May 08, 2026
Britain’s Favourite Way to Complain Is No Longer a Phone Call
Understanding how customers want to be contacted has become one of the most consequential questions in customer experience. Get it wrong, and organisations risk losing people before an interaction even begins. Get it right, and the returns show up in loyalty, satisfaction and long-term revenue.
A new study from the CCMA (Contact Centre Management Association) and Route 101 attempts to answer that question with more precision than most, drawing on a nationally representative survey of 2,000 UK adults conducted in Spring 2026.
According to the findings, email is now the UK’s dominant channel for routine customer service contact, with 48% of adults choosing it, compared with 41% who prefer to pick up the phone.
Phone remains the preferred option when things get complicated or time-sensitive. Over half (55%) of respondents chose phone for complex queries, and for urgent issues, the figure jumped to 68%. But the finding that email now leads for everyday contact represents a notable change in how UK consumers think about customer service.
The research also uncovered an unexpected pattern in experience-sharing behaviour. UK consumers are now more likely to post publicly about a positive customer service experience than a negative one, with review sites being the most popular platform for doing so. When consumers want to send unsolicited feedback directly to a company, email is once again the preferred route.
Five Types of UK Consumer
Below the headline numbers, the CCMA identified five distinct Customer Contact Personas through a cluster analysis of 56 variables. Each persona represents a different type of consumer with its own preferences, habits and expectations.
Efficiency Optimisers, the largest group in the study, treat customer contact as a task to complete quickly. They favour email for routine queries and want minimal friction.
Knowledge Gatherers are the most active contact-makers across all five groups, with 49% having contacted a bank for customer service in the past six months, compared with just 28% of Simplicity Seekers.
Simplicity Seekers are the least engaged persona, which takes a highly transactional approach and rarely express strong opinions about how they want to be served, with 44% reporting no preference on advisor communication style.
Experience Enthusiasts stand at the other end of the spectrum, holding organisations to exceptionally high standards and pursues connection and meaning in every interaction. Some 74% have posted publicly about a positive customer service experience, and 76% have contacted a provider to offer praise. The consequence of those high expectations is a low tolerance for disappointment, with 66% having stopped doing business with a provider after a poor experience. Recent research from Zoom and Morning Consult also found that 82% of consumers say an unsatisfactory resolution would make them likely to stop buying from a brand altogether.
Tradition Maintainers are the strongest advocates for phone and face-to-face contact. This group is sceptical of AI, with 49% having rejected all six suggested AI benefits put to them in the survey, and they are the most likely to want confirmation that a self-service transaction has been completed successfully.
AI Divides Every Persona
While 68% of UK adults say technology is making their lives easier, opinion on AI in customer service is almost evenly split. Across all five personas, 33% say AI is a net positive, while 34% say it is a net negative. The near-even division matches the findings from a recent consumer trust study, which revealed that just 15% of consumers fully trust AI recommendations, even as adoption of AI-powered tools accelerates.
Leigh Hopwood, CEO of the CCMA, said: “We are not all the same and the most sophisticated organisations have long understood this when it comes to product development and marketing. As technology makes personalisation increasingly achievable, it becomes incumbent on organisations to understand who their customers actually are and start designing meaningfully different contact experiences for them. These personas give providers a practical foundation for doing exactly that.”
The study suggests that organisations treating all their customers as a single group when designing contact experiences are likely underserving several of them at once.
