2026 Customer Voice Benchmark
Why the customer listening gap is digital's growing business problem.
New research from Quantum Metric reveals a growing disconnect between brand investments in customer understanding and how heard customers feel.
Findings based on a survey of 1,500 U.S. and UK consumers, a survey of 750 digital leaders, and aggregated, anonymized behavioral data from the Quantum Metric platform.
Skip the scroll. Just ask.
Get instant answers to your biggest questions on the customer listening gap and what it means for your team.
Key takeaways.
Despite brand investment, customers don’t give feedback.
45%
of digital brands invested more in feedback channels.
Half
of consumers haven’t given feedback in six months.
Digital teams struggle to move from listening to action.
1 in 4
have daily access to recent customer feedback.
52%
have no process for acting on customer feedback.
Unheard customers impact retention and revenue.
56%
have left a brand that ignored their feedback.
31%
would skip a brand AI flagged as having issues.
Employees are going quiet too.
51%
have stayed silent about a broken tool.
45%
say it impacts their ability to help customers.
Introduction
Brands have never had more ways to listen to customers: surveys, chatbots, reviews, personalization, real-time alerts the moment something breaks. Yet, most customers still don’t feel heard and many are now opting out of providing feedback.
The issue? A listening gap: where digital brands take in customer feedback, but consumers never see action or a response that shows they were heard. In a time where digital competition has been enhanced by search, social media and AI, that gap can mean the difference in digital teams meeting core site KPIs and having to explain why they lost customers to a competitor.
This report examines consumer sentiment around digital feedback channels, whether current listening tools build real loyalty, what is causing the listening gap within digital enterprises, and what happens when employees, customers of their own company’s tools, hit the same wall.
Section 1
What does real listening look like today?
So, why is customer listening so critical to digital business today? Consumer habits are constantly changing, and many times shifts in behavior can go unseen. This starts to build a gap in understanding between what customers want and what brands assume they want. Take the mobile experience, for example:
- Mobile makes up 47% of all digital consumer conversions, putting desktop in the continued lead.
- Similarly, native app makes up just 46% of mobile conversions
It’s no surprise then that the majority of digital leaders still consider desktop the most critical for customer journeys.
However, when you incorporate customer feedback you find:
- 1 in 3 connect primarily on mobile and today 40% of consumers would only interact with brands via mobile app, if they had to choose one channel.
- If you break that out by generation, you see 55% of Gen Z and 59% of Millennials would only interact on mobile apps.
The takeaway: Customer feedback is critical for digital decisions and likely why 45% of digital teams have made bigger investments in the last year to expand and improve those channels.
But, half of consumers have not provided direct feedback to a brand in the last 6 months. That’s a major gap in context, especially when frustration and friction is up 77% on average YoY (Aug. 2025-Aug. 2026), while error rates are trending down 23% YoY.
Talk about mixed signals.
The reason consumers then stay quiet is simple: they don’t think it matters.
- 1 in 3 consumers don’t feel heard by digital brands at all.
- 37% believe ChatGPT understands their feedback better than the brand itself, with 53% of Gen Z and Millennial consumers agreeing.
- <20% see surveys as an effective way to get feedback heard.
What does it all mean?
- Brands need to listen across every channel, integrating qualitative feedback with behavioral data for the greatest customer understanding.
- But, traditional listening practices don’t work when consumers won’t even participate. It’s time to rethink how brands engage and support their customers.
Section 2
So what is causing the listening gap?
A big contributor to the listening gap is the need to be heard and the belief that unless they speak to a human, brands aren’t really listening.
When consumers do reach out, they want a person, not a form with 1 in 3 choosing to contact support teams directly over filling out a feedback survey. The majority (50%) say this is the most effective way to be heard.
A major contributor to the listening gap is just how long it takes for digital leaders to actually see customer feedback.
- Just 1 in 4 digital team members have daily access to customer feedback.
- 35% have weekly access.
- 38% receive feedback monthly or less.
The biggest barrier is action: 50% also want visible proof their issue was fixed in order to continue trusting the brand.
According to digital leaders that’s the hardest part:
- 52% have no formal process for acting on feedback. 24% have no designated owner for it.
- 52% say 25% or less of the feedback they collect ever leads to a visible change.
- 31% are focused on sentiment/satisfaction scores to define customer success.
What does it all mean?
- Real listening isn’t another channel: it’s closing the loop between what’s collected and what visibly changes.
- That loop is broken on both ends: consumers don’t believe feedback matters, and most leaders don’t have a process that proves them wrong.
Section 3
What’s the business impact of customer listening?
The right customer listening strategy means happy customers and a happier business.
Take customer retention and loyalty:
- 56% of consumers left a brand that continued to ignore or not act on their feedback.
- The average consumer gives brands 2-3 strikes before they move on.
- Half of consumers who have reported issues have had to reach out more than once on the same issue.
