Consumer Trust and Loyalty: Navigating the 2025 Landscape

The 2025 Consumer Trends Report shows declining loyalty, rising privacy concerns, and a shift to trust over convenience; businesses must adapt to stay competitive.

Today’s fickle consumers are sensitive to privacy concerns and less inclined to offer feedback than they previously were, according to the 2025 Consumer Trends Report from Qualtrics. This will set up a tightrope walk for companies in 2025 as they seek to meet expectations. The annual report draws on insights from nearly 24,000 consumers in 23 countries worldwide.

The five consumer experience trends for 2025 are: 

• Heightened expectations fuel a decline in loyalty: Despite fewer bad experiences, consumers are more likely to pull back on spending after a negative interaction.
• Feedback falls to a new low: Consumers are increasingly staying silent about their experiences, whether good or bad. 
• AI hype gives way to skepticism: Only 26% of consumers trust organizations to use AI responsibly. 
• Today’s consumers want privacy and personalization: Consumers want a tailored experience, yet they are uncomfortable with companies using unsolicited data to personalize their interactions.  
• Consumers are clear – go back to basics: Trust is highly correlated with loyalty, so the best way for organizations to keep customers is to do what they say they will do. 

Heightened expectations fuel a decline in loyalty

“As companies selling discretionary goods and services up their game to win over customers, consumers are less willing to let poor experiences from more necessary services slide,” said Isabelle Zdatny, customer loyalty expert at Qualtrics. “The bar has been raised – consumers know what is possible and are ready and willing to look for alternatives if companies don’t keep up.” 

Rising consumer expectations make poor experiences more costly. Compared to last year, people are less likely to share with a company that they had a bad experience and more likely to cut their spending after a recent negative interaction. 

Consumer response to poor experiences

Customers cite the following causes for a bad experience: 

• Service delivery issues (selected in 46% of bad experiences)
• Communication problems (45%)
• Employee interactions (39%)
• Pricing concerns (37%)
• Product quality/failure (35%)
• Post-purchase support (21%) 

Industries offering critical services, such as public utilities, banks, and hospitals, are more likely to leave consumers with a negative impression than more discretionary industries, such as airlines, hotels, and fast-food restaurants.

However, perhaps due to the essential nature of their services or the lack of alternative businesses, consumers are less likely to cut spending after a negative interaction with “must-have” industries than they are with “nice-to-have” industries. 

Consumers are less likely than ever to share feedback 

People are increasingly likely to stay silent about both good and bad experiences. Since 2021, consumers are 7 percentage points less likely to say something about a good experience, and 8 percentage points less likely to say anything after a bad experience. 

Whether they had an exceptionally good or bad experience, the most common response from consumers was to tell family or friends about it. Less than a third of consumers share feedback directly with a company and are least likely to post something on social media. 

Consumer response after a very good experience

Consumer response after a very bad experience

“In a world full of surveys constantly asking for feedback, people are increasingly less willing to answer them, leaving businesses with little to work with in their efforts to meet consumer expectations. Leaders can still gain an understanding of their customers, but it will require a more sophisticated listening program to make up for the lack of direct feedback.”

Also Read: How Predictive AI is Transforming the Retail Industry

AI hype gives way to skepticism

Only a quarter (26%) of consumers trust organizations to use AI responsibly. Consumers are also increasingly concerned about the lack of a human agent to connect with when companies use AI to automate customer interactions; more than half (51%) of consumers identified this as a concern, up two percentage points from a year earlier.

“Companies are more excited than consumers are about using AI for customer interactions at this point,” said Zdatny. “They will have some work to do to persuade their customers that AI benefits both parties.” 

When asked about using AI to achieve a specific goal, nearly half (46%) say they would be comfortable using it in specific use cases.

Consumer comfort using AI for specific tasks

Today’s consumers want both privacy and personalization

Consumers want to feel catered to; almost two-thirds (64%) prefer to buy from companies that tailor experiences to their needs. However, they are uncomfortable sharing the information that would easily enable such customization—just 27% of consumers are comfortable with organizations using unsolicited data for personalization, and only a third trust the companies they’ve shared personal information with to use it responsibly. 

As Zdatny explains, “Companies are in a tough spot. Consumers want personalized experiences but give less feedback than ever and don’t want to share their data. Businesses must find a way to collect the necessary information to meet consumer expectations without overstepping and turning them away instead.”

When consumers trust companies with their personal information, they are much more comfortable with their data being used to tailor their experiences. 

Consumer comfort with companies using information for personalized experiences

Also Read: How Predictive AI is Transforming the Retail Industry

Consumers are clear – go back to basics

What consumers care about most is being able to trust what a business tells them. Setting accurate expectations is more valuable to consumers than speed or convenience.

With loyalty harder to come by, it will be even more important in 2025 for organizations to prove they are reliable. Innovation and new products and services must not come at a cost to the customer trust organizations have already earned. Why? Trust is highly correlated with consumers’ likelihood to become repeat buyers of a company and recommend it to others, meaning businesses are at risk of losing both existing and new customers by failing to maintain it. 

Consumer priorities when interacting with organizations

“Following through on their basic commitments carries the most weight with customers. New initiatives rolling out are outside customers’ comfort zones, so having the basics in place and upholding them is essential. Customers are more fickle than ever, and it’s dangerous to assume that existing customers will stay loyal without intentionally trying to keep them. ”