The Trend of Call Center 'Re-shoring' Accelerating

We're all used to U.S. call center jobs heading to places like India and the Philippines. We're even becoming used to U.S. companies returning call center jobs to U.S. shores. But what about Indian call center outsourcing companies bringing jobs to the U.S.?

It's more common today than you might think. Mary Murcott, CEO of the Fort Worth-based outsourcing firm Novo 1, estimated at a recent White House event devoted to U.S. job growth that at one point, 30 percent of call center jobs with high technology companies were offshore. Thanks to the new trend of “onshoring,” or “insourcing,” this figure stands closer to 12 percent.

This week, Aegis, a Mumbai, India-based outsourcing company owned by Indian conglomerate Essar, announced that will add 1,000 new call center jobs to the Dallas area as part of a pledge it made last year to hire “more than 4,000 workers in the U.S. over the next two years,” reported the Daily Beast.

According to Aegis, the jobs are a mix of full and part-time and of sales and customer service jobs: 230 of the new employees will be “licensed full-time sales representatives,” 600 will be customer service representatives and the remaining 250 will be “non-licensed sales representatives.”

Experts say the new trend in onshoring is in part due to technology. While once upon a time, the conventional wisdom was that simple calls (password resets, for example) could be handled offshore, while U.S.-based contact centers were used for more complex calls, today automated systems are more likely to handle the simple calls, leaving call centers handling primarily the more complicated customer interactions for which Americans overwhelmingly prefer U.S.-based agents with no accents.

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