Experts of Experience - 4 Trends That Will Make or Break Brands in 2026

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

How are customer expectations evolving when people are talking less, trusting less, and switching brands faster than ever? In this episode, we break down the four major shifts reshaping customer experience in 2026 and why traditional listening tactics are failing right when companies need them most. Our guest is Isabelle Zdatny, Head of Thought Leadership at the Qualtrics XM Institute and co-creator of one of the largest global CX studies in the world. With data from 20,000 consumers across 14 countries, Isabelle reveals the surprising trends leaders cannot afford to overlook and why trust has become the real driver of customer behavior. Chapters 00:00:00 Meet Isabel Zdatny, Head of Thought Leadership at Qualtrics XM Institute 00:04:43 The Surprising State of Customer Experience Heading Into 2026 00:10:44 Why AI-Powered Customer Service Is Failing Customers 00:15:07 How to Use AI to Enhance Rather Than Replace Human Experience 00:19:41 The Silent Customer Crisis: Why Feedback Has Dropped to All-Time Lows 00:25:03 Conversational Surveys and Predictive Models: The Future of Customer Listening 00:34:55 Why Value Alone Won't Keep Customers Loyal in 2026 00:38:18 The Trust Equation: How Economic Uncertainty Changes Customer Behavior 00:42:51 The Personalization Paradox: Consumers Want It But Don't Trust It 00:54:10 What Will Surprise Us Most About 2026: Two Wildly Different Predictions

Nearly one in five consumers who used AI for customer support said that they received zero benefits from it, which was the highest failure rate of any AI application we looked at. Wow. This is particularly problematic because often customer service is the only time that customers know that they are engaging with AI. So it becomes a litmus test of whether brands can actually deliver on their AI promises. and they are failing that. It's pretty clear that a lot of companies are using AI customer service to deflect costs, which is great for them.

Efficiency metrics internally are up, but they're not actually resolving customer problems. It's the end of the year and we're heading into 2026, which means it's one of my favorite seasons. I'm getting the flood of end of your research, trend reports, all those juicy stats to tell us where our customers are actually. headed. And that's why I'm so excited for today's episode. I'm joined by Isabel Zanatney, the head of thought leadership at the Qualtricks XM Institute. Isabel and her team just released their brand new

26 experienced trends report. And it spotlights four major customer trends every business leader should have on their radar going into this new year. You're going to love her write downs. She makes the data feel really clear. Her energy is amazing. She gives some great actionable advice. And honestly, if you've these findings surprised me in the best of way, you're listening. You're listening to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lacey Pease. And if you enjoy this episode, hit that subscribe button, drop a comment below letting me know which trend or stats stood out to you the most. I guarantee some of these insights will surprise you, and some might even confirm the exact hunch you've been feeling with your customers all year long.

So without further ado, here's Isabelle Zadatney. Isabel, welcome to Experts of Experience. Thank you so much for having me. I'm belated to be here. I am so excited you're here. And thanks for joining me on a Friday. I know it's like the end of the week for the both of us. So like you made it happen. You're here. here. We're on Mike. We're on cam. It's a great note to end the week on. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Well, we're going to go through the Qualtricks report that you guys just released in the last, what was it, like, month ago about? I mean, time goes so fast. But yeah, about six weeks ago at the beginning of

October. So give me a rundown of this report because you guys have been doing it for a few years. It's designed to measure a few things around consumer experience. So what have you guys been tracking over the last four years and how has it kind of evolved and like what survey data are you guys really pulling from. This is the fifth year we've conducted this global consumer study. So we started in 2021. And this year, we surveyed just over 20,000 consumers from 14 different countries to really understand their experiences with and perceptions of those experiences with organizations across 18 different industries. So we have a whole host of questions in here about satisfaction and trust and likelihood to recommend. And then we dig into some of the deeper themes that we think are really

influencing customers' experiences today. So questions around AI and personalization and data usage, all of those top of mind trends. And have you been involved for the last five years in this report? Yes. So my old boss used to lead out and I would be supporting. And then since he left like two and a half, three years ago, I've been doing the last few. And what's been some of the like trends over time that you've been tracking that you've been most excited by? I would say the biggest one, which we might get into in more detail, is the continuous decline in customer feedback. We have found the percentage of customers who say that they send feedback to companies has gone down every single year. It's gone down about 7.5 percentage

points since 2021. And I think that's really relevant for a lot of the companies I'm talking about are talking to where they ask, you know, why are my response rates dropping? And it's like, this is a trend across the board that we're seeing, not just giving direct feedback, but actually things like sharing on social media or third party review sites, that's dropped like five percentage points over the last few years. Fewer people are even telling their friends and family about their experiences, which is interesting. And I think the only response that has increased over that time is, I did not tell anyone about this experience. So wow. Customers are just saying increasingly quiet about the experiences they're having with

companies. And that's been a real standout. Yeah, I want to dive so much deeper into that. Because I know that's going to be one of the trends that we talk about today. But there were four key trends. Do you mind just highlighting those four trends that you guys found in 2026? Is it worth setting the scene first of something really high-level big picture before we get into the specific? Absolutely. Let's do that. Big picture. As we head into 2026, this surprised me, honestly. We found that consumers are feeling good about their experiences. All four of the CX metrics that we track, so satisfaction, trust, likelihood to recommend, likelihood to repurchase, those all improved by at least three percentage points over the last year, which is particularly impressive given the challenging environment that we're all operating in. I can't believe that, to be honest. Like, if you didn't have the numbers to pull out, I would be like, there's no way.

