Telemarketing Bureaus and Other Contact Centers (U.S.) — NAICS 561422

A Histometrics industry primer for public-market and private investors.

1. Overview

This is the outsourced-contact-center industry: firms that answer the phones, chats, emails, and texts for other businesses. When you call your bank, your airline, or a tech-support line and reach a third-party company rather than the brand's own employee, you have reached a business classified here. The industry's legacy name is "telemarketing," but outbound sales calls are now a minority of the work; the bulk is inbound customer service, technical support, order-taking, retention, and back-office interaction handling — an activity the industry now brands "customer experience," or CX.

Why it matters to an investor: this is a large, labor-intensive, low-margin services industry sitting directly in the path of the decade's biggest technology shift. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) — software that can hold a human-like conversation — attacks the industry's core product, the human agent-hour. That single fact drives both the risk and the opportunity: a value-versus-value-trap debate on the public side, and a consolidation-and-reinvention story on the private side.

There are several ways in. A handful of pure-play stocks give public-market exposure; most of the industry is private-equity-owned platforms and thousands of small U.S. operators; and an adjacent, faster-growing route is the software layer — the cloud "contact-center-as-a-service" and AI-orchestration vendors that arm these centers (a different industry code, covered below). Tickers, valuations, and specific names are held for Sections 4 and 10.

2. What it is and how it is structured

NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) code 561422 covers establishments that operate call/contact centers to place or take communications — by telephone, fax, email, chat, or other channels — on behalf of clients, to promote products, take orders, solicit donations, or provide information and assistance.[1] The defining trait: the operator does not own the product or service it represents. It sells capacity, labor, and management. The client keeps the brand; the contact center supplies agents, supervisors, scheduling, quality assurance, telecom, customer-relationship-management (CRM) software, analytics, and compliance controls.[1]

The work spans inbound service, order-taking, billing, retention, and technical support; outbound sales, renewals, surveys, and compliant telemarketing; email, chat, text, social, and back-office handling; and delivery that can be onshore, nearshore, offshore, or work-from-home — increasingly with human agents assisted by AI and self-service.

What the code excludes matters for sizing the industry:

• In-house ("captive") contact centers are not here. A bank or retailer running its own service center is classified in its own industry. The code captures only third-party outsourcers (and shared-service centers serving other units of the same enterprise).[1]
• Telephone answering services — simple message-taking — sit next door in NAICS 561421.[1]
• Collection agencies are NAICS 561440, and contract charitable-fundraising campaign organization is 561499 — adjacent activities a contact center may resemble but that are coded separately.[1]
• Marketing research and public-opinion polling (designing and tabulating surveys) is NAICS 541910, even when contact centers field the calls.[1]
• The technology vendors that sell dialers, routing, and cloud contact-center software are in software/data-processing codes (e.g., NAICS 513210 / 518210), not 561422.

Ownership is mixed: a competitive fringe of thousands of small, privately held U.S. centers, topped by a global oligopoly of giants that are either publicly listed or private-equity-owned. As the federal data below show, the domestic market is fragmented even though a few firms dominate worldwide.

3. How big it is

U.S. federal statistics for NAICS 561422 (our authoritative figures):

That works out to roughly $38,900 in average annual pay per U.S. worker[3] and about $10.7 million in average receipts per firm[2] — a labor-heavy business where wages consume roughly half of revenue.

Concentration is low. The four largest firms hold 21.8% of U.S. receipts (CR4), the top eight 29.7% (CR8), the top 20 42.1% (CR20), and the top 50 57.9% (CR50). The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI, a standard concentration gauge that sums the squared market shares of all firms) is just 165.2.[2] Antitrust regulators treat any market below 1,500 as "unconcentrated," so the U.S. market reads as highly fragmented and competitive — a long tail of small centers under a few large ones. The relevant competitive market may be narrower still, sliced by language, client vertical, channel, or service type. The SBA (Small Business Administration) size standard of $25.5 million in annual receipts is a government-contracting eligibility rule, not an industry-size estimate — but it does imply most of the 2,380 firms count as "small businesses."[4]

Scope caveats — the figures understate total contact-center activity in three ways. First, County Business Patterns covers employer establishments with paid staff; it omits nonemployer and tiny owner-operated shops. Second, because captive (in-house) centers are excluded by definition, the brands' own service operations don't appear here at all. Third, the federal number is a domestic slice: the U.S.-based and U.S.-listed giants run most of their agents offshore (the Philippines, India, Latin America), so their global scale dwarfs the $25.6 billion U.S. line. Note also that our authoritative receipts figure is the 2022 Economic Census — there is no separate 2023 receipts number in the federal file. Industry researchers put the broader U.S. call-and-contact-center outsourcing market near $19–20 billion in 2024 with mid-single-digit forecast growth, inside a global outsourcing market estimated around $115–120 billion in 2025 — figures that blend U.S.-billed work delivered from many countries.[5][6] Treat those consultancy estimates as directional; the Census figures are the authoritative U.S. count.