Consumers want to be heard, and when they aren’t, they’ll leave. The rise of AI is making that easier than ever to do. Our AI Experience Benchmark showed that half of consumers will use AI to easily find new brands, leaving digital teams today little room for error. Added to that, new findings show 31% of consumers would skip a brand entirely if an AI flagged known site issues before their visit. And AI-referred traffic isn’t the only concern. Agents will only increase the impact AI has on brand choice.
Today, 46% of consumers would trust an AI agent to complete a purchase on their behalf, up from 20% in the 2025 Peak Benchmark report.
Across industries that trust varies based on what consumers see as high risk or high value opportunities. Consumer-facing agents are just one side of this shift. On the brand side, agentic AI like Felix is what lets digital teams understand and act on these changes as fast as they happen.
The price of not listening to customers could also impact revenue.
While we saw that frustration rates are up, abandoned cart rates are primarily down YoY and engaged session time is down 11% .
For the most part, this trend extends across industries with FSI seeing the biggest abandonment drop at 34% YoY, while Healthcare saw the steepest decline in engaged time at 19% YoY. Travel saw a slight uptick in engaged time of 4% YoY, but a steep decline in abandonment rate at 21% YoY.
This shows it’s not always a conversion that might be lost. In this case, higher frustration is costing brands the upsell.
Platform data also shows that as cart values rise in the face of rising prices, frustration rates go with them with average order values climbing 17% in early 2026 and frustration rates up 77%.
Survey data further proves that consumers want to spend if the experience is right:
- 1 in 3 consumers are more likely to leave over unheard feedback than a price increase
- 46% of consumers say proactively fixing issues and a consistent experience is what shows a brand supports them. More than personalization.
What does it all mean?
- Listening only builds loyalty when it’s tied to action and goes beyond the survey to be an organization-wide focus.
- Brands that close the loop keep the relationship. Brands that don’t may still get the sale, they're quietly losing what comes after it.
Section 4
What about feedback on the employee app experience?
Employees also serve as a customer of their experience as they work through internal tools to do their job. United Airlines saw this play out directly: once behavioral insight was available, requests came in from internal teams the program never expected to reach.
And their issues around offering feedback are very similar:
- 51% have stayed silent about a broken tool because they didn’t think it would change anything.
- 33% are comfortable giving feedback but don’t believe it leads to real change.
- 25% have no formal way to report friction on internal tools
Breaking out digital teams by industry, we see that retail (27%) and Healthcare (32%) are the least likely to have a formal way to report friction. While travel is most likely to have a formal way to report friction on internal tools.
The cost brands pay is in productivity, security, and accuracy.
- 50% of employees who hit a broken tool built their own (often unapproved) workaround.
- 45% say broken tools get in the way of helping customers at least weekly.
Broken out by industry, we see that broken tools impact telco the most with 64% noting it impacts customers weekly, followed by travel (59%).
The data shows that consumers are not the only ones feeling unheard and this especially impacts those on the front lines of customer experience. Today, 38% say corporate employees get more support with their tools than frontline teams do. Closing that gap starts with visibility into how frontline teams actually use their tools day to day. See how Quantum Metric helps teams do that.
What does it all mean?
- Employees are often the most critical touchpoint in a customer’s experience.
- Friction left unresolved on one side of the counter tends to show up on the other.
The bottom line.
Digital experiences have evolved fast. The way brands listen hasn’t caught up. Silos. Unprompted surveys. Weeks-long analysis. It doesn’t work.
Closing the gap means rethinking Voice of Customer solutions to focus on customer listening and understanding, across every single channel.
Quantum Metric is redefining the next generation of Voice of Customer.
See how leading digital teams are applying customer listening to understand intent faster, prioritize the issues that matter most, and make more confident decisions.
Frequently asked questions about customer listening.
What is the customer listening gap?
The customer listening gap is the disconnect between the feedback brands collect and the visible action customers experience. It occurs when companies invest in surveys, support channels and listening tools but lack the processes, ownership or timely insights needed to respond effectively.
Why do customers feel unheard by brands?
Customers feel unheard when their feedback does not lead to a response or noticeable improvement. Half of consumers want visible proof that an issue was fixed, yet 52% of digital teams say only a quarter or less of the feedback they collect results in a visible change.
How does customer feedback affect retention and revenue?
Customer feedback helps brands identify and resolve friction that could otherwise damage loyalty, retention and revenue. More than half of consumers have left a brand that repeatedly ignored their feedback, while one in three are more likely to leave over feeling unheard than because of a price increase.
How can brands turn customer feedback into action?
Brands can turn feedback into action by combining qualitative feedback with behavioral data, making recent insights available to digital teams and assigning clear ownership for responding. Teams should also prioritize high-impact issues, act quickly and show customers what changed as a result.
What is the difference between customer listening and Voice of Customer?
Voice of Customer refers to the methods and programs brands use to collect and analyze customer needs, expectations and feedback. Customer listening is the ongoing practice of understanding what customers say and do across channels, then using those insights to make visible improvements.