Tim ZylaWhen U.S. President Donald Trump captured the White House in 2016, his economic agenda was made crystal clear: Bring more jobs back to America.
Plenty of onshore BPO executives are still waiting to see this become a reality.
Trump’s “America First” platform has had its share of wins over the years, but most of those victories have centered around the manufacturing industry, and contact centers are still looking for a life raft.
Estimates suggest about 300,000 U.S. jobs are “lost” to offshoring annually, according to data from Radix.
A 2017 executive order, entitled the America First Tax Relief Plan, signed by Trump during his first term, sought to subject “profits that have accumulated offshore to a one-time low tax rate, thereby ending the tax incentive to keep those profits offshore.”
The plan could have been the much-needed support domestic BPOs were looking for, but, Thomas Laird, CEO of Erie, Pennsylvania-based Expivia, a 600-seat contact center, said the idea never fully came to fruition.
To be honest, I’m just a little disappointed,” he said. “You know, I would love to see some of (those jobs) come back onshore with the understanding that it would not just boost onshore, but also boost how quickly AI gets implemented. … It would be a win-win from that standpoint.”
Cultural advantage still sells
Despite the lack of policy wins at the federal level, Laird still feels domestic BPOs will remain viable for years to come — first and foremost due to the cultural advantage they provide for customers that, by and large, want to speak to fellow countrymen for customer support.
“We’re proud of being a USA contact center,” he said. “I think the quality aspects — and I don’t really shy away from this — are much better. … We’ve seen study after study, and we’ve done our own studies, where it’s 70 to 80% of USA customers prefer to talk to somebody from the States.”
While AI will continue to be a disruptor in the market, Laird said he still expects advertising campaigns to be launched in the future promoting human-based service over robotic support, similar to how many U.S. banks are increasingly branding as human-first in a digital world.
“We just assume that every organization is going to go with AI. I think for certain things — 911 call centers, health care — there’s still going to be an appetite for the human being,” he said.
The price is right
As jobs continue to move offshore and Latin America continues to increase in popularity for U.S. clients looking to save money, Laird said BPO employee pay is beginning to consolidate in some forms across the globe. He specifically mentioned a dramatic rise in hiring costs in the United States’ nearshore market.
“We’re never going to compete with offshore prices,” he said. “But we can relatively compete with nearshore prices as those have really skyrocketed, relatively speaking to where they’ve been, based on the technology that we can provide now.”
Laird said agents at his Pennsylvania-based company are paid about $15 to $17 an hour, while supervisors are being paid $20-plus. He said contact centers tend to find success in the U.S. in areas that have low minimum wage, such as Pennsylvania’s $7.25 an hour limit, and areas that are not heavily taxed. This, typically, leads him to view medium-sized cities in rural areas — such as the Rust Belt that Expivia operates in — as being prime markets due to the size of the labor pool and lack of financial disincentives.
Laird said the jobs are desirable because they are remote work and offer wages similar to what retail operations would demand in similar markets.
Looking ahead, Laird said he believes AI adoption will likely lead to contact center agents being paid some of the “highest wages in the company,” to handle some of the most complex issues for customers that AI cannot handle independently.
But he warned that, by and large, the industry does not have the necessary infrastructure built yet for full-scale AI adoption and feels many executives have jumped the gun and made unsuccessful attempts at using the technology to implement cost-cutting measures too soon.
He expects many of those concerns to be waning by 2027, provided companies are taking a serious approach to building knowledge bases right now.
Laird also noted the added security concerns that AI adoption will pose in the BPO world, including concerns surrounding data use in large language models.
“There’s still a lot of things that need to be worked out with security,” he said.
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