4. The investable universe

A caveat up front: NAICS 561422 does not map cleanly onto public-company reporting. Most listed operators are diversified and report "customer experience," "digital operations," or "software" rather than a clean 561422 line. Publicly traded pure-plays are few, and the largest is not U.S.-listed. Figures below are the most recent full fiscal year each company reported.

A further listed name is TELUS Digital (TIXT, NYSE/Toronto), a CX/BPO (business-process-outsourcing) operator majority-owned by Canada's TELUS, which has moved to take it private.[26]

Major private / other operators and owners:

• Foundever — private; formed by the 2021 merger of Sitel and SYKES; roughly $4.3 billion revenue and ~160,000 employees. Co-founder Laurent Uberti remains executive chairman.[11]
• Alorica — private, minority-owned; industry estimates put revenue in the several-billion range and headcount around 75,000–100,000 (figures approximate, as it is privately held).[12]
• Sutherland — private, founder-led business- and digital-transformation provider with large contact-center operations.[29]
• VXI Global Solutions — contact-center/BPO platform owned by Bain Capital Private Equity.[27]
• Qualfon — family-owned private BPO and CX provider.[30]
• iQor, [24]7.ai, and hundreds of regional and niche BPO shops round out the long tail.

The adjacent software layer — a different NAICS code but the same demand wave. Cloud contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) and AI-tooling vendors sell the software that runs (and increasingly automates) these centers: Five9, NICE, RingCentral, Twilio, and privately held Genesys and Talkdesk. Genesys is majority-owned by private-equity firms Hellman & Friedman and Permira and recently took a $1.5 billion strategic investment from Salesforce and ServiceNow.[28] If you want exposure to the growth (AI-as-disruptor) side rather than the labor (AI-disrupted) side of the same trend, this is where it sits.

5. How the money works

Owners sell agent capacity and price it a few ways:

• Per productive agent-hour — the most common. Rates track geography: roughly $28–$45/hour onshore (U.S.), $14–$22 nearshore (Latin America, Eastern Europe), and $8–$14 offshore (Philippines, India).[13]
• Per-minute (~$0.25–$0.75) for pooled inbound work, per-seat/month (~$1,500–$2,900) for dedicated agents, and increasingly outcome-based pricing (per resolved case or per sale). Contracts often carry bonuses or penalties tied to service levels and quality.[13]

The economics are simple and unforgiving. Labor is 70–95% of cost.[13] Profit is the spread between the billing rate and the fully-loaded cost of an agent, multiplied by how many billable hours you can keep that agent producing. The metrics that decide whether an owner makes money are therefore operational:

• Utilization / occupancy — billable hours divided by paid hours; idle agents are pure loss.
• Seat fill, attrition, and ramp time — turnover is chronically high, and every departure means re-hiring and re-training at the owner's expense.
• Labor arbitrage — moving volume to lower-wage geographies is the classic margin lever. For context, the median U.S. customer-service representative earned $20.59/hour ($42,830/year) in 2024, versus roughly $2–3/hour in the Philippines.[23][13]
• Revenue per productive hour and program mix — complex, specialized work (technical support, healthcare, collections, regulated workflows) bills more than basic call-answering.
• Quality metrics that gate the contract — average handle time (AHT), first-contact resolution (FCR), customer satisfaction (CSAT), abandonment, and conversion determine whether bonuses are earned or penalties triggered.

A provider can grow revenue while destroying profit if it staffs ahead of demand, suffers high turnover, accepts low-priced contracts, or fails to pass wage and technology costs through to clients. Same-store-sales and factory capacity-utilization lenses do not fit this industry; revenue-per-productive-hour, occupancy, attrition, and contribution margin per seat do.

A telling labor signal: the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects domestic employment of customer-service representatives to fall about 5%, and of telemarketers about 22%, between 2024 and 2034 — automation and offshoring already thinning the onshore workforce.[23] Because labor dominates and much of the product is commoditized, operating margins are thin — typically mid-single-digit to low-double-digit EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization). Scale, wage arbitrage, utilization discipline, and long client contracts separate winners from the pack.

