TL;DR
- Compliance is moving into the call itself: FCC proposals would require offshore-agent disclosures and working US transfer options, alongside changes to how consumers opt out of communications.
- A working prompt isn’t enough: Failed transfers, broken keypress options and carrier routing faults could undermine consumer rights while internal dashboards still show healthy performance.
- Providers need proof the whole journey works: Map published numbers, test calls across live carrier networks and retain evidence that disclosures, transfers and opt-outs function as promised.
 Two FCC items six months apart are handing consumers new rights they can exercise inside a call itself: a disclosure that must play and a transfer or opt out option that must work. These move compliance out of contracts and scripts and into call flow behavior instead, where no policy document can evidence it, and the time to get it in place is shorter than most providers planned for. Mark Rohan, Chief Operating Officer and Co-founder at Klearcom explains
Picture a customer in Denver calling their broadband provider one Tuesday morning. They hear a greeting, then are told the call is being handled by an agent abroad. They then get an offer to be put through to someone in the US instead. They take the offer, the line then goes quiet for 40 seconds… and then the call just drops.
Today that’s one bad evening and one entry in a churn report. Under the new rules now taking shape at the FCC, the same dropped transfer becomes a failure to deliver a right the regulator granted, one a call the provider has to count, measure and report on.
What has changed
In March, the Commission adopted Improving Customer Service and Protecting Consumers through onshoring. Comments closed in June and an order is pending. The live proposals would cap the share of customer service calls routed to or answered at foreign call centers, with a figure of 30% being floated. They would require a disclosure at the start of every call handled abroad, potentially naming the country, together with a right to transfer to a US representative, wait times no worse than the domestic route.
Sensitive interactions like password resets and card related actions will stay onshore, and a reporting system sits on top of that, covering things like routing, transfers, wait times, and dropped calls.
On 5 September 2026 the Commission released an item due for consideration at its September 30th open meeting to rework opt-out rules. Based on this, businesses may have to designate one clearly disclosed channel as the way to opt out, which will be chosen from three options: an automated voice or keypress option, a standard text keyword such as STOP, or a designated website or phone number.
The timing matters in all of this. As analysts at the Consumer Financial Services Law Monitor point out, the revised rules take effect 30 days after Federal Register publication, superseding the delayed date of 31 January 2027 and leaving far less wiggle room than businesses had planned for. If a business doesn’t name a method, it has to accept any reasonable opt-out, and once the customer shows proof they asked, the business is assumed to be in the wrong unless it can prove otherwise.
What that looks like in practice
Both rules work the same way: something the caller hears announced at the start, and something they can act on with a keypress or a spoken request. Both now sit in the call flow rather than just in a policy document.
Most consumer protection law in telecoms covers what a provider says, charges or stores. These rules cover what the network does e.g. the disclosure plays before the agent speaks, if the transfer option reaches a live queue, how that queue compares with the direct route for wait times, and whether the second leg connects at all.
Say a retailer tells its customers to opt out by calling its phone menu, prints the number of every disclosure, then sends out a release that breaks DTMF capture on option 3. The prompt still plays but the path behind it is broken. The retailer has closed the one door its customers are entitled to use, and with the presumption that the rules via the FCC are now running in the customer’s favor, proving the door opened falls now to the business that owns the number.
Where it get a bit difficult
Nobody owns the entire journey. It’s all coming from different pots: numbering comes from one supplier, the IVR from another, and agents from two or three outsourcers. Certifying a percentage or view of wait times requires a view of the voice estate that most organizations don’t have.
Internal dashboards solve only half the visibility gap. They report what the platform did with a call it received and stay silent on everything before it arrived. A carrier can misroute a number, or a prompt can play in the wrong language after a release, and CCaaS reporting still looks healthy, because the call never got counted. None of it raises an alarm.
How to get ahead of it
Start with an inventory of published numbers that you have on your books, map them to the journeys that each one lands in and the team answers. Define the compliant path before you test anything, which input triggers a domestic transfer, which queue receives it, and which keypress counts as a valid opt out.
Validate from where the caller is calling from and not from your own location. Dialing your numbers over live networks across more than one carrier shows what a regulator would find if they did the same. Routing faults are usually carrier specific, so one carrier tells you less than it appears to.
Make sure to record evidence as you go. Things like timestamped records, recorded and transcribed audio, and pass and fail rates by market. Reporting is the easier part compared to showing if the call behaved as described.
Why other regulators will be watching
Read the industrial policy and you’ll be half on your way. The interesting part is more the mechanism, because Europe got there first. Article 50 of the EU AI Act has been in force since August 2026 and it says people must be told when an AI system is what they are dealing with. Fail to do that as the business and the exposure runs to 15 million euros or 3% of global turnover.
Here is where I can be specific with what I’m seeing in the industry. From our testing logs, the single largest group is callers reaching a greeting other than the one the business intended. One business had more than 40 numbers sending callers directly to agents, with no warning, after a carrier altered routing on its own. Internal dashboard reporting showed a healthy contact center voice estate. Under the new FCC rules taking shape, all of these examples wouldn’t fly.
Your published number is your front door. What regulators are moving towards is evidence that it opens in every market, on every carrier, for everyone entitled to walk in.
Author
Mark Rohan is Chief Operating Officer and Co-founder at Klearcom
