CCMA Voice of the Contact Centre Consumer 2026 — a planner’s summary
The headline shift
For the first time in five years, more UK consumers feel customer service has improved than feel it has worsened. In 2024 the gap was 10 percentage points negative (21% improved vs 31% worsened). In 2026 that has not only closed but reversed: 31% positive vs 26% negative — a net positive of 5pp. The CCMA frames this as “genuine progress” driven by investment in people, process, digital experience, and competitive pressure.
For planning teams, that’s a backdrop worth knowing. Customer service investment is now visibly paying back in the consumer’s lived experience — which makes the business case for further investment easier to land, and changes the conversation about what “good” looks like at the next forecast cycle.
The unevenness
The improvement is real and unequal. Younger consumers (58% of 18–34s say service has improved) and higher-income households (41% of £40k+ feel positive) are most likely to feel the lift. The over-55s and lower-income households see far less of it. The CCMA’s framing is sharp: those who need good service most are getting it least.
The patterns reflect the channels each group uses. Affluent and younger consumers interact more through digital-first channels that have improved markedly; lower-income and older consumers are over-represented in the high-stress contact types (debt, benefit claims, essential utilities) where service experience is harder to deliver well.
Self-service is being rebuilt — cautiously
Consumer willingness to self-serve has grown for most query types between 2024 and 2026. The biggest movers: routine servicing / technical support (+14pp), opening an account / placing an order (+9pp), warranty & repair (+7pp), product / service queries (+7pp), and delivery queries (+6pp).
The notable exceptions: advice prior to placing an order (-5pp) and complaint handling (-4pp) have moved away from self-service. Consumers continue to want human empathy, accountability, and resolution when things have gone wrong or have a higher chance of going wrong — qualities digital channels still don’t demonstrate consistently.
For planners: the demand-mix is shifting. Routine queries are being absorbed by self-service; the human-handled mix is increasingly weighted to complaints, complex advice, and the situations where empathy is paying for itself. That has implications for AHT, training time, advisor selection, and the kind of capability a senior advisor needs to be hired for.
Sector performance
Net consumer ratings by sector show the spread:
- Travel providers — +20 net. Competitive market, sustained omnichannel investment.
- Banks — +18 net. Strong digital plus human support for complex interactions.
- Local councils — −11 net. Constrained resources, high-volume complex contact, less competitive pressure to invest.
The local-council position has persisted across the research series and reflects the structural challenge of public-sector contact rather than the quality of any individual operation.
Vulnerability — the central theme
The CCMA places vulnerability at the centre of the 2026 analysis — not as a niche concern, but as the lens that reveals where the improvement isn’t reaching. The numbers are striking:
- 17% of UK consumers describe themselves as financially vulnerable — low confidence managing money, difficulty paying bills, debt or overdraft challenges, limited financial knowledge.
- 27% receive help from another person with everyday activities (13% regularly, 14% occasionally) — either personally vulnerable or acting on someone else’s behalf when contacting providers.
- 41% have experienced a health-related issue in the last five years that could affect their ability to contact organisations — mental-health challenges (22%), recurring fatigue (19%), vision or hearing problems (8% each), difficulty understanding written communications (6%).
- 54% of vulnerable consumers feel they are more likely to be treated unfairly because of their personal circumstances.
Vulnerable consumers experience higher rates of self-service failure, are more likely to need to switch back to phone after starting online, and are significantly less optimistic about whether customer service is improving. The gap is widening even as the overall picture brightens.
What it means for planning
Several practical implications follow.
The human-handled contact mix is harder. As self-service absorbs the routine, what reaches an advisor is more complex, more emotional, and more likely to involve a vulnerable consumer. AHT assumptions built on the 2022 contact mix are increasingly wrong.
Vulnerable-customer routing matters more. The technology and process to identify a vulnerable customer and route them to an appropriately-trained advisor is no longer a fringe investment. The CCMA report frames it as central to good service; planners should frame it the same way in capacity and capability conversations.
Training time should rise, not fall. The contact mix the advisor faces is harder, the empathy bar is higher, and the consequence of failure is bigger. Planners modelling training time as a fixed percentage of paid time should revisit the assumption.
The channel mix is shifting non-linearly. Routine queries leave for self-service; complex queries stay on phone or chat. Forecast models that assume a uniform channel growth or contraction rate will mispredict at the granular level. See demand decomposition by call reason for the framing.
The business case for quality has just got easier. When 54% of vulnerable consumers feel they’re treated unfairly, the QA programme isn’t a cost — it’s a regulatory, reputational, and revenue lever. See QA scores and workforce planning.
What to do with this in your operation
Three practical next steps for planning teams.
1. Cross-reference with your own data. The CCMA numbers are national. Your operation will have its own pattern. Pull self-service success and failure rates by demographic if you can. Where you see the same demographic split, the CCMA report is your supporting evidence; where you don’t, you have something worth investigating.
2. Bring the report to your operations leadership team. The headline numbers are persuasive; the vulnerability framing is the one that lands strategically. Use it to anchor a conversation about the operation’s vulnerable-customer routing, training investment, and AHT assumptions.
3. Read the full report. This summary covers roughly a third of the report’s detail. The sector-by-sector breakdown, the four vulnerability dimensions, and the consumer quotes are worth reading in the original.
Source: CCMA & Zoom Voice of the Contact Centre Consumer 2026 (free PDF, 17 pages, May 2026). Pair this with demand decomposition by call reason, designing a meaningful QA programme, and the resources page.