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 find out about bad interactions, or good ones either.
Those are the foremost 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 offer social media feedback. Whether experiences are good or bad, consumers are least more likely to post about them on social media, more than likely to inform friends and family (in the event that they tell anyone in any respect). We asked Isabelle Zdatny, head of thought leadership at Qualtrics’ XM Institute, for commentary.
“Consumers are staying silent about their experiences, whether or not they’re good or bad,” she said. “That’s an enormous problem for firms trying to know and calibrate experiences. This is a trend we’ve been asking about yearly because the study began in 2021 and it has dropped each 12 months. It has dropped seven points after a very good experience, eight points after a foul experience. The only thing that has increased is consumers saying they didn’t tell anyone in regards to the experience. When consumers do tell anyone, they’re more than likely to inform 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 number of survey fatigue happening. What’s in it for me to offer feedback to a corporation?”
Only a couple of quarter of consumers trust brands’ use of AI. Twenty-six percent of consumers trust brands to make use of AI responsibly — and that’s against a background of consumers becoming more conversant in AI.
Zdatny again: “The headline is, AI hype gives strategy 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 typical drop in how comfortable the typical 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 literally less comfortable using it to perform tasks.”
The full report is here (registration required). The foremost 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 only 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 can be, for a lot of us, a surprise. Of course it’s hard to disentangle disillusionment with brands from disillusionment with social media as a channel.
Dig deeper: What is customer experience and why does it matter?
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