A Genesys report has surfaced evidence that consumers are actively avoiding contact centre interactions, signalling a fundamental breakdown in how organisations are delivering support experiences. Rather than viewing this as a channel preference shift, the data points to deliberate avoidance behaviour—customers are choosing not to engage with support at all rather than accepting poor service quality. This represents a critical inflection point for CX teams: the traditional contact centre is no longer a default destination for problem resolution. The underlying drivers appear rooted in friction, wait times, and the perception that contacting support will worsen rather than resolve issues. For teams managing legacy infrastructure or operating with siloed data systems, this finding should trigger immediate reassessment of whether current tooling and processes are creating barriers to contact rather than removing them.
The implications cut across vendor strategy and team capability alike. Organisations investing in conversational AI and agent-assisted automation are positioning themselves to intercept customers before they reach the avoidance threshold, yet the report suggests many teams remain trapped in reactive, high-friction models. The question becomes whether traditional contact centre platforms are becoming liability rather than asset if they cannot reduce friction sufficiently to reverse avoidance behaviour. Teams relying on incremental improvements to existing systems face a harder problem than those with flexibility to redesign interaction models entirely. The data also exposes a gap between vendor innovation cycles and customer expectations—AI-driven solutions are proliferating, but if foundational issues around accessibility, speed, and first-contact resolution remain unaddressed, adoption of new technology will simply automate poor experiences at scale.
For support leaders, this report reframes the competitive landscape. Success is no longer measured by contact volume or resolution time alone, but by whether your organisation has made contact unnecessary or frictionless enough that avoidance behaviour reverses. Teams should audit whether their current stack—whether Zendesk, Freshdesk, or proprietary systems—is configured to eliminate the specific friction points driving avoidance, or whether they're optimising metrics that mask deeper customer dissatisfaction. The organisations winning in this environment will be those that treat avoidance as a leading indicator of systemic failure, not a channel preference.
Genesys report suggests consumers avoid contacting customer service - Enterprise Times