The Customer Service Onshoring Decision: What the FCC's 2026 Proposed Rule Means for Your CX Operation

A proposed federal rule is pushing brands to ask a question most have avoided: is your support operation structured well enough to handle what is coming?

In March 2026, the Federal Communications Commission released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would require companies to cap the percentage of customer service calls routed to offshore call centers at 30%, mandate disclosure of agent location at the start of each call, and give customers the right to be transferred to a US-based representative with no additional wait time penalty.* ¹ The NPRM was published in the Federal Register on April 23, 2026, formally opening the comment period.* ² For founders and CX leaders, this is a rule worth tracking. It may not pass in its current form, but it puts operational questions on the table that many lean teams have not yet answered.

What the rule actually proposes

The FCC's proposal goes further than most coverage has conveyed. Beyond the offshore volume cap, the NPRM proposes to prohibit the use of call centers located in countries designated as foreign adversaries under federal law, including China, Cuba, and Russia.* ¹ It would also require that agents handling customer interactions in English demonstrate proficiency in American Standard English, including cultural context and tone. The FCC acknowledged that auditing this standard would be complex.* ¹ Separately, the rule asks whether sensitive customer data transactions, such as credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, and password resets, should be handled exclusively by US-based agents.* ¹

For ecommerce brands and service businesses that currently use offshore BPOs or blended teams, each of those provisions creates a different operational question. The customer service onshoring decision is no longer a theoretical cost comparison. It is a compliance planning question that may require looking at vendor contracts, data handling flows, and call routing architecture at the same time.

The operational issue underneath the regulation

Customer Experience Dive reported on how seven organizations are responding to the FCC proposal, and the pattern is consistent. The companies best positioned to adapt are the ones whose operations are already well-documented and clearly structured.* ³ Brands that do not have clear visibility into what percentage of their support volume goes where, or what their agents are handling versus routing versus escalating, have a harder path regardless of which direction the rule goes.

This is the part of the customer service onshoring decision that is easy to miss. Whether you end up shifting volume domestically or not, the FCC's proposal is a forcing function that surfaces how well you actually know your own support operation. Most lean teams have never formally mapped it. That gap tends to be visible in the customer experience long before it becomes a compliance issue.

If you want to understand what your current support operation actually looks like beneath the surface, including where volume goes, how it is handled, and where the structural gaps are, the SK Frameworks Tech Readiness Engineering Consult is designed to give you that picture clearly.

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Sources

Steptoe — "Press 1 for America: FCC Proposes Restrictions on and Compliance Requirements for Offshore Call Centers" — https://www.steptoe.com/en/news-publications/press-1-for-america-fcc-proposes-restrictions-on-and-compliance-requirements-for-offshore-call-centers.html

Federal Register — "Improving Customer Service and Protecting Consumers Through Onshoring" — https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/04/23/2026-07960/improving-customer-service-and-protecting-consumers-through-onshoring

Customer Experience Dive — "The FCC wants to onshore contact centers: How 7 organizations respond" — https://www.customerexperiencedive.com/news/fcc-onshore-contact-centers-how-7-organizations-respond/821518/