There's no way that's true. So many people were like, are you sure? Like, check the numbers again. I do think in fairness that one of the things we've seen, I've been doing this before I worked at Qualtrix. I was at a small CX consulting firm called Temkin Group that was actually acquired by Qualtrix in 2019. And we've been asking a lot of these questions since, like, 2011. So able to track over quite a long time period. And one of the quirks, I would say, of doing these types of temperature checks every year is that often numbers seem to be a lot lower in election years in the states. So it could also be that 2024 was a particularly low year and 2025 is more of a return to average. But I was also shocked by the increases across the board because I don't know a more professional way to say this. But, like, those are not the vibes that seems like right now.

Absolutely. So, yeah. So that was, like, big picture. I mean, you look a little deeper, something that I actually thought was really surprising and interesting this year was how unevenly distributed those gains are, actually. So we found this part isn't surprising. But in industries where it's really easy to switch between brands, so sectors like fast food, retail, airlines. hotels. Those all saw much more substantial gains compared to industries with high barriers to switching, like utilities, health insurance government agencies. And to what was interesting this

year is we track what percentage of sales at risk organizations are putting. So revenue loss based on delivering bad experiences to customers. We found overall globally about three trillion of sales are at risk in 2026. Wow. But normally the way we calculate that number is we look at what percentage of bad experiences do you deliver? And then how do customers respond to that? So do they decrease or stop spending? And normally what happens is those hyper-competitive markets deliver fewer bad experiences, but customers are much more likely to decrease or stop spending because they have so many more options. Makes all sense.

Right. And in those harder to switch, more protected industries, they deliver more bad experiences. But because it's so hard to switch, they have a captive audience. Customers can't really punish them for it. This year,

those harder to switch, more protected industries, are putting a higher percentage of their sales at risk, 6.1% versus those hyper-competitive industries, 4%, that. And I think speaks to the increasingly transactional nature of customers' relationships with brands, which will be a theme, one of the kind of sub-themes, I think, weaving through the other

specific themes. So with all that kind of throat clearing and big scene setting, the four specific themes this year were AI-powered customer service is failing so far. Survey fatigue leaves businesses guessing about the causes of customer churn. Value won't be enough to secure customer loyalty as we head into 2026. And my personal favorite, if we're allowed to have personal favorites, consumers demand transparency over personalization tactics. Awesome. Well, thank you for that overview of like where we've been standing. I think it's really helpful context. So like trend one, if we want to dive there first, you said it's AI powered customer service is failing, right? which is interesting to hear because we've talked to so many people who have shared their like success stories with customer service.

So then when I like read your guys' report and was digging into it a little bit more, I was like, okay, what's the angle here, right? It's because we're talking to consumers. So from a business ROI standpoint, yes, we're seeing returns. We're seeing like less, you know, I'm spending less money on this, da, da, da, da. But the consumer is not necessarily receiving that same sort of impact. So could you walk us through that trend a little bit? Yeah, there's a really interesting paradox, I would say, happening here. So overall, consumer comfort with AI has actually rebounded from its low last year.

So we found that about 73% of consumers, so nearly three and four, have used AI for daily tasks, things like research and writing and language translation, a massive adoption increase. So these technologies are moving from a novelty to a habit for a huge percentage of the population. And something else, I'm just going to tell you all the stats that kind of surprised me. 50% of consumers now say that they believe AI will positively impact society, which is up nine percentage points since we last asked this question in 2024. So big picture, like consumers are moving past their initial skepticism. They're actively engaging with AI across multiple years.

use cases, the one blight on this otherwise rosy picture really is AI for customer service. So nearly one in five consumers who used AI for customer support said that they received zero benefits from it, which was the highest failure rate of any AI application we looked at. It was nearly four times worse than the average. when we ask consumers to score different AI applications on qualities, like convenience, time-saving, usefulness, right? Yeah. All the things that chatbots, these AI agents, are supposed to be excelling at.

That's the promise. Yeah. That's the promise. Organizations are like, this is what we're deploying them for. Customer support ranked the lowest of all of those applications. So, again, it's falling behind us. other AI applications on the very metrics it's supposed to excel at. And I think this is particularly problematic because often customer service is the only time that customers know that they are

engaging with AI when they're having an AI-mediated experience of the company, right? So it becomes a litmus test of whether brands can actually deliver on their AI promises. And they are failing that, I would say right now. And as a result, only 29% of consumers say that they trust organizations to deploy AI responsibly. So, you know, I think it's pretty clear that a lot of companies are using AI customer service to deflect costs, which is great for them, efficiency metrics internally are up, but they're not actually resolving customer problems. They're using it as that gatekeeper to keep people away from expensive human agents rather than a tool to help customers solve their problems. I think a really key point that you made in that was around this, like, the trust factor of AI tools, right?

