France and Spain have held the worst spam rates in Europe for seven consecutive quarters. French residents receive an average of 13 spam calls per month, while Spaniards receive 12— and more than half of all unknown calls in both countries are unwanted, with spam flag rates of 53 percent and 51 percent respectively, according to Hiya's Global Call Threat Report.
Globally, reports of scams enabled by generative AI between May 2024 and April 2025 rose by 456 percent compared with the same period a year earlier, according to TRM Labs. And Deloitte's Center for Financial Services predicts that generative AI could enable fraud losses to reach US$40 billion in the United States by 2027, up from $12.3 billion in 2023.
The industry's response, in most cases, is a label. Potential spam. Two words on a screen. The phone still rings. The customer still has to decide.
For CX leaders, this is not someone else's problem. It is yours — and it is already showing up in your metrics.
A CX problem hiding in a security category
Voice fraud is almost universally categorized as a security issue. Fraud teams own it. Regulators discuss it. CX leaders hear about it when a vulnerable customer has already been victimized and the complaint lands in the care queue.
But the erosion of trust in the phone call begins long before anyone gets defrauded. And its consequences belong squarely in the CX domain. Here are some key stats the demonstrate the scale of the problem:
- 74 percent of consumers say they do not answer calls from unknown numbers out of fear they might be scams.
- 70 percent have not answered a phone call due to safety or fraud concerns, and afterwards learned it was a legitimate number calling them— according to TransUnion's 2024 consumer research.
- 92 percent of consumers believe unidentified calls are fraudulent, and as a result, nearly half of such calls go unanswered, according to Hiya's State of the Call report.
None of this shows up in your fraud reporting. All of it shows up in your CX metrics.
The contact center agent calling to resolve an open complaint goes to voicemail. The appointment reminder goes unanswered. The proactive outreach your team carefully designed never lands. The channel is not broken because customers don't value it — nearly 80 percent of consumers say phone calls are important for communicating with businesses, especially for complex, sensitive and urgent matters according to TransUnion. It is broken because they no longer trust it.
That gap between value and trust is where your CX problem lives.
Who is actually being affected
The customers most exposed to this breakdown are not evenly distributed across your base. They are concentrated in the segments you can least afford to lose.
According to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, total losses reported by Americans over the age of 60 topped $3.4 billion in 2023 — an almost 11 percent increase from 2022. Elderly customers are most likely to have been targeted, most likely to have suffered financial loss and most likely to have overcorrected into blanket call avoidance. Their families tell them not to answer unknown numbers. So, they don't — including when their GP calls, when their pharmacist calls, when your contact center agent calls to resolve a complaint.
These are not marginal customers. In many organizations they are the most loyal, longest-tenured, highest-spending segment and they are being systematically pushed away from your most effective service channel.
Professionals who cannot afford to miss calls have developed their own adaptation: answering reluctantly, warily, already reaching for the end-call button. That posture does not generate satisfaction. It generates anxiety. And anxiety is not a foundation for loyalty.
Younger customers — particularly those coached by parents not to answer unknown numbers have created households where legitimate outbound communications are structurally unreachable. Not blocked. Not declined. Simply never answered.
Why current approaches aren't working
The spam label was a reasonable tool for a different era — one where the threat was primarily robocalls and telemarketing. Flag the number, let the subscriber decide. If they're alert, they'll decline.
That era is over.
Today's attacks involve real-time conversation. Contextual information scraped from public sources to build credibility.
Scammers need as little as three seconds of audio to create a voice clone with an 85 percent voice match to the original speaker according to Keepnet Labs.
As mentioned, scams enabled by generative AI rose by 456 percent between May 2024 and April 2025, and over 82 percent of phishing emails are now created with the help of AI, according to Sift's Q2 2025 Digital Trust Index.
The subscriber-action model of label the call, let the customer decide, offer an app if they want more is failing precisely as the threat has become most sophisticated. Call protection apps remain underused: research consistently shows only a minority of consumers have downloaded them, and the majority say they are unwilling to pay extra for protection. The burden of defense has been placed entirely on the person least equipped to carry it.
3 things CX leaders should do now
The industry will get there eventually. The question for now is whether your organization moves at the pace of the threat or at the pace of the industry.
CX Network’s annual research into the state of CX in 2026 found that data security is one of the top challenges facing practitioners right now – and it also found consumer privacy is a top trend influencing their work. So, here are three things CX leaders should be acting on now:
1. Own the conversation internally
Voice fraud and call avoidance belong on your CX agenda, not just in fraud and risk forums. If your team is not measuring channel avoidance — tracking how many outbound contacts go unanswered, and correlating that with complaint rates, NPS, and churn — you are managing a broken channel without the data to fix it.
2. Audit your outbound strategy against current answer rates
Every outbound call program your organization runs was designed in an era of higher pick-up rates. Review your contact strategies against current data and consider what proportion of your legitimate communications are simply not getting through. Based on Transunion's internal statistics, close to 90 percent of calls to customers go unanswered because consumers just can't be sure who's calling — a figure that should alarm any CX leader relying on outbound voice as a service or retention tool.
3. Push for upstream protection in your vendor and carrier relationships
When evaluating telecoms providers, CX platform vendors, or contact center technology partners, ask specifically what they offer at the network or platform layer — not just at the point of subscriber notification. The most effective interventions act before the phone rings, not after.
The opportunity inside the problem
As many as 73 percent of consumers say they would be likely to answer calls from businesses if their company name and logo were displayed on calls, according to Transunion research. Every one of those answered calls is a resolved complaint, a confirmed appointment, a retained customer.
The organizations that move first — that restore confidence in the phone call as a service channel rather than waiting for a regulatory mandate — will see it in their NPS, in their first-contact resolution rates, and in churn figures in exactly the segments where loyalty is hardest to rebuild once lost.
The phone call does not have to be broken. But fixing it requires CX leaders to claim it as their problem — not leave it to the security team, not accept a label as a solution, and not wait until the damage is already done.
Your customers have already learned not to answer. The question is how long your organisation takes to respond.
Quick links
- Loyalty program fraud: How points can become a shadow currency
- AI and customer trust: Reflections from CCW 2026 Sydney
- How to invest to capitalize on four top CX trends