In September 2025, STAMMA did a survey with several hundred people who stammer, exploring their experiences during their most recent call to a business or organisation. The results were fascinating. Here are some of the key findings:

• 14% of callers who stammer were hung up on
• 24% got stuck in voice response systems that didn’t give them enough time to complete the desired response or didn’t understand them when they stammered
• 32% found that, when they got to speak to a human, that human kept trying to guess what word they were trying to say rather than waiting for the to finish speaking
• 5% were laughed at for stammering 

The survey also gave us lots of stories of what went well and what didn’t, and we’ve been working with organisations to change the way they deal with silence of ‘bad lines’ at the start of phonecalls, as well as some of their technical procedures around voice response systems and customer record flagging, and offering written channels of communication as well as telephony.

As a Speech and Language Therapist by professional background I’m fairly confident that it’s not only people who stammer who are facing this sort of disadvantage when they go about their daily lives, contacting their banks, their insurers, trying to change the date of an appointment or book their car in for a service. I can easily imagine that people with voice disorders face similar challenges.

I’m interested in broadening out the survey beyond people who stammer, to find out whether people with other voice and speech differences and disabilities are receiving similar treatment from the businesses they interact with. This would give us even more evidence to push organisations to change and to actually adjust their ways of working to accommodate us all!

If you’d like to complete the survey or willing to share it with your networks, here’s the link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/5GNPMLJ

Kirsten Howells
Deputy CEO, Director of Services, STAMMA