If my one experience that I know to be AI is through customer service and it's not a good one or it slows me down or I cannot get a person on the phone when I know my specific thing needs to be addressed by a person. It does make you skeptical of any AI tool moving forward, right? So if you can't do this one thing, why would I trust you to be able to use AI to do all these other really cool applications in theory, but you can't even deliver on better customer service initially? So I think that's a really valid point. Or it makes it clear that you're delivering, you're using AI to help the business achieve its goals rather than help the customers achieve their goals, which again undercuts

trust in these new technologies. Which kind of piles into some of the trends. I know we're going to speak about around consumer trust, right? Like, if I can't trust you to do this one thing, then it's really going to lower value, like the value that a business can get from a customer over time. Exactly. Right. As we move to that more transactional environment, trust becomes even more important because

otherwise you don't have sticky interactions with your customers, right? If, you know, you're just, if they're just selecting you because of speed or convenience or you have the lower price, the second, you know, someone undercuts you by a few cents, the second a competitor comes along and is like, instead of three clicks to purchase this item, you can do it in two, those customers are going to be gone. And not only is the environment more transactional, but it's also, there's a lot more economic uncertainty and instability. And so customers are going to choose to interact with companies that they trust to have their interests at heart, right? If price increase happens, it's not because they're trying to boost their profits, but like genuinely because supply chain issues or something goes wrong that they will try to make it right. That's going to become a competitive differentiator. I think as we move even deeper into this environment of uncertainty. and complexity. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. With that, when you think about AI that enhances

human experience instead of just replaces it, like, what do you think about? Are there any, I don't know, case studies or stories you've heard of where this has done well so people can learn from that? One of my favorites recently was from one of our clients, which is a healthcare technology provider. And they used to have a claims process. This is a pretty common use case. But they You have a claims process that took about two days to complete. Customers often don't know the right way to fill out the forms, what's actually eligible. Then you need a claims processing agent on the other side to review it, go back to the customer with questions. So they used AI.

First of all, they used computer vision to help analyze customer receipts. So customers could just take a picture of their full receipt with some things that are eligible, some things that are not eligible. It was able to determine these items are. eligible for reimbursement and automatically fill out the form for customers. And then they also deployed an AI chatbot along with that where customers could ask questions and get answers very quickly. So the ones that I'm seeing working well are asking, what are the goals that customers are trying to achieve?

And what are the right tools that we can deploy to help them reach those goals more quickly and painlessly? And sometimes that's going to be AI. sometimes you're going to want human connection, you're going to want a human on the other side of it. Sometimes there's other tools that you should be deploying that are not AI. So rather than just like, oh, here's this shiny object, it's like, how do we help people do what they want to do better and more smoothly? I like that question reframe way more than how do I save money? How do I cut, you know, save things at the bottom line?

Instead of, instead of that, how can I actually improve my customer's experience? with these tools, or maybe that's not even the right tool to choose. There has definitely been shiny object syndrome with AI, where it's like, we can fix everything with AI. It's like, no, there's actually some great tools that have existed for a really long time or just human interaction that would be, you know, super fitting in this particular moment in this customer journey. And to just ignore that and try to replace everything with AI, I do feel like a lot of companies

have made that misstep, unfortunately. And I've been on the receiving end of that as a consumer, you know, trying to get a hold of a company. I think we all have had that experience this year. Yeah, absolutely. One of the other things I think companies are doing is they are using these AI tools to accelerate their existing ways of working. How can you do what you already do more quickly and more efficiently? So like, okay, we already do customer support. How do we do that faster and more cheaply? And that's great. I don't think they should be ignoring the efficiency use cases, but these technologies are so transformative that I think companies also need to be looking at what are we able to deliver

to customers now? How can we create and deliver value to customers in new ways that were never possible before? What is our unique brand able to deliver to customers at scale that we've never been able to do before. I think they're getting very spun up in these like efficiency metrics productivity gains and are really failing to imagine more interesting and differentiating ways of delivering better experiences to customers. Oh, that is such, such a good point. And the imagination piece, like actually taking time and saying like, if we didn't do anything at all, if I was going to build this business today from scratch, how would I want to deliver this rather than getting caught up in how we've been doing it for a decade or 50 years,

like can we just completely wipe that from our mind and think about what would I do next year for my customer if I was starting this business completely from scratch? That's exactly. And I mean, it's probably not only a little cliche now, but I'm pretty sure it's also apocryphal, but I always think of that old Henry Ford line. If I would have asked the people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. Yeah. So how are we not just doing those simple AI adoption use cases,

but also, like you're saying, if we started from scratch doing those blank slate exercises, how are we creating safe spaces for dangerous ideas and giving them different budgets and KPIs and timelines to go run and explore what are like radical innovations we could be doing with this AI, I suspect companies that are going to succeed and thrive in this new era are the ones that do that. Isabel, the second trend you highlighted is that customers aren't giving feedback anymore. already talked about this a little bit, but I want to dive even deeper. Give me all the juicy stats that you found in this report this year. The key finding here is that for every 10 poor

customer experiences, five results in spending cuts, while only three generate direct feedback from customers. So those companies that still rely solely on traditional surveys to understand customers' experiences, they are losing both their consumers and their revenue often without knowing why. And we talked a little bit before about some of the stats here about how dramatically feedback has declined across all channels from direct feedback to social sharing. But yeah, it hit an all-time low this year at 29% of consumers who share direct feedback with companies following a poor experience. You know, it is something that I think about with my own you know, life, like how I recommend products. I do not recommend things as much as I used to.

I mean, years ago, I would be like, oh my God, this thing blew my mind away. Like, you guys have to try this. I love it. I don't feel that way about many things anymore. If I have a great experience in the store or something that's super memorable, even like online, that might be something I share. But like a product itself, I'm not, I'm not sharing. I'm curious, like, are you having the same thing in your life and family? I think overall, another of those kind of through lines that we've seen doing the trends for so many years is that customer expectations are rising. So I think what used to blow us away a few years ago just becomes kind of baseline and

table stakes. So yeah, creating those standout experiences, I think is just a lot harder, wowing your jaded customer base is a lot harder. than it even was a few years ago. Yeah, for sure. And I think most of the experiences I do share are ones where like something maybe went wrong and the person fixed it. The company fixed it.

