Customer Service Avoidance: 50% of Consumers Prefer Anything Else

What happened

A new global study published by Genesys has found that more than half of consumers would actively choose to do almost anything else before picking up the phone — or opening a chat — to contact customer service. The research, released in 2025, surveyed consumers across multiple markets and paints a stark picture of how deeply averse people have become to the very touchpoints brands rely on to resolve issues and build loyalty.

The findings reveal that avoidance of customer service contact is not simply a matter of inconvenience — it reflects a widespread expectation of frustration. Consumers anticipate long waits, repetitive interactions and the need to re-explain their situation multiple times, and they factor that anticipated pain into their decision to reach out at all. Many choose to abandon resolution attempts entirely rather than endure the process.

Why it matters

For CX practitioners and service designers, this is a signal that cannot be dismissed as anecdote. When the majority of customers treat contact with your service team as a last resort — or an ordeal to be avoided — the damage extends well beyond individual interactions. Unresolved issues quietly compound into churn, negative word-of-mouth and eroded brand trust. The behavioral economics framing here is important: consumers are not simply dissatisfied after a bad experience; they are pre-emptively discounting the value of reaching out, which means brands never even get the chance to recover.

Service design has long focused on reducing effort once a customer is inside a journey. This research suggests the more urgent design challenge is reducing the anticipated effort — the mental tax customers apply before they even begin. If the perception of pain is high enough to suppress contact, organisations are operating with a hidden failure rate that never shows up in CSAT scores or resolution metrics, because those customers never register at all.

By the numbers

• More than 50% of consumers surveyed said they would prefer to do almost anything else rather than contact customer service.

The Renascence take

Most organisations will read this research and reach for the same lever: faster response times, more AI in the queue, a shinier chatbot. That misses the deeper problem entirely. Avoidance is not a channel-design failure — it is a trust failure, and trust is rebuilt through consistency and predictability, not speed alone.

The real finding here is not that service is slow — it is that customers have learned, through repeated experience, that the system is not designed for them. Behavioral economics calls this learned helplessness: when people consistently feel that their effort produces no reliable outcome, they stop trying. The fix is not a faster IVR; it is radical transparency — proactive status updates, honest effort estimates and visible follow-through — so customers no longer have to brace themselves before making contact. A customer-obsessed operator should audit not what happens during a service interaction, but what a customer imagines will happen before they even begin.