How Have Consumers’ Responses to Poor Experiences Changed?

For many years, surveys have been the standard method for measuring customer experience. Businesses ask questions, customers respond, and metrics such as CSAT or NPS become the basis for many service improvement decisions. However, recent data shows that this model is gradually losing its representativeness.

According to the Qualtrics 2026 Consumer Experience Trends Report, consumers’ willingness to provide feedback has declined significantly in recent years. One of the most notable shifts is the growing tendency to remain silent after a poor experience.

Specifically, 30% of consumers now choose not to tell anyone about a bad experience, an increase of 9.2 percentage points compared to 2021. This is the highest level recorded since Qualtrics began tracking this behavior. At the same time, all forms of proactive feedback have declined:

• Providing direct feedback to the company: 29% (down 7.5 percentage points)

• Sharing with friends or family: 42% (down 6.4 percentage points)

• Posting on social media: 15% (down 4.7 percentage points)

• Leaving reviews on third-party platforms such as Google Maps or TripAdvisor: 19% (down 2.6 percentage points)

These figures point to a significant change in consumer behavior:
👉 customers are increasingly unwilling to invest time and effort in explaining a poor experience, even when that experience is serious enough to influence their spending decisions.

Importantly, a decline in feedback does not mean a decline in the impact of poor experiences. The report shows that 5 out of 10 negative experiences still lead customers to reduce or completely stop spending. However, in only 3 out of 10 cases do businesses receive direct feedback explaining the reason for this change.

The gap between churn behavior and feedback data is widening. When organizations rely primarily on surveys to “listen” to customers, many experience improvement decisions are based on an increasingly small and less representative dataset.

In other words, today’s challenge is not only about customer retention, but about maintaining the ability to accurately understand why customers are leaving. When customers choose silence, businesses may not lose them immediately, but they begin to lose visibility into the real friction points along the customer journey.

In this context, reassessing how organizations listen to and analyze customer signals is becoming a strategic requirement — not only for Customer Experience initiatives, but for business decision-making as a whole.