That interaction of like something went wrong with it immediately was resolved. It feels so rare now that that I feel compelled to share. Absolutely. And I think that goes back to like the trust point, right? We're almost surprised when companies demonstrate like reliability and dependability and making things right. like that integrity as a company, I do think that rather than bells and whistles and shiny features, that it is that type of like trust, integrity, benevolence that really strikes people and

differentiates companies today. Absolutely. So with surveys, why do you think customers are opting out of doing them? Is it just people like get so much spam now that they're not going to look at it in their email or what's causing that? I do think some of it, probably a large portion of it is survey fatigue combined with a why bother factor. When companies don't visibly act on feedback, which very few of them do, customers just stop participating, right? It's not worth their time to go scream and to avoid. We have a lot of other things on our plate that we could be working on. And I also think that this does reflect some of that, again, increasingly transactional nature of customer relationships where there's no point, again, taking your precious time to share

feedback with one company when you can just easily and quietly just go switch to one of their competitors. And I think there's a lot of bad survey practices out there. I will not name any names, but earlier today I did hear one who has 15 questions on a single survey. And so not only are customers getting a lot of feedback requests that are not seeing the benefit of it. And, but when they do take surveys, they're long, they're asking irrelevant questions, and they're just exhausted by the end of taking those surveys, and that trains them not to take future surveys. No, I mean, I feel that 100%.

Do you see any patterns in people who are still filling out the surveys, though? Like, of the three of ten that are filling these out? Are they people that are really, really happy or really upset, or is there some sort of trend there? That's a good question. We're not able to dig into that in this, like, granularity level. of granularity in this research. Generally speaking, working with a lot of companies, I do think you're getting the two extremes, especially people who are more upset and screaming into the

void might not get them a response, but it does feel cathartic. And then you might also get those types of standout experiences, especially like if an employee went above and beyond to solve an issue. But I think you're really seeing a hollowing out of the middle, which is going to be a vast majority of your consumers. And so you are getting quite unrepresentative feedback when customers are responding. Yeah. Oh, for sure. I mean, and I think about that in my own experience. Anytime I've left feedback recently, it's usually been because there's just something terrible. And it's usually not even because I think the business is going to do anything about it. It's because I want other customers to see that review to know, hey, look out for this.

Don't, you know, don't invest here. Yeah. So I know when we were chatting last time, you had a really cool way that people are, a few companies have been doing surveys and feedback differently with AI tools. I would love to hear you share more about that. I would say just overall right before getting into the details. The organizations that we're seeing do this well are really diversifying their listening portfolio. So combining the sparse survey feedback that they do receive with rich unsolicited data from sources like support conversations and that operational data and behavioral patterns, and then synthesizing all of those different signals into predictive early warning signal systems that can actually prevent problems

rather than just reactively documenting them. And one of my favorite examples of this recently comes from one of the large financial institutions that we work with. One of the things that they found is that on their relationship study, every year where they're looking at net promoter score was their core CX relationship metric. They only had an 8% response rate on that survey, which meant that historically, they've been blind to 92% of their customer base. What they did recently was they took that 8% and they used it to build this predictive model where they created rich profiles for the customers who did respond

to that survey. And this included not just their CX scores, but also behavioral and operational signals like call frequency, usage pattern, support interaction, demographic information. And then they used machine learning to find the patterns that correlated with different net promoter scores. And then once they had that model, they could then apply it to the other 92% of customers who never responded to the survey. So they generated a synthetic net promoter score for every single customer based on their behavioral and demographic patterns. And then they not only kind of came up with a synthetic way to track it, they actually used those scores to act on those predictions. So triggering proactive outreach to customers

that the models flagged as detractors, even though, again, those customers had never filled out a single survey. And what was the response like when they did this? Yeah, so far, so good. I don't have, this was pretty recent. So I don't have a whole ton of ROI metrics. But I think so far has been a really effective program. I think it's a really imaginative way to think about taking what you do have and making the most of it. Because you could look at that and say, oh, only 8% of people responded. What are we going to do about the 92? But to actually think, okay, what can we take from that data?

Translate it out. And it may not be entirely accurate, given that it's just a sample size. But we're going to try this out and see what we can get. There's another thing that I had heard recently about using a chatbot essentially to get survey feedback. instead of just sending out, you know, five questions and having someone answer it. It was like, I get to have a conversation almost. And then the questions are geared as the person responds. Is that something you guys are seeing as well?

Absolutely. Yeah. So this is exactly to your point of like, when you have fewer signals, how are you making the most out of the information that you do have? We offer conversational surveys. So I have seen a number of customers deploy these. My personal favorite example comes from Pfizer, which is a financial services technology company. And they deployed these conversational surveys on their attrition survey because they figured

it was low risk. These people are already leaving us. What's the worst that could happen, right? It's smart. It's so smart. Yeah. And so their head of VOC, she knew that on these surveys, there were always two complaints. People were leaving either because of cost or because of customer support.