6. What drives demand

• Total interaction volume. More customers, transactions, and digital services mean more support tickets. E-commerce and subscription growth are tailwinds.
• Corporate cost pressure. Outsourcing converts a brand's fixed customer-service cost into a cheaper, variable one; recessions and margin squeezes push more volume out the door. Buyers also want channel, language, time-zone, and seasonal-peak coverage that is hard to staff in-house.
• Vertical concentration. Financial services, telecom, healthcare, insurance, retail/e-commerce, utilities, travel, and technology are the biggest buyers; their spending cycles move the industry.
• Vendor consolidation by clients. Large enterprises increasingly want fewer vendors with broader capabilities, stronger data security, and integrated technology — favoring scaled providers.[8][9]
• Geographic arbitrage and reshoring. Wage gaps drive offshoring; data-privacy, quality, and political concerns periodically pull some volume back onshore or nearshore. Researchers estimate ~18% of U.S. firms that offshored have repatriated some volume since 2020, and ~27% have shifted to nearshore delivery.[14]
• AI automation — now the dominant swing factor. AI both destroys demand (deflecting simple calls to bots) and creates it (clients need help deploying and running AI, plus human-in-the-loop oversight, escalation, data labeling, and trust-and-safety work). Which effect wins, per client, is the central question for the industry's revenue.

7. Regulation

Outbound calling is heavily regulated; inbound service less so, but data and labor rules bite.

• Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR). The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rule governs disclosures, misrepresentation, calling times, caller identification, abandoned calls, unauthorized billing, prerecorded messages, and Do Not Call compliance. Covered sellers and telemarketers generally must scrub call lists against the registry at least every 31 days, and FTC guidance puts civil penalties as high as $53,088 per violation.[15]
• National Do Not Call Registry (2003). Jointly run by the FTC and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC); telemarketers must scrub against it. The FTC's fiscal-year 2025 data book reported more than 2.6 million Do Not Call complaints and more than 258 million active registrations — the scale of the compliance surface.[16]
• Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA, 1991). Enforced by the FCC, it restricts autodialers, prerecorded "robocalls," robotexts, caller-ID spoofing, and governs consent and its revocation — and is the basis for a large private-litigation industry.[17]
• STIR/SHAKEN. Caller-ID authentication mandated under the TRACED Act to fight spoofing; all major carriers implemented it by mid-2021.[18]
• Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The Department of Labor (DOL) applies it to wage, overtime, and worker-classification questions; its independent-contractor guidance remains subject to review and litigation, making staffing-model diligence important.[20]
• State "mini-TCPA" and privacy laws, plus sector rules — HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) for healthcare data, PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) for card data — govern inbound centers handling sensitive information.

The rules are in flux. In January 2025 the Eleventh Circuit, in Insurance Marketing Coalition v. FCC, vacated the FCC's "one-to-one consent" rule that would have tightened lead-generation calling; the FCC then removed the nullified language.[19] Through 2025 the FCC proposed rolling back several consent and internal-do-not-call requirements.[18] Separately, the Keep Call Centers in America Act, reintroduced in the Senate in mid-2025, would pressure firms to disclose and limit offshoring of U.S. customer-service work[14] — a political risk that cuts against the industry's core cost model. Diligence should cover consent records, Do Not Call procedures, call recordings, complaint history, state-law exposure, data-security controls, and wage-hour compliance.

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

The domestic market is fragmented (HHI 165)[2], but the top end has consolidated into a global oligopoly. The landmark deal was Concentrix's ~$4.8 billion acquisition of France's Webhelp in 2023, creating a roughly $9–10 billion revenue leader.[21] That followed Sitel's 2021 merger with SYKES to form Foundever.[11] The strategic logic: labor-arbitrage BPO is a scale game — bigger buyers of real estate, telecom, and (now) AI tooling win on cost, and only the largest can fund the AI reinvention clients demand.

Competition runs along several seams: large multinationals compete on scale, security, multilingual delivery, technology, and geographic redundancy; smaller firms compete on domestic delivery, vertical expertise, and high-touch service; captive in-house centers compete with outsourcing altogether; and CCaaS/AI vendors compete by cutting the labor required per interaction. Because switching costs for buyers are only moderate, low concentration also means limited pricing power and many alternatives for clients. That supports continued M&A (mergers and acquisitions) — especially add-on deals for vertical expertise, domestic capacity, regulated clients, or software — but consolidation can destroy value as easily as create it, through client loss, integration problems, excess debt, or acquired labor and litigation liabilities.

