What if your customers are staying silent after a bad experience – or even a good one for that matter? If you’re waiting for feedback to drive improvement, the silence might already be costing you more than you think.
Today we’re exploring the future of customer feedback with Isabelle Zdatny, Head of Thought Leadership at the XM Institute at Qualtrics. We’ll dive into the findings from Qualtrics’ 2025 Consumer Trends Report, the challenges of the “feedback recession,” and the role technology could play in shaping the future of customer insights.
About Isabelle Zdatny
As Head of Thought Leadership with Qualtrics XM Institute, Isabelle helps Experience Management (XM) professionals make sense of the complex, evolving XM landscape so they can do their jobs with more confidence and success. She produces industry-leading content on XM trends and best practices, develops and delivers training, advises organizations on the design and execution of their CX and EX programs, and speaks on key XM topics and trends.
Resources
Qualtrics: https://www.qualtrics.com
Qualtrics 2025 Global Consumer Trends Report: https://www.qualtrics.com/ebooks-guides/customer-experience-trends/
XM Institute: https://www.xminstitute.com/
Wix Studio is the ultimate web platform for creative, fast-paced teams at agencies and enterprises—with smart design tools, flexible dev capabilities, full-stack business solutions, multi-site management, advanced AI and fully managed infrastructure. https://www.wix.com/studio
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom:
What if your customers are staying silent after a bad experience, or even a good one for that matter? If you’re waiting for feedback to drive improvement, the silence might already be costing you more than you think. Today, we’re exploring the future of customer feedback with Isabelle Zdatny, Head of Thought Leadership at the XM Institute at Qualtrics. We’re going to dive into the findings from Qualtrics 2025 Consumer Trends Report, the challenges of the feedback recession, and the role technology could play in shaping the future of customer insights. Isabel, welcome to the show.
Isabelle Zdatny: Hi, Greg. Delighted to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, looking forward to talking about these topics with you. Why don’t we start with you giving a little intro of yourself, a little background on what you do at Qualtrics.
Isabelle Zdatny: I’m head of thought leadership here at Qualtrics XM Institute. And XM Institute is a small but mighty team inside Qualtrics that operates almost like a little think tank. So we are entirely dedicated to building the category of experience management, customer experience, employee experience, brand experience. And we really focus on helping XM professionals, whether they’re improving customer experiences or patient or employee or citizen, everyone feel like they have the insights and the advice and the practices that they need to build a successful, sustainable program inside their organization. And I have been in this space since about 2013, where I started at a small boutique consulting firm called Temkin Group that was actually acquired in 2018 by Qualtrics. So that is the foundation of XM Institute.
Greg Kihlstrom: Wonderful, great. Well, yeah, let’s dive in here. And I want to start first by talking about this concept called the feedback recession. And I’ll need your help defining this as well. But just this idea that there’s a decline in customer feedback. And this definitely ties in with the Qualtrics 2025 Consumer Trends Report that I mentioned. So, you know, that report highlights, as I said, a significant decline in both positive and negative customer feedback. What do you think is driving this feedback recession? And, you know, why is it important for businesses to pay attention to these trends?
Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah, it’s so important. So let me give you just a few numbers around this trend that we’re seeing. So this was one of the five major trends that we found this year. And frankly, the one I feel like I’ve been talking about the most with companies and CX professionals. And what we found was that consumer feedback had fallen to a new low. So again, we found that consumers are increasingly staying silent about their experiences, both good and bad. And that’s really leaving organizations without the information that they need to understand customers’ needs and address their rising expectations, which was another trend we found this year, around their experiences with organizations. So since we started this study in 2021, the percentage of consumers who say they told anyone about their experience has declined every single year. So it fell to a new low this year. Only a third of customers now send feedback directly to a company, which is an eight percentage point drop over the last four years. And interestingly, one of the things we found is that they’re not just sharing less with companies, they are sharing less just period. So fewer consumers today are posting about their experiences on public channels, right? That the organization could theoretically scrape for that unsolicited, unstructured feedback. So places like social media platforms or online review sites. We also found that people are telling their friends and family about their experiences at a lower rate than they were a few years ago. So since we started, the only option that has included was, I did not tell anyone about this experience. And the percentage of consumers who don’t tell anyone is about double for the oldest age group, those 55 and older, compared to younger consumers. So really interesting, definitely. A lot less information on experiences out there.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely… Definitely interesting to hear that. And you know, there’s there’s a cost to this, right? I mean, you know, businesses kind of thrive on on that, that feedback and information, you know, to your point earlier, whether it’s good or it’s bad, I mean, you know, good things, you know, keep doing more of the same bad things, you know, what can we do to improve? How does this impact a business’s ability to improve the customer experience?
Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah, I mean, I think, right, as we just said, A lot of organizations we see today are still relying on that traditional survey-based approach to customer listening. Those insights are really important for helping to design and deliver positive experiences. And while I don’t think that surveys or direct feedback is going away entirely, they’re going to continue to remain a useful source of consumer perceptions and attitudes, just generally speaking, right, in addition to these falling response rates, things like surveys do suffer from a whole lot of other issues, like they have very limited scopes, we get data lags, and that makes them insufficient tools by themselves for providing organizations with the insights that they need to really understand their consumer needs and address their expectations make those emotional connections with their customers. So if you aren’t understanding how your customers are thinking and feeling about your experiences because they are not providing you with that feedback, it’s going to make it really hard to design those types of engaging experiences that drive lasting customer loyalty and build trust with your customer base over the long run, which is going to have some serious business impacts.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I mean, essentially, worst case, you’re kind of guessing, right? And not completely, but if you have a low percentage, you’re not meaningfully accounting for a big segment of the audiences. What do you see as some of the reasons that people aren’t sharing this? Why are we in the feedback recession?
Isabelle Zdatny: So if I had to hazard a guess, I suspect there’s something of a why bother factor at play. If you think about it, providing feedback is a pretty substantial investment of time and effort on the part of the customer. And it implies I care enough about you to want you to get better. So it implies this more lasting, mutually beneficial relationship. And I think consumers today just feel like often brands aren’t even acknowledging receipt of this feedback, let alone following up with those consumers, let them know how they are listening, how they’re taking action based on this information. So that’s one factor, right? Of like, why would I take the time to do this? If you’re not going to make any changes based on my insights, And I think, you know, there’s also an ease of switching between brands where if I have a bad experience with one brand, the cost of just kind of quietly switching to another one is pretty low these days. And so we’re seeing more transactional relationships rather than those longer term relationships that would encourage people to provide, take their precious time to provide that feedback. I also think Frankly, probably there’s a lot of survey fatigue going on. I don’t know about you. I know I get bombarded with a lot of long, irrelevant surveys, which again, if they’re not going to have a clear impact, I think a lot of us are just tuning out those feedback requests at this point.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. I mean, definitely. I can definitely speak for myself. I think the worst is when you get one when you’ve had a bad experience and it’s not really the right time to do, you know, so there, I think there’s, and I want to talk a little bit more about this in a second, too, is just like, how do we do this in a more intelligent way? But yeah, I do think there’s Best intentions, I would assume from brands of wanting to get that feedback, because again, you know, if we’re in a feedback recession and they’re getting less feedback, so, you know, what do you naturally do? OK, let’s send more surveys so we get more information, maybe. But let’s maybe, you know, this I think this is a good segue to talk about. Well, OK, let’s assume that even if things don’t decline, things stay as they are as far as you know, it already is kind of declined in the direct feedback that the consumers are giving. How do companies adjust the way that they look for feedback that maybe looks beyond some of these these direct feedback mechanisms?
Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, right, even though there is this feedback recession happening, If you think about it, organizations actually have vastly more insight into customers’ experiences today than they’ve really ever had before thanks to just this explosion of available data. Almost every single action someone takes with an organization is going to generate a data point. Often those are behavioral or operational data points about what happened rather than you think about feedback or experience data is about why something happened, how someone felt about it. But if organizations are able to capture all those pieces of data, right, from transactional interactions and web interactions of click paths through a website, and then they’re able to analyze those alongside the feedback that they’re collecting, they can start filling in some of those feedback gaps. So, for example, we’ll see companies be able to say things like, customers who own this type of product and call into the contact center more than once are likely to feel extremely dissatisfied. We don’t need to collect feedback on that necessarily. We don’t need to throw up our hands and say, we have no idea how this person felt because they didn’t complete a survey. you can make an educated guess and say, actually, you know, based on all these data points we have for this person, as well as similar people in their segment, we know that they’re likely feeling this way. And we can just go ahead and proactively reach out to them, close the loop and mend that relationship. And then there’s also, of course, opportunities around harnessing unstructured data types. So open text, like online reviews or social media posts, videos, right, like TikTok, product unboxing, audio. And so I think if I’m remembering correctly, Qualtrics has data that 80 to 90% of all customer experience data today comes in these unstructured formats, which, you know, we have a lot of powerful new AI tools that can process these massive data sets, which is making it increasingly easy and inexpensive for organizations to access this type of data at scale. So here we’re really looking at expanding our customer listening portfolios, looking at how can we include behavioral data and operational data and unstructured data and unsolicited data. And when we take all of that together, despite the declining rates of customer feedback, we can still develop a pretty comprehensive view of people’s experiences.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, because I mean, to your point, it’s they may be directly giving feedback less frequently, but they’re giving feedback with their action. You know, this kind of goes back to leading and lagging indicators, you know, for those less familiar, you know, the leading indicators would be, you know, somebody clicks on the website. And so we know they’re back for the 10th time, you know, this week or whatever, and lagging would be the survey result, right? So, so like, companies have they have all of this data to your to your other point, they have unstructured data beyond even, you know, the things I just mentioned. So, so that in other words, the problem, they may not have some of the data that they would like to have, you know, so they may not have as many survey results as they would like to have, but they have no shortage of data. What do they do to make the most of all of this stuff that they kind of, you know, leading lagging, structured, unstructured, you know, what can they do to make the most out of it?
Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing here is being full about what data you’re bringing together. Right. As I just said, there is a lot of operational data. There’s a lot of unstructured, unsolicited data out there. And so before organizations can effectively harness all these different data types and bring them together, to create this kind of holistic understanding. They’re going to need to take the time to do things like clean up their data sets, right? Make sure that they’re all speaking to one another and invest in the underlying technological infrastructure that’s going to allow these types of connections and integrations at scale. I will say that is a place we are seeing a lot of companies struggle with right now, but there’s a few strategies we can talk about that are going to help help companies get off to a better start on expanding their listing portfolios and integrating those different types of data into their existing experience data.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. Well, and so, yeah, maybe, maybe let’s, let’s talk about that plus the, you know, you, you had mentioned AI driven insights as well. So, you know, that, that ability, I mean, you know, AI, there’s a lot to talk about it in lots of different ways, but I’m most excited about it from the insights and, and that perspective, plus, you know, how it might be used to personalize and stuff too, but kind of to follow on to your, your last point there, you know, how should businesses kind of take these different types of sources and, you know, combine them together and, and in some meaningful ways and strategies.
Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah, I mean, my first piece of advice is often to just start small, right? Don’t try to integrate everything all at once. Find naturally adjacent data sets. So like if you’re trying to improve people’s experiences, you know, in a location, maybe looking at point of sale data or foot traffic. So finding like what data does it make the most sense to bring in? And then perhaps even more importantly, find your friends, right? Who are the other departments or teams who are understand the value of what you’re trying to do by improving experiences and are willing to partner with you to share their data to implement those interventions once you’ve identified here’s a pain point, here’s a problem, let’s go ahead and fix it. And just focus there, right? You don’t have to work with everyone all at once. Starting small is going to give you an opportunity to test things out, to build up a business case, and then hopefully capitalize on those early wins to start growing your momentum and expanding into other teams and data types. The other piece of advice I often give organizations is to look at journeys. Use a tool like a journey map for whichever is most broken or most important journey for your organization. Use that as a blueprint to help you plan out which types of data do you want to incorporate from which different channels, where there are opportunities to pull in some operational data or maybe some unsolicited data from online reviews. you know, one of the big ones I would always recommend is rather than asking customers for feedback all the time about every experience, which is feeding into the survey fatigue, maybe you get a little bit more targeted and you just send surveys during those, you know, moments that matter most along those customer journeys, those episodes that are going to have the most outsized impact on a customer’s perceptions and behaviors about their experiences. And so being a lot more thoughtful about how you’re instrumenting your listening strategy to make sure you’re collecting insights at those points that are most important for, I would say, fueling your most important business decisions and activities. And then again, starting there, where are the most important impactful spots to collect this data, and then just growing as you can.
