A Qualtrics survey released today – the 2025 Global Consumer Trends Report – found that consumers are less likely than ever to share feedback about both good and bad experiences. Overall, since Qualtrics began tracking these trends in 2021, consumers are 7 percentage points less likely to say something about a good experience, and 8 percentage points less likely to say anything after a bad experience.
Consumers Turn to the Silent Treatment
As illustrated in the following chart, the Qualtrics research found that after either a good or bad experience with a company, consumers’ most common response (45%) was to tell family or friends about it – down 4.9% since 2021. Thirty-two percent of consumers share feedback directly with a company, down 7.7% since 2021. And 24% of consumers are likely to say nothing about the experience – up 6.3% since 2021. Note that the question Qualtrics asked in the survey pertained to any experience with a company, not just a voice/chat/email interaction with personnel in a contact center.
“Our findings show that, after a poor experience, 21% of consumers who still choose to provide feedback are picking up the phone to share their thoughts, an increase of 4 percentage point change from 2021, indicating they're not afraid to reach out to contact centers,” commented Isabelle Zdatny, customer loyalty expert at Qualtrics. “However, survey fatigue is real, and constant requests for feedback, without visible results, make consumers hesitant. They want to see improvement and not feel that their input leads only to penalties or grief for agents.”
Zdatny further suggested that this increasing fatigue around taking surveys or providing feedback, perhaps through reviews in Google Maps or other semi-social or social networks, may be linked to a general increase in businesses asking their customers to provide feedback. This unwillingness leaves “businesses with little to work with in their efforts to meet consumer expectations,” Zdatny commented. “Leaders can still gain an understanding of their customers, but it will require a more sophisticated listening program to make up for the lack of direct feedback.”
The Cold Shoulder
Robin Gareiss, CEO & Principal Analyst with Metrigy, discussed related findings during her presentation at Enterprise Connect AI 2024. In some of her recent research (illustrated below), Gareiss found that 44.4% of consumer respondents simply stop doing business with a company after, on average, 2.4 bad experiences. This is down from 3.3 in June 2023, suggesting that consumers have gotten less tolerant of poor customer experiences.
“These bad experiences that consumers have happen to every company. No one's immune,” Gareiss said. “Many technologies, including AI, can help identify the ‘at risk’ customers and then reach out to them. You could also use AI to figure out who are the people who are willing to talk to us. Maybe those are the customers you invite to a focus group to help you improve your customer service.”
Improving CX
In its report, Qualtrics recommends using operational and behavioral data, predictive analytics, use reviews, social data, calls, email, etc., all of which can be used to more accurately understand customers' behaviors. For example, Qualtrics highlights natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis capabilities enable businesses to ingest unstructured data shared conversationally on various platforms like forums, websites, social media, chats, or calls identify the topic, sentiment, emotion, intensity, level of empathy and effort, reason for contact, and intent.
These data should then be combined with data from other systems around the organization, including operational data (e.g., sales, finance, and HR data) and experience data from sources like surveys, market research, and digital channels. And, Qualtrics says that these insights should also automatically integrate with the business applications (e.g., Slack, Jira, Teams, etc.) so that different teams can better understand what customers are saying and thus incorporate those insights into their workflows.
Metrigy’s research highlighted proactive outreach to improve business-to-customer communications. Some of the use cases are relatively simple and do not necessarily require AI (e.g., reminders, shipping notifications). “We see businesses using AI to identify groups of customers who are likely interested in a new product based on their buying history, demographic, etc.,” Gareiss said. “AI is also really good at identifying customers who might be leaving.”
That's where businesses need AI, automation and people to work together not only to figure out how to increase revenue per customer, but perhaps even retain customers who may leave. Gareiss suggested that in the latter case, perhaps a phone call from someone in an authority position who can say, ‘We've noticed you haven't been using our service lately. We don't want to lose you as a customer. Is there something we can do to keep you’ would be enough to prevent that customer from leaving. “That's a very high value use of an agent’s time or even a supervisor's time,” Gareiss said.