Genesys: Over Half of Consumers Avoid Customer Service

What happened

New research from customer experience technology provider Genesys finds that more than half of consumers deliberately avoid contacting customer service altogether, even when they have a genuine issue that needs resolving. The company attributes this avoidance to anticipated frustration: consumers expect the interaction to be difficult, slow or unproductive, and choose not to engage rather than risk a poor experience.

According to reporting on the findings, this avoidance behaviour effectively masks the true scale of customer dissatisfaction from the brands responsible for it. Because these customers never file a complaint, log a ticket or leave a review, their frustration goes unrecorded in the metrics organisations typically use to gauge service quality — meaning satisfaction scores and contact volumes may be understating the real scope of the problem.

Why it matters

For CX and service-design teams, this is a direct challenge to how "customer satisfaction" is measured. If a meaningful share of dissatisfied customers simply disengage rather than complain, then traditional feedback loops — surveys, complaint logs, NPS follow-ups — are structurally biased toward the customers who persevere, not the ones who give up. That silence can be mistaken for contentment.

The behavioural driver here is anticipated regret: consumers are making a pre-emptive calculation that the effort and emotional cost of contacting support will outweigh the benefit of resolution. This is a classic case of friction shaping behaviour before an interaction even begins, and it has real commercial consequences — unresolved issues, quiet churn, and erosion of trust that never shows up in a complaints dashboard until it's reflected in retention or lifetime value.

By the numbers

• Over half of consumers say they actively avoid contacting customer service.

The Renascence take

Most organisations still treat low complaint volumes as a proxy for good service. This research suggests the opposite may sometimes be true: silence can indicate resignation, not resolution.

The real risk isn't the customer who complains loudly — it's the one who never shows up in your data at all. If more than half of consumers are opting out of service before they even try it, the metric that matters is not "how satisfied are our contacts" but "who never became a contact, and why." Operators serious about experience should be actively measuring avoidance and pre-emptive churn signals, not just resolution rates, and should treat every reduction in friction — shorter wait times, clearer self-service paths, less repetition — as a way to earn back the customers who have quietly stopped asking.