In the past, they just ignored those two responses because they're not really actionable and would look kind of down further at the list of complaints. But when they started using conversational AI on their attrition surveys, they got this like completely different stories. So my favorite is within 24 hours, they deployed this. And a customer, you know, had an open-ended comment that was like terrible service. I keep getting transferred. And instead of just being like, oh, that's that's that's.

bad, let's go, you know, share that with the customer support department. The AI followed up and was like, oh, no, I'm so sorry. Tell us about a time you were transferred and like probed even deeper into that. I think it's set up to ask just two follow-up questions, but it comes up with them itself and they're very effective. That's great. And so based on this follow-up, they found that there was like this critical issue leading to turn that Pfizer had not been aware of, which is sometimes like the local government or the IRS would require a hold on clients' financial accounts as they were investigating an issue. But FISER isn't legally allowed to tell their customers that. And so customers would have funds withheld or frozen. They'd call into customer support.

And then they were very reasonably infuriated when they felt like they were being given the runaround or lied to or transferred to different departments. But that's not the service. agent's fault. They're actually following proper procedures, but unsurprisingly, customers experience this as terrible service, get very frustrated and leave the company. And so it looked like a service problem they could then identify is actually a communication and an expectation setting problem. And as soon as they recognize this, again, this was all within like 24 hours, FISER was able to change how they set expectations up front around those legally restricted processes so that customers at least understood, you know, why certain information can be shared

rather than just feeling like they were given the runaround. And also, interestingly, on these, we don't see a drop in response rates, which is crazy. Everyone thinks that there's going to be a drop in response rates. Yeah. But instead, customers feel like the company's actually listening to them rather than these cookie cutter questions and really trying to understand their issue. And so, yeah, they're actually willing to supply more information we found. And is this just chat?

Like, I just would text response to that. So it's within a survey, and it's like off the back of open-ended questions. So instead of, you know, you get a low MPS score and saying, like, tell us more about why you gave the score, it's able to ask much more targeted and specific questions based on their answers. But it's within the survey. That's so smart. That's amazing. And it would be interesting, too, to have that. I don't know if you guys have tried this yet for phones.

Like if I could do a phone survey where it's the same type of deal. And I can just, because then I really would speak my mind if I don't even have to type it. Yeah, exactly. I haven't seen that yet, but that's a great point. That would also be probably more cathartic. And it's faster, right, often for people to explain things. Yeah. Yeah.

We do see a rise in video feedback where customers can, like, show their screens and talk about the problem rather than, again, respond to these static generic surveys. So I don't think surveys are going away, but I do think surveys need to evolve as we move ahead. They're just not effective mechanisms anymore for getting a comprehensive understanding of customers' experiences. They're reactive. You have data lags. You have limited response rates. So they should be one tool in your toolkit rather than the whole of your customer listening program.

And the beauty of what AI can offer now, too, is we can change how we think about getting customer feedback. because we can take all this unstructured data, like sentiments, how the person's voice was, you know, the words that they used, how long they responded, all this stuff can then be digested by AI and, like, you can come up with more thorough conclusions. So we're definitely at a pivotal point where I think next year we're going to have a completely different way people are looking at how we get customer data and customer feedback. Yeah, it's so interesting. AI makes it so much cheaper and easier to access and combine vast data saturate, like that

data that kind of has always been produced as an output of transactional or operational systems. Like we can now capture that and combine it with customer sentiment. Exactly as you're saying, unstructured conversations from the call center or chat conversations to get really granular understanding at both an individual level and at that segment level. With the video feedback, is that people being like, hey, this is my problem that I ran into? And like, you guys can't solve it? Or is it literally someone just being like, here's my problems and speaking into the camera about all the things that they don't like. Yeah, it can be either. A few of the most common use cases are things like on digital. So being able to screen share and then talk over

if you've had a bad digital experience and like physically show this is the issue I'm running into has been huge. And then another one is for market research where you can capture people like almost like real-time observability labs of like, here are my thoughts and feelings as I'm going through this experience has also been a really effective use case for, again, getting a much more comprehensive view of customers' like perceptions and attitudes as they go through an experience. All right. This third trend, I feel like, is actually a pretty big one. It's around, you know, price sensitivity and value, but that not being quite as important as one might think in this economy as trust in which we've been talking about this whole time and how important trust is.

So tell me about how people are defining, a redefining what's important to them, like how consumers are redefining what's important to them when it comes to brands that they're loyal to. You asked at the beginning, what are our common side of questions? This was a new question set this year, which I love. This was like my favorite addition to the survey. And we found that, again, the trend here is value won't be enough to secure customer loyalty in 26. So given our current economic climate, it is unsurprising that when we ask consumers, why did you choose to do business with a company, value for money was the number one driver

of consumer choice, like 46% of people selected that. However, while value will get people in the door, we found that it's those high quality services that will keep them coming back again, over the long term. So 92% of consumers who choose companies based on their customer service say that they feel satisfied as opposed to just 87% for value, so notably higher. And then the trust gap between that was even bigger. So 89% of consumers who choose companies based on their customer service trusts that company versus just 83% when it comes to value. And then we also saw that a number of the negative drivers, so if customers say, I had no other options or it's too difficult to switch, their satisfaction scores are so much lower. They're

usually in the 60s. So those are customers that are just waiting for an easy alternative to show up. And I think as we head into 2026, why this really matters is that while price is clearly important. In tough economic times, a race to the bottom isn't sustainable. It's going to erode your margins. It's going to leave you vulnerable, again, when a competitor offers you any slightly better deal. And so instead, what we recommend organizations do is combine operational excellence. A lot of what we've already been talking about around how do you apply technology for those efficiency gains, right? Save some money there. And then that will allow you to compete on price, but also give you the wiggle room to deliver those high quality experiences

that ultimately we see end up creating lasting customer relationships, even as those business conditions continue to switch. I think all of us as consumers have had this experience now, too, of like getting something because it's cheaper and we just, we're all feeling very price sensitive right now. But then almost regretting it because, oh, I had a problem with it and I can't get a hold of your customer service. And so like 100% I think we've all been trained now to like not just think about what's the price of the product or service that I'm purchasing, but what's the longevity of that? You know, I think of classic examples like vacuums.