Greg Kihlstrom: I want to actually go back to one thing that you said, which not a lot of people have brought up on this show, to be honest, but the find your friends kind of thing, because I’ve lived this firsthand in my work in the Enterprise, is you know, often, you know, let’s say you’re working with like a CRM or a CX team, you know, the the marketing team has a lot of information that some of those leading indicators and some other things that they’re using it, they’re using it maybe for different reasons, but they’ve got it. And, you know, let’s, let’s, let’s have some conversations and, and collaborate, especially when you’re talking about the other thing, you know, the looking at the journey, everybody is part of that that journey. And maybe some teams are a little more focused on some pieces of the journey than others. But no, I love that you brought that up, because I think it’s so overlooked. And, you know, we kind of get so in our silos, right? That it’s hard to think. Yeah.
Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah, it doesn’t sound like very official business advice or just like find your friends, but like push on open doors. I’ll say too, as we kind of bridge into AI things, I think as we go forward, something not a lot of organizations have done, but to your point of there are different sources of customer insights in these different business silos. Investing and building a single source of truth about your customer’s journey, ideally built around an individual person so you can see, oh, they clicked on this marketing campaign and they visited the website this time and they provided this feedback. And having those data sets and visibility at an individual level is going to help you track people’s experiences over time. It’s going to help you build up those segments that are going to allow you to drive a better personalization down the line. And then you can apply AI models to those individual data sets. And it’s going to give you much more kind of predictive and actionable information about how you can improve those people’s experiences.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, I love it. And so just to kind of wrap up here, it might be something that you’ve even already shared, but if you were to give some advice to companies that want to stay ahead here, keeping in mind all of the things, the feedback recession, some of the other things that we’ve talked about, what would you say to them? how to stay ahead in this evolving landscape of CX and feedback collection and kind of all the above.
Isabelle Zdatny: Yeah, so I guess in addition to things I’ve already talked about, two additional ones here would be one to just try things out, right? Like don’t be scared of experimentation and pilot programs and you know, you have a hypothesis, if you’re an expertise in this area, try something, see if it works. And then again, start small, grow from there. I would also say another one of the key themes in this year’s Consumer Trends Report was the importance of trust. And so we found, for example, that consumers who trusted organizations felt much more comfortable with them using their personal information. And that could be things like their financial information, their purchase history, their social media posts. If they trusted them more, they felt more comfortable with the organization using that data to tailor their experiences. And I also suspect that if they trust you more, again, they feel more like this is a long-term relationship. You’re going to take action based on the feedback provided. that you’re going to get more feedback and they’re going to be feel more comfortable providing you with personal information. So I would say experiment and also focus on building consumer trust. That’s going to make a lot of these other pieces a lot easier down the line.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, that’s great. Well, one last question for you. I’d like to ask everybody here. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Isabelle Zdatny: Man, this is the hardest question. I would say for me, I do my best to just embrace curiosity and exploration at all times. I am constantly seeking new sources of information. I love reading about different perspectives, especially if they’re different from my own. I have a morning ritual where I read my coffee and I have my set of, you know, articles and news houses. that I check out every morning. I love VentureBeat for all things AI. And I think that allows me to hopefully keep my finger on the pulse of the rapidly changing business environment that we’re in and stay on top of, sometimes ahead of, the key trends and themes that we’re seeing that are important to our audience. So, just constantly kind of having that continuous learning mindset, I would say.
