The state of today’s consumer? Upset by negative experiences — but staying silent about them too.
Brands today are challenged by heightened consumer expectations and declining consumer feedback. In other words, negative experiences sharply impact customer loyalty, but — despite the ready availability of feedback channels — consumers aren’t letting brands know about bad interactions, or good ones either.
Those are the main takeaways from the “2025 Consumer Trends Report” from experience management platform Qualtrics, based on insights from nearly 24,000 consumers in 23 countries.
Consumers least likely to give social media feedback. Whether experiences are good or bad, consumers are least likely to post about them on social media, most likely to tell friends and family (if they tell anyone at all). We asked Isabelle Zdatny, head of thought leadership at Qualtrics’ XM Institute, for commentary.
“Consumers are staying silent about their experiences, whether they’re good or bad,” she said. “That’s a huge problem for companies trying to understand and calibrate experiences. This is a trend we’ve been asking about every year since the study began in 2021 and it has dropped every single year. It has dropped seven points after a good experience, eight points after a bad experience. The only thing that has increased is consumers saying they didn’t tell anyone about the experience. When consumers do tell anyone, they’re most likely to tell their friends and family. Only about 20% post something about it on social media; that’s dropped significantly.”
Zdatny thinks consumers really can’t be bothered. “If you’ think’re like, I’m never going to interact with this company again, you’re not going to take your precious time to go write out a rant or provide them with feeback. It’s reflective of a general erosion of trust. There’s a lot of survey fatigue going on. What’s in it for me to give feedback to an organization?”
Only about a quarter of consumers trust brands’ use of AI. Twenty-six percent of consumers trust brands to use AI responsibly — and that’s against a background of consumers becoming more familiar with AI.
Zdatny again: “The headline is, ‘AI hype gives way to AI skepticism.’ We asked how comfortable consumers were performing activities using AI — like booking a plane ticket, getting medical advice, checking the status of an order — and the average drop in how comfortable the average consumer is, is 11 percentage points year on year. Even though AI has been around longer and consumers have presumably used it more, they are actually less comfortable using it to perform tasks.”
The full report is here (registration required). The main data points are here.
Why we care. Two things jump out about this report. First, it’s a healthy sample size. Second, unlike many reports, it’s not just a booster for the sponsor’s business. After all, one thing central to Qualtrics’ offering has been survey-based assessment of experience quality. What it does reflect is an interest in facing facts about declining feedback and loyalty as a basis for doing something about it.
Seeing consumers turn their back on social media ranting will be, for many of us, a surprise. Of course it’s hard to disentangle disillusionment with brands from disillusionment with social media as a channel.
The post Declining customer feedback and loyalty, growing AI skepticism appeared first on MarTech.
About the author
Kim Davis is currently editor at large at MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for almost three decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Shortly thereafter he joined Third Door Media as Editorial Director at MarTech.
Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.
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