I feel like vacuum used to last forever. And now they just break like every six months. And so I'm like looking for the vacuum that will actually last as long as I need it to last. And that's just a small example of something that you have in your household. But when you're talking about like big enterprise purchases, like what we do for our business, whenever we buy, you know, something that's like a subscription service or something. I'm not so much looking at the price tag. Sure, it's something I consider.

But if I know that they're going to be responsive and helpful and their customer service is going to be great, I will spend an extra $100 a month if I need to to make sure that I've access to that. Absolutely. One of the other really interesting findings, I can just be behind the scenes. So as part of this survey, we also ask what we call our well-being index, which is made up of three elements. So customers, we ask customers, like, are you happy, are you healthy, and are you financially secure? One of the things we found is that customers who say that they're financially insecure give much lower CX scores across the board, like about seven percentage points lower than average for trust, satisfaction, likelihood to recommend, and likelihood to repurchase. So something that I think organizations need to be keeping their eye on.

as, again, we move into more economic uncertainty is how do those price pressures change customers' perceptions of their experiences? You know, it's going to be harder to hold on to those customers who are incredibly price sensitive if they're shopping around. Yeah. So if I'm thinking about this from a business perspective of like things are getting tighter, like I don't have a lot of money to spend on making this great experience and making sure a customer service is perfect and also trying to lower the cost of my product or service to be competitive. It is such a tough position to be in. So how are you thinking about that? What are you seeing businesses do who are successful with sort of balancing the fact that, yes, we've got to cut costs in some fronts, but there's

other things we're still going to be investing in? And really making the argument for that investment because I do see, like, it's hard to go to like the CFO and say, no, this is worthwhile for like the long term when in the short term, the budgets are tight. Yeah, and I think this is actually where the customer silence piece gets really dangerous in this environment. And frankly, in all environments, right? None of us are working with infinite resources. But when budgets are tight, you need to be able to identify what specific moments, what products, what interactions are driving the business outcome that your company cares about the most. And when you're missing those customer signals, right, that these perceptions

you can then say lead to these behaviors down the line, like renewal, churn, calling into the contact center, it becomes a lot harder to make those investment decisions because you're working from incomplete information. So I think companies need to get better at understanding what are those moments across customers' journeys that have the most outsized impact on people's perceptions and behaviors, and then by extension on the business outcomes that the company cares about the most. And then how are you prioritizing investment in those particular areas? So you're not just listening to the loudest customers. Maybe a lot of customers are complaining about a broken link, but actually, that doesn't drive their purchasing behaviors. So

as you're trying to prioritize, what should we be investing in, maybe that one goes further down the list as opposed to another area that fewer customers are complaining about, but actually affects those business outcomes that the company is looking for. So I think that to start, organizations need a much stronger sense of what is happening across people's experiences, and then how do those variables affect their downstream behaviors to allow them to prioritize their investments and make those trade-off decisions that are inevitably going to be required in climate like this. Oh, that's great.

That's great. That's really good advice. And I think looking at all the different pieces of the customer journey and really stack-wraking them, it's so helpful because it's really easy to be like, we need to make everything great. Yes. And if you go to a stakeholder, like everyone, thinks that their own hobby horse is the most important thing. For sure. Yeah. And so if you don't have regression analysis or you don't have customer validation to give you objective information

about where you need to focus to get the most bang for your buck, it's really hard to make those, again, objective trade-off decisions that you need to make when you are trying to maximize your investments. Absolutely. So I want to get to the trend for, the one that you said, that you are most excited about. So what exactly, as it's stated in the Qualtrick support, what is this trend around personalization? And then I have my own opinions on it. So I'm curious to see what you're excited about with it.

Yeah. So this is consumers demand transparency over personalization tactics. And I think what I find so interesting here is that for years, companies have just assumed that customers would gladly trade their privacy for personalization. And that is just not true. So what we found is that while demand for personalization is growing, so 64% of consumers today say that they want tailored experiences, only 39% of customers trust companies to use their data responsibly.

This is another one of those paradoxes that we've ever seen. Yes, and this is one the personalization and privacy paradox is called a paradox for a reason. We also asked, you know, do you think that the person? personalization benefits you receive are worth the privacy tradeoffs, and only 41% of consumers said that they were. And then this is the part that, again, I think because I live in the CX world really shocked me, when we ask customers about specific personalization methods, we saw like just remarkably low comfort levels across the board. So the highest is 30% of consumers say that they are comfortable with basic things, like companies remembering their purchase behavior

or seeing their website behavior, right? Like, things that I guess I take for granted, like, of course companies know what I purchased from before. And then unsurprisingly, right, the more invasive or opaque the method becomes, the less, less comfortable customers feel. So only 16% say that they're okay with companies listening to or watching them through their devices. Again, completely unsurprising. But the largest group was 32% who said that they are uncomfortable with every single method of personalization. So I think what... Wow. But then 64% want

