Genesys's research exposes a fundamental crisis in customer service accessibility: more than half of consumers actively avoid contacting support, viewing it as a chore comparable to other undesirable tasks. This finding arrives amid a broader industry pivot toward AI-driven automation, yet the data suggests the problem isn't merely technological—it's structural. Consumers are deterred not by the absence of innovation but by the friction inherent in traditional contact centre models: lengthy wait times, repetitive authentication, channel fragmentation, and the cognitive load of navigating support systems. The research underscores a paradox that should concern CX leaders: while vendors invest heavily in AI agents and omnichannel platforms, the baseline experience remains sufficiently poor that avoidance is the rational consumer response.
The implications for support teams are stark. If customers are actively choosing not to engage, your deflection metrics and first-contact resolution rates become secondary concerns—you're optimising systems that people are designed to escape. This reframes the strategic question: is your team's investment in Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Salesforce configurations addressing the root cause of avoidance, or merely making an inherently friction-laden process marginally smoother? The related trend that third-party generative AI tools are outperforming brand chatbots suggests consumers will route around your support infrastructure entirely if alternatives exist—a warning that traditional CX platforms must evolve beyond incremental improvements to genuinely reduce the effort required to get help.
For support leaders, the actionable insight is uncomfortable: you cannot automate your way out of this problem without first dismantling the structural barriers that make contact avoidance rational. This means auditing your current setup not for efficiency gains but for friction points—authentication loops, channel switching, knowledge gaps that force escalation. The question becomes whether your team has the mandate and resources to redesign the support experience from first principles, or whether you're constrained to optimising within a fundamentally flawed model. Until that distinction is clear, incremental platform upgrades will continue to miss the point.
More Than Half of Consumers Would Rather Do Anything Else Than Contact Customer Service, Genesys Research Finds Business Wire