9. Risks

• AI disruption — the defining risk. Live deployments now replace human agents at scale (fintech Klarna publicized replacing the work of ~700 agents with an AI chatbot). Public-market investors have repriced the sector severely: parts of the financial press have called the sub-sector "uninvestible," short interest in Teleperformance has run into the double digits, and Concentrix has booked large goodwill impairments as its share price fell. Whether AI is a net headwind or a pivot opportunity is unresolved.[22]
• Thin margins and client concentration. Low profitability leaves little cushion; losing or repricing a single large program can strand facilities and trained agents.
• Wage inflation and attrition. Rising offshore wages erode the arbitrage; chronic turnover is a permanent cost.
• Regulatory and litigation risk. Consent, Do Not Call, caller-ID, privacy, and recording failures can create penalties, injunctions, or client claims.
• Cybersecurity and outages. Providers hold sensitive customer data and depend on telecom, cloud, and client systems.
• Currency and geopolitics. Offshore delivery exposes owners to foreign-exchange swings and political, infrastructure, and disaster risk in delivery countries.
• Reputational risk. A client's fraudulent or abusive campaign can damage the provider even though it does not own the underlying product.
• Balance-sheet risk. PE roll-ups and public-company acquisitions can pile on debt before synergies materialize.
• Cyclicality. Volume tracks client budgets and consumer activity.

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public routes. The listed pure-plays — Concentrix (CNXC), TTEC, ibex (IBEX), and TaskUs (TASK) on Nasdaq, plus Teleperformance (TEP/TLPFY) and TELUS Digital (TIXT) — trade at depressed valuations after the AI-driven sell-off; there is no U.S.-only listed pure-play, and the largest name is French. These are contrarian, higher-beta bets on the thesis that AI augments rather than eliminates the outsourced agent, and that today's prices already assume the worst. The adjacent software vendors (Five9, NICE, RingCentral, Twilio) offer the opposite tilt — exposure to AI as the disruptor. When comparing operators, separate service firms from software, and examine organic vs. acquired growth, client concentration and renewal rates, voice/digital/back-office/AI mix, onshore vs. offshore delivery, revenue per seat, utilization, attrition, cash conversion, leverage, and regulatory reserves. For valuation, enterprise value (EV) to EBITDA and free-cash-flow yield are the workable lenses — not regulated-utility rate base or REIT-style metrics, which do not apply here.

Private routes. Most of the industry is private: PE-owned platforms (Foundever, Alorica, VXI, iQor) and a long tail of regional BPOs that trade in private M&A and roll-ups. Favor providers with recurring inbound or regulated work, diversified clients, defensible vertical expertise, documented compliance, strong operational data, and a credible automation plan. The best acquisition candidates are often specialty operators that can be scaled through better systems, staffing, geography, or cross-selling. Underwrite purchase price, debt service, client retention, labor cost, and downside capacity utilization — not headline revenue growth.

