in higher prices at a time when American consumers remain sensitive to any price change. 

Even more ironic is the impact on jobs. 

By dramatically increasing the cost of human-staffed support models, policymakers make automation more attractive. A policy sold as job protection is far more likely to accelerate the shift away from human roles altogether. 

Good customer service is rarely generated because of edicts from Washington bureaucrats. It comes from innovation, competition and accountability. Retailers are already improving service quality, strengthening protections and modernizing their workforce models — because that’s what competition demands. 

Heavy-handed onshoring proposals reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of modern customer service and risk creating exactly the problems regulators claim to be solving.