May 19, 2026
UK Consumers Are Screening Out Legitimate Businesses Because They Can No Longer Tell What Is Real
Contact centres have spent years optimising dial rates, agent scripts, and channel strategies. But a growing body of evidence suggests the most consequential decision in outbound contact now happens before any of that comes into play. It is whether the consumer picks up at all.
Scam calls, fraudulent messages, and an increasingly sophisticated landscape of impersonation tactics have trained UK consumers to treat unfamiliar contact with suspicion by default. New research from MaxContact suggests the damage to legitimate outbound contact is already significant.
The company’s Voice of the UK Consumer 2026 report shows the distance between a company’s confidence that its outbound contact is legitimate and useful, and what consumers actually believe. According to the data, 69% of UK consumers always or often screen calls from numbers they do not recognise. Half have ignored a message from a legitimate company because they assumed it was a scam. Only 22% strongly agree they can tell when unexpected company contact is genuine.
Of 500 respondents who admitted to ignoring a legitimate message, 77% experienced a tangible negative outcome. Thirty-seven percent had to contact the company later to resolve a problem, while 31% missed important service information. Twenty-one percent missed an appointment, and another 21% missed a payment deadline.
Where Avoidance Hits Hardest
At the sector level, loans, credit and debt management companies are the most avoided, with 37% of consumers saying they would be least likely to answer a call from this category. Insurance follows at 25%, with technology, telecoms, and retail and e-commerce close behind at 22% to 23%. Banks and building societies fare the best, with only 16% avoidance, sitting alongside the highest trust score of any sector at 96%.
The report notes that loans and debt companies also carry the lowest trust score at 84%, yet operate under the most intense regulatory scrutiny. Consumers dealing with financial difficulty are avoiding the very contact that could help them access repayment plans, Breathing Space, or reduced contact frequency. Sixty-three percent of consumers in the debt sub-sample said they had only a rough idea of their rights when contacted by a lender or debt management company.
Surprisingly, 59% of consumers in financial difficulty said they would prefer to interact with an AI or automated system rather than a human agent. The report attributes this to a desire for privacy and a reduced likelihood of feeling judged, rather than a preference for AI capability itself.
AI Disclosure Is Now a Consumer Expectation
AI deployment is accelerating across UK contact centres, but consumers still expect to know when it is being used.
Eighty-seven percent of consumers believe they have interacted with AI or automation in a recent company contact. Of those, 22% were sure or fairly sure they had interacted with AI but were not aware of it at the time. That is more than one in five consumers who discovered, after the fact, that part of their contact experience was automated.
Across age groups, sectors and regions, the expectation that companies disclose AI use is close to universal, with 88% of consumers saying it is important and 50% calling it very important.
The report argues this expectation exists regardless of whether regulators have mandated it, and that failing to disclose AI use risks reinforcing the same uncertainty that drives call screening in the first place.
Consumer acceptance of AI depends heavily on what it is being asked to do. Answering FAQs (36%), directing to the right department (35%), and providing account updates and billing information (26%) are the tasks where consumers see AI working best. But 54% do not want AI involved in emergency situations, 50% do not want it handling complex account problems, and 49% do not want AI in any financial discussion.
Suspicion Did Not Come From Nowhere
As deepfake and synthetic voice threats target contact centres and communication platforms, consumers are right to treat unfamiliar contact with suspicion. The report found that 46% of call screeners cite concern about scams or fraud as the reason they do not answer, while 45% are tired of irrelevant spam and sales calls.
Identification is the lever most likely to change behaviour. Eighty-two percent of consumers say they would be more likely to answer a call if caller ID displayed the company name. Nearly as many (80.5%) say a pre-call text or email would increase their likelihood of picking up.
Ben Booth, CEO of MaxContact, said the findings should prompt a rethink across the industry: “Consumers broadly trust the sectors they deal with, but that trust doesn’t translate into picking up the phone. The problem isn’t sentiment; it’s signal. Consumers can’t tell a legitimate call from a scam, and until businesses close that gap, the best outbound strategies in the world will go unanswered.”