Outlook (forward-looking judgment). The near-term drivers to watch are the pace of enterprise AI deployment, whether clients keep outsourcing their AI operations or insource them, the margin trajectory as labor-only work deflates, and further consolidation. The plausible path is bifurcation: labor-arbitrage-only operators face structural decline as automation absorbs simple, high-volume interactions, while firms that reposition as AI-orchestration partners — handling complex, high-value, regulated, and emotionally sensitive interactions with humans in the loop — can defend and even grow revenue per relationship. Total interaction volume is still rising; the open question is how much of it a human will ever touch, and how much of that human-plus-AI work the winners can capture. For investors, this is a sector in the middle of a violent re-rating, not a settled one.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS Definition — 561422 Telemarketing Bureaus and Other Contact Centers (and adjacent codes 561421, 561440, 561499, 541910), 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/?input=561422&year=2022
2. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census — Concentration of Largest Firms (NAICS 561422): receipts, firm count, CR4/CR8/CR20/CR50, HHI, 2025. https://data.census.gov/
3. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023 (NAICS 561422): establishments, employment, annual and first-quarter payroll, 2025. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
4. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Small Business Size Standards (NAICS 561422 — $25.5M), 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
5. Grand View Research, Call and Contact Center Outsourcing Market Report, 2025. https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/call-contact-center-outsourcing-market-report
6. Mordor Intelligence, Contact Center Outsourcing Market Size, 2025. https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/contact-center-outsourcing-market
7. Teleperformance SE, 2024 Annual Results (revenue €10.28B), 2025. https://www.tp.com/media/0pgdef5u/tp-press-release-2024-annual-results.pdf
8. Concentrix Corporation, Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2024 Results (revenue $9.6B; ~450,000 employees), 2025. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/01/15/3010437/0/en/Concentrix-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Fiscal-Year-2024-Results.html
9. TTEC Holdings, Inc., Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Financial Results (revenue $2.208B; net loss ~$321M), 2025. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ttec-announces-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2024-financial-results-302387939.html
10. IBEX Limited, Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2024 Results (revenue ~$525M), 2024. https://investors.ibex.co/news-releases/news-release-details/ibex-announces-record-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2024
11. Everest Group / Foundever, Concentrix Acquires Webhelp; Foundever (Sitel + SYKES) formation and scale; Laurent Uberti executive chairman, 2023/2025. https://www.everestgrp.com/uncategorized/concentrix-acquires-webhelp.html
12. PitchBook / IBISWorld, Alorica Inc. Company Profile (private; revenue and headcount estimates), 2026. https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/42917-68
13. Callforce / Site Selection Group / Retell AI, Call Center Outsourcing Pricing by Region and Model; labor as share of cost, 2026. https://callforce.global/blog/call-center-outsourcing-cost/
14. Site Selection Group, The Keep Call Centers in America Act; reshoring and nearshoring statistics, 2025. https://info.siteselectiongroup.com/blog/the-keep-call-centers-in-america-act-a-turning-point
15. U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Complying with the Telemarketing Sales Rule (disclosures, 31-day scrub, civil penalties up to $53,088/violation), 2025. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/complying-telemarketing-sales-rule
16. U.S. Federal Trade Commission, National Do Not Call Registry Data Book for Fiscal Year 2025 (2.6M+ complaints; 258M+ registrations), 2025. https://www.ftc.gov/reports/national-do-not-call-registry-data-book-fiscal-year-2025
17. U.S. Federal Communications Commission, Telephone Consumer Protection Act — Unwanted Calls and Texts, 2026. https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/stop-unwanted-robocalls-and-texts
18. National Consumer Law Center, Top Six TCPA/Robocall Developments in 2024/2025 (STIR/SHAKEN, TRACED Act, FCC consent proposals), 2025. https://library.nclc.org/article/top-six-tcparobocall-developments-20242025
19. U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, Insurance Marketing Coalition Ltd. v. FCC (one-to-one consent rule vacated, Jan. 2025), 2025. https://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/202410277.pdf
20. U.S. Department of Labor, Fact Sheet 13: Employment Relationship Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, 2026. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/13-flsa-employment-relationship
21. Concentrix Corporation, Concentrix to Combine with Webhelp (~$4.8B), 2023. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2023/03/29/2637153/0/en/Concentrix-to-Combine-with-Webhelp-Creating-a-Diversified-Global-CX-Leader-Well-Positioned-for-Growth.html
22. Bloomberg / Nearshore Americas, Call-Center Stocks Fall on Worry AI Makes Them 'Uninvestible' (Klarna, Teleperformance short interest, Concentrix impairment), 2026. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-30/call-center-stocks-fall-on-worry-ai-is-makes-them-uninvestible
23. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook — Customer Service Representatives (median $20.59/hr, $42,830; −5% 2024–34) and Telemarketers (median $34,410; −22% 2024–34), 2025. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/office-and-administrative-support/customer-service-representatives.htm
24. TaskUs, Inc., 2025 Form 10-K; founder/Blackstone take-private, 2026. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001829864&type=10-K
25. Conduent Incorporated, 2025 Form 10-K, 2026. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001677703&type=10-K
26. TELUS Digital (TELUS International), Investor information; TELUS proposal to take private, 2025. https://www.telusdigital.com/investors
27. Bain Capital Private Equity, Bain Capital Completes Acquisition of VXI Global Solutions, 2022. https://vxi.com/news/bain-capital-completes-acquisition-of-vxi-global-solutions/
28. Genesys, Genesys Announces $1.5 Billion Investment by Salesforce and ServiceNow (Hellman & Friedman and Permira majority owners), 2025. https://www.genesys.com/company/newsroom/announcements/genesys-announces-1-5-billion-investment-by-salesforce-and-servicenow
29. Sutherland Global Services, Company / 2024 Sustainability Report, 2025. https://www.sutherlandglobal.com/
30. Qualfon, Customer Experience Company (family-owned private BPO), 2026. https://www.qualfon.com/