personalization. But they want personalization, but they don't trust companies to do it responsibly. So I think the issue here is not data collection. Again, it's trust. You know, I see most companies today getting this personalization equation backwards. So they are stockpiling information about who their customers are, right? Like, their demographics and their purchasing behavior and browsing patterns, but they're missing out on what customers actually need in any given moment. So instead of just amassing more and more data, I think companies should instead to hear really be focusing on understanding their customers' current context and intent,

what journey are they on with you? Have they already called your contact center three times before? Is this a product that they purchased frequently? And then using that information to, again, help them achieve their goals more quickly and efficiently. Because I think customers at this point are recognizing that personalization is really just fancy sales tactics, right? It's clear what's in it for the company. They're getting more sales. They're pushing more product, but it's not necessarily clear what's in it for the customers. Which sort of ties back to what we're talking about with AI, right? I can see how your business is going to save money if you invest in this, but what do I get out of it, right? Social media has also taught us, like, if we get something for free on the

internet, we're the product and they're selling our data. So I think there's just very low trust across the board in that, except the place where we see trust is the highest is in Europe, where they have GDP laws and regulation about how consumer data can be used. Oh, that is interesting because you did say this report was across 14 different countries. So did you see that difference in the response with them? Okay. Yeah, Europeans are much more like, yeah, we trust them because legally they're being forced to do this. Like, okay, now I get it. Yeah.

I think there was a stat in that this trend as well around if a consumer trusted the company already, then they were way more okay with personalization. It's like, how do you get to that bridge? How do you bridge this gap? I don't trust most companies, but of the ones that I do, then I'm like, okay with personalization. It's very complicated to kind of figure out how we bridge this. Yeah. And exactly as you're saying, when customers say that they do trust a company with their personal data,

that bumps up all comfort levels with personalization methods about 10. 10 percentage point. So we found customers want transparency about what's collected. They want control over how their data is being used, and they want the ability to easily delete their data. And I would say, these are not complex demands. These are just the basics. And if companies don't do them, consumers are going to remain wary of sharing their personal data, even if it might genuinely lead to better experiences. And exactly like you're saying, this is going to have major downstream consequences because customers are not going to share their information for AI models. They're not going to try new experiences that the company is offering, right? When you

undermine the trust like this, it makes your life a lot harder down the line when you're trying to get customers to shift their behaviors in ways that are going to help your business. Yeah, I really feel like if we were to like summarize all these four trends into one, it's just this big, like how do we get our customers to trust us more? Like 2026 is the year of trust to customer trust. Let's get it back. We do at XM Institute, we do a year of every year. This year is like the year of connection, but we did year of trust last year. And I'm like, but this year is the year of trust. And next year is also the year of trust. Every year of trust. We have a lot of data showing that when customers say that they trust a company, they do all of these business positive.

of behaviors like recommending and repurchasing and forgiving the company if it makes a mistake and trying a new offering. So I completely agree it is foundational to everything else that we've been discussing. I don't know if you guys measured this in your report, but did you see any difference in company size? Because like when I think about a small business that I work with, if they're personalizing things for me, I feel like very receptive to it. I don't think it's weird at all because you have 20 people in your business. Like I anticipate that you would know who I am and my law needs cut this specific way. Oh, you have an upgrade for blah, blah, blah. Sure, I'm all about it. But then, of course, this like degrades as I get to a larger

company where I'm like, oh, you are recommending this thing. Now suddenly I'm super skeptical of you. Yeah. So was there any differences in business size that played a role in this? So we don't look at it. So for our global consumer study, because it is global, we don't ask at a brand level. We ask at an industry level. Like, have you interacted with a bank in the last, you know, 90 days. We have a U.S. consumer study where we do ask about specific brands. However, in order to get the sample size that we need, we only ask about the top, I think it's like 418 companies to ensure that we can get responses. So we haven't, but my intuition would completely align with what you're saying that the larger the company is, the less you inherently trust them

to take care of your needs and deploy AI responsibly and use your personal data responsibly, they start becoming more of kind of a faceless corporation. Yeah, yeah. And it's funny, the companies that stand out, at least for me, like I think of Costco. Like, it's a huge company. But they have such good brand trust. And I trust they're pretty much everything that they do. So it is interesting, the companies that do stand out that are still large organizations,

but somehow still give that like mom and pop enough vibe that I trust you to do these things. And I'll say, you know, Costco has been at the top of our, again, that U.S. consumer ranking for 15 years, not the very tippy top, but I would say like, you know, in the top 10 consistently. We see a lot of other brands that I think would surprise people versus, you know, the more like sexy brands like Apple or Tesla. The ones that we actually see at the top, are the ones that have very clear value propositions for customers and then deliver on them consistently every single time. So they're not promising super fancy, you know, bells and whistles, but they're like, here's what you can expect. And then we deliver on it in every single interaction regardless of which, you know, store you're in, regardless of which product you're using, whether you're getting tires from us or ordering a vacation, again, back to the trust. Like, we are going to reliably deliver on our brand promises.

