Customer Service Avoidance: Why 50% of Consumers Don't Bother

What happened

A major new Genesys study has found that more than half of consumers actively avoid contacting customer service — not because their problems have gone away, but because they expect the experience to be frustrating, time-consuming or ineffective. The research, reported by MarTech Cube and Enterprise Times, signals a deepening crisis of confidence in service channels across industries.

The findings reveal that avoidance behaviour is not passive indifference. Consumers are making deliberate, pre-emptive decisions to sidestep service interactions entirely, absorbing unresolved problems rather than risk a poor experience. This points to a fundamental breakdown in the perceived value of reaching out — a gap between what customers believe will happen and what organisations believe they are delivering.

Genesys positions the research as a call to action for contact centre and CX leaders, arguing that the industry's focus on handling interactions efficiently has obscured a more damaging trend: a growing share of demand is never expressed at all, leaving organisations blind to the true scale of customer dissatisfaction.

Why it matters

From a behavioural economics standpoint, this is a textbook case of anticipated regret and effort aversion combining to suppress demand. Customers are running a mental cost-benefit calculation before they even pick up the phone or open a chat window — and the expected cost of engaging (time, frustration, perceived futility) is consistently outweighing the expected benefit of resolution. The implication for service designers is stark: satisfaction scores and resolution rates only measure the customers who showed up. The majority who opted out are invisible in most CX measurement frameworks.

For operators in the MENA region, where digital service adoption is accelerating rapidly and customer expectations are being shaped by best-in-class global benchmarks, this research is a warning. Organisations that optimise solely for handled-interaction metrics risk building an increasingly polished service for a shrinking, self-selected audience — while the broader customer base quietly disengages, churns or migrates to competitors perceived as lower-effort.

By the numbers

• More than 50% of consumers surveyed said they avoid customer service interactions, according to the Genesys research cited by both MarTech Cube and Enterprise Times.

The Renascence take

The instinct among CX leaders reading this will be to invest in easier channels — better chatbots, smoother IVR, faster response times. That instinct is understandable, but it addresses the symptom rather than the diagnosis. The real issue is anticipated experience, not actual experience — and those are governed by very different levers.

Most organisations are measuring the wrong population entirely: the customers brave enough to contact them. The behavioural principle at work here is expectation formation, not channel friction — and you cannot fix a reputation for being painful simply by adding a WhatsApp button. Customer-obsessed operators should start by auditing what signals, past experiences and cultural norms are feeding the avoidance decision, then redesign the pre-contact moment as deliberately as they design the interaction itself. That means proactive outreach, transparent service promises and — critically — closing the loop visibly with customers who never asked, so that the next time, they believe it is worth trying.