State of the Call 2023: The latest findings across the voice channel

Hiya’s State of the Call for 2023 report is now available for download.

The way we connect is changing. Voice is impacted by spam and fraud. The State of the Call report provides insights, trends, and recommendations to help businesses better reach their customers. The annual report combines market research data from consumers and businesses, with Hiya’s data from over 243.5 billion calls in 2022.

Hiya’s research determined that 10% of the 243.5 billion phone calls that passed through its network in 2022 were spam or fraud. The report takes a deeper look at the global issue of spam and fraud calls, and how they impact consumer and business behavior across the voice channel.

“Unwanted calls erode consumer trust in their favorite communication tool - the phone - and therefore makes it harder for legitimate, trusted businesses to reach them. That has very real consequences for sales, customer experience, and other critical areas.” - Kush Parikh, Hiya President

What hasn’t changed

Voice continues to be preferred by consumers and businesses for complex, important, and sensitive communications. The State of the Call 2023 identified key trends across the industry – in addition to areas that haven’t changed:

Voice is still the go-to choice for consumers’ most important communications.
It’s also the top communication method for professionals because it’s crucial to their business.
Virtually everyone who relies on the phone is using it more than ever.

But what does the future hold for professionals and consumers on the voice channel? Let’s take a look at how phone call usage may change throughout the next 12 months:

The voice call isn’t going anywhere - it continues to be deeply entrenched in customer, business, and carrier communications alike.

The big hurdles:

Businesses suffer when they can’t reach their customers

As workers shared that resolving issues and closing sales are their top uses for voice calls, it should come as no surprise that businesses feel the impact when they can’t reach their customers or prospects by phone. In fact, 38% of workers report that their business has been financially impacted by an inability to reach prospects and/or customers.

More than half of the workers surveyed in the US, UK, and Spain reported a negative financial impact as a result of being unable to connect with prospects and customers by phone. Additionally, 42% said they lost customers or a potential deal due to an inability to connect by phone.

Phone spam and fraud by the numbers

Spam calls – which include both illegal fraud calls and legal nuisance calls – are increasing

in frequency around the world. It’s a global problem but the specific rates vary by country.

In the US, spam accounted for 35% of all calls while fraud was only .9%.
In the UK, 28% of calls were spam and 13% were fraud.
In Canada, spam and fraud calls were 21% and 6%, respectively.
In France, 43% of calls were spam, and 2% were fraud.
In Germany, spam was 21% of all calls and fraud was .21%.
In Spain, spam and fraud were 44% and 5%, respectively.

The spam flag rates above represent unknown calls outside of an individual’s contact list calls that Hiya has identified and flagged as either fraud or nuisance.

Spam and fraud calls cost consumers time and money

In previous State of the Call reports, we asked consumers how much money they lost if they were scammed in a fraud call. This year in addition to the financial costs of being scammed, we also asked consumers how much time spam and fraud calls have cost them.

In the US, consumers lost 32 minutes on average, the most of all the countries surveyed, followed by Spain (27 minutes), Canada (27 minutes), France (27 minutes), and the UK (23 minutes). Consumers in Germany lost the least amount of time - 22 minutes.

Recommendations for businesses:

Organizations across industries generally understand the problem and know they need to do something about it. The solution? Both surveyed consumers and workers agree, adding identity to outbound calls is the answer. In fact, 72% of consumers say they’re more likely to answer a call if they know who’s calling.

How we build State of the Call

Censuswide conducted a market research survey on behalf of Hiya of 2,209 business professionals, 13,326 consumers, and 624 decision-makers at mobile network carriers in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, and Spain.

Hiya analyzed more than 243.5 billion calls that passed over the Hiya Voice Security Network, which includes more than 250 million users worldwide through Hiya’s integrations with wireless carriers and device manufacturers and the Hiya app.