Those are the companies we see perform really well in our kind of brand tracking study. So from this report, we've gone through four, you know, really comprehensive trends. Some things, I think, are probably surprising to anyone listening. Some things are not surprising. They all align with, like, what we've experienced as consumers or seen in our own business. businesses. But from this, if you wanted our CX leaders listening today to like walk away with a few core actions to take going into the next year, what would those be? The one that immediately comes to mind is I would say pick, you know, one to three of your high priority

customer journeys and really try to understand them for a few reasons. Number one, I think that's going to give you a sense of which part of those journeys you can automate with AI or use AI to help people do more efficiently, which parts of that journey are really important for maintaining human connection and differentiating yourself. That's also going to help you instrument your listening strategy. People tend to get very overwhelmed given the entire world of customer signals and market signals out there of figuring out how do we move from a few surveys to this more holistic listening program. And if you look across the journey, you can find what are those key moments that matter that we really need to make sure we're capturing feedback

or behavioral signals, what's some existing operational or behavioral data that already exists with other teams that we can bring in to help understand this journey. And so I think that's a good place to start. And it's going to give you an outside in perspective of how customers are perceiving those core experiences rather than just an inside out. Here's how our company thinks customers are working through it. So I think that that will answer a lot of the trends that we're seeing. All right. I got one last fun question for you.

What do you think is going to surprise us the most if we have this conversation in a year about 2026? I could go two ways. I could say that we would either be surprised at how little problems. got made. And my argument for that would be, you know, everyone's talking about agentic now. But if you actually look inside companies, many of their processes are undocumented. They're messy. They're made up of workarounds and handoffs. And so when you add AI and AI agents on top of that mess, you're not fixing it. You are amplifying the dysfunction. And so I could see that

rolling out, you know, effective enterprise-wide AI systems is actually a lot harder than people think and we're not going to move as fast as we think we will. On the one hand, I could see it being like, wow, we've really not made as much progress as I would have anticipated. On the other hand, I can see us being like, holy cow, we came five years in a single year. Yep. Yep. And I think a lot of that is going to depend on how these capabilities advanced to some degree, right? Like Gemini 3 just came out and has moved the ball forward across a number of different fronts. But I also think it's going to be organizations figuring out some of those internal structures and change management issues that have been holding them up so far.

So we found in our research that a lot of organizations are stuck in what I'd call pilot purgatory, the state of kind of fragmented experimentation that really fails to scale and capture AI's full potential. MIT Nanda just released a report that 90% of generative AI initiatives, enterprise-wide gen AI initiatives, have failed to scale beyond pilots and reach full production with P&L impact despite tens of billion dollars of investment. So I think companies have really been bumping up against that barrier recently. And if companies, by and large, made a few changes. I think they could rapidly accelerate and start seeing some really incredible wins. There's a few large organizations I've seen do some really incredible things with AI,

and we could start seeing that on a broader scale. I think it's going to be both, truthfully, I think half the companies are maybe even more, maybe 75% are going to be in the first bucket that you described of like, why are we itching along? Because they're going to start to feel these pain points. I mean, the pain points are becoming obvious as we look inside how these companies are rolling on Enterprise AI. but unfortunately when you're inside the company, it's really hard to let you get stuck in bureaucracy and things don't move. But there's going to be the like 10% of companies over here that do just accelerate way beyond what was possibly imagined. And there's going to be this divide. So I actually

think your prediction is completely on point. Well, and one of the things I've just been doing this tour of executive dinners on the topic of AI. And one of the things that struck me is just the unbelievable range. You have some like large complex companies. companies that are truly transforming their business. And you have others who are like, my executives still don't know what AI stands for. So there's such a range. And I would say the ones that are just like accelerating their success are the ones that invested a few years ago in things like data warehouse and data hygiene. And so they're working from a much richer, cleaner, more easily accessible and queerier. It's not a word. But data.

data set that can, again, accelerate their efforts very quickly. The ones I'm seeing really lagging behind have messy silo data. And that is just watch an impediment for AI models. And what's unfortunate about that is it's not the sexy thing, right? Like the sexy thing is, let's do AI now. Let's do a gentic AI, right? But like, oh, sorry, no, you need to do the thing that, you know, some of these companies are doing five years ago and clean up your data and spend all the time in investment it's going to take to do that. Luckily, it's a little bit faster than it was a couple years ago because of AI, right? Yep. Are helping with some of those. So you could leapfrog, right, where companies kind of had to do this the hard manual way a few years

ago. But yeah, you're right. It is not the sexy glorified work. No, no. If I'm the CEO of the company, I'm like, wait, we're spending all this money and time on data. Yeah. And not AI. That's the hard part. They're investing in the like flashy, sexy use cases that are giving these like high productivity and efficiency gains that look really good to the board. They're not investing in the actual foundational work like cleaning their data that doesn't have clear ROI at the moment, but is so important over the long run. So I think that's also a hurdle is they're measuring the things that are less important rather than just focusing on the, on those foundational pillars. 100%. I totally agree. Well, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for running us through

the entire report and sharing your, you know, trends and takeaways, especially on a late afternoon. It was fun. I really appreciate the time. Yeah. And if any of our listeners are interested in they actually want to go read this report themselves, where should they go? Yep. If you look at Qualtricks, I mean, at this point, you can just Google Consumer Experience Trends, 2026 Qualtricks, and that will get you there. Awesome. We'll also drop the link in the show notes. People have easy access to download it. But, yeah, that's great.

And Isabel, where can people find you? If they're like, I want to stay, you know, in connection with this woman who has so many good insights. Absolutely. Well, one of the good things about having an unpronounceable last name is that I'm very easy to find online. So feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Send me a note, Isabel Zadatney. so Z-D-A-T-N-Y, hopefully I'm easy to track down. And I love these topics. I love talking to the people who are actually in the trenches doing this work. So always happy to connect and talk more about

these ideas. Awesome. Well, thank you so much of joining us. Of course. This is great. I really appreciate it.