Greening the contact center: the faster route to real carbon reduction, not just offsetting

Delivering on net zero is one of the defining challenges of our age. 

Most companies are already working to reduce their Scope 1 and 2 emissions (those directly under their control). But the more difficult and significant task is to reduce Scope 3 (the indirect emissions generated across an organization’s entire value chain).

While data shows that Scope 3 emissions typically account for 70-90% of a company’s total carbon footprint, they are often the least measured and the least reported.

That is changing. In Europe for instance, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) is already in force. If your company has more than 250 employees, generates €50 million in annual turnover, or holds €25 million in assets, you will need to report your Scope 3 emissions for the 2025 financial year by 2026.

Sometimes overlooked and often underestimated, contact center operations offer critical opportunities to cut Scope 3 emissions for five reasons.

1. Contact centers typically operate at the intersection of multiple customer/supplier relationships, so improvements by suppliers and partners can ripple through company supply chains (as Scope 3 emissions).
2. As office environments go, they are relatively energy-intensive, working around the clock to handle continuous calls, chats and other digital interactions with millions of customers.
3. How and where contact center agents work has changed with adoption of remote and hybrid working that eliminates commuting emissions and reduces the energy demand of large physical office spaces.
4. AI-powered tools in modern contact centers typically reduce the number of customer interactions, simultaneously increasing operational efficiency and aiding decarbonization.
5. As consumers and other stakeholders increasingly scrutinize brands’ sustainability credentials, being able to say your customer service operations are low-carbon is a reputational asset.

For practical progress, it helps to think about contact center decarbonization across four interconnected domains: the premises at which operations are run, the technology infrastructure powering those operations, the data flowing through them, and the people working within them.

Crucially, you can’t effectively manage what you can’t measure. So underpinning all these domains must be the capability to accurately measure and track carbon. The most widely recognized and rigorous framework to do this is the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi). Committing to SBTi-aligned targets means not only calculating your carbon footprint but having external experts certify that your reduction commitments are consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5°C.

As an example, Konecta has been scored A- through CPA’s Supplier Engagement Assessment, which evaluates how companies are driving reductions across Scopes 1, 2 and 3 emissions. Based on our experience, here are four evidence-based ways to measurably decarbonize contact centers. 

Energy consumption is the single largest source of carbon in a contact center, so it’s therefore the single largest reduction opportunity. Every decarbonization strategy must incorporate comprehensive and measurable ways to increase energy-efficiency and eliminate waste associated with every aspect of operations.

These typically include (but are certainly not limited to):

• Shifting to renewable energy sources
• Cutting energy consumption for example, automated light-switches, power and temperature controls, dynamically adjusted according to need
• Sourcing only low-carbon devices and office supplies (manufactured, maintained, reused, recycled and disposed of sustainably).

The other critical opportunity here is to harness the decarbonization advantages of agentic AI that reduces both the duration and volume of customer touchpoints. Research found that AI-powered voice analytics can cut average call handling times by 15%, saving an estimated 4.5 kg of CO₂ per agent per day - roughly equivalent to planting a tree every two weeks.

One single impactful step any contact center can take is migrating to a cloud-native platform. Contact centers relying on older, on-premise data centers can waste up to 40% more energy than those using modern cloud providers.

This is for two reasons:

• Specialist cloud providers are deeply invested in ongoing energy and resource optimization. Many locate data centers in cooler climates to reduce cooling requirements, develop water recirculation systems, or use non-drinkable water in cooling systems to reduce pressure on freshwater resources. 
• Cloud platforms enable resource sharing. A single cloud-native data center can serve hundreds of companies simultaneously, delivering economies of scale that no individual on-premise deployment can match. Contrast this with the legacy model: multiple proprietary data centers, each consuming energy and raw materials.

Just one word of caution. This doesn’t mean that every contact center should migrate to the cloud. The key is devising a strategy that combines local infrastructure with cloud infrastructure depending on an evaluation of critical factors such as data regulatory, sovereignty and storage requirements.

In the dawning age of agentic AI, training and running AI models requires substantial computing power, and therefore substantial energy.

Meanwhile, research has found that even as data volumes grow exponentially, so too does the amount of dark data that may be hidden, untapped or unknown. In fact a recent global survey discovered that 55% of an organization's data is considered “dark” - all of which consumes energy to store.

One important way to reduce carbon is to devise and implement a sustainable data management strategy. While the principles of green data management may be straightforward, implementation requires discipline in three key areas:

• Delete data you no longer need. The more historical data you retain, the more storage and processing power you consume. 
• Compress and archive data efficiently. Storing data in compressed formats reduces the energy footprint of storage infrastructure.
• Choose the right infrastructure for AI workloads. Running AI on renewable-powered cloud infrastructure means the energy cost of those workloads does not translate into additional carbon emissions.

Remote and hybrid working models can reduce a contact center’s carbon footprint by up to 50% by cutting office energy use and employee commuting.

But let’s be clear. Working from home does not eliminate emissions: it redistributes some of them. What’s more, there are multiple variables that depend on geography. Public transport infrastructure and cultural norms vary significantly between countries. For global contact center operators, this means that a one-size-fits-all approach to remote working will not deliver consistent environmental outcomes.

Getting this right requires country-level analysis: where remote works, where hybrid is better, and where on-site presence is essential.

For companies who outsource, supplier selection is one of the most powerful tools for reducing Scope 3 emissions. Questions worth asking any contact center partner include:

• Do you measure and report your carbon footprint, including Scope 3? Is that measurement independently audited? Are you aligned with a recognized science-based target framework?
• How are you reducing the carbon footprint of your operations? How are you optimizing your use of green IT?
• What percentage of your operations are currently powered by renewables?
• How do you support and incentivize sustainable ways of working for your people?

Scope 3 can certainly be challenging. The good news is that your contact center is one place to turn commitments into action while delighting customers along the way.