For brands and retailers looking for customer feedback, it may be time to ditch the traditional survey and rethink how they garner sentiment from shoppers.

According to the 2026 Customer Voice Benchmark report from Quantum Metric, an agentic digital analytics company, customers don’t trust the channels designed to hear them. “Fewer than 1 in 5 consumers see surveys as an effective way to get feedback heard, and a third say they don’t feel heard by digital brands at all,” the report’s authors said.

Researchers at the company said the data revealed what it calls the “customer listening gap.” This is where there is a disconnect between “the effort brands put into collecting feedback and whether customers believe that feedback will lead to meaningful action.”

The poll showed that shoppers have not given a brand direct feedback in the last six months, “even as 45 percent of digital brands say they’ve increased investment in feedback channels over the last year, and 56 percent of consumers have already left a brand that continued to ignore the feedback they did provide.” Ouch.

Mark Treschl, general manager of voice of customer at Quantum Metric and co-founder of OpinionLab, said consumers haven’t stopped having opinions. “They’ve stopped believing brands will do anything with them. Somewhere along the way we made customers do the work to improve how we understand them, and created a gap between listening and actually taking action.”

Treschl said retailers and brands don’t win that trust back with a better survey. “You win it back by having the right process in place to share that feedback across the organization, act on it, and build the best experience for your customers.”

The survey showed that 56 percent of those polled have walked away from a brand that continued to ignore their feedback, while 31 percent said they would “skip a brand entirely if an AI assistant flagged known site or app issues before their visit.”

Polling digital teams at retailers and brands found that 1 in 4 digital leaders “have daily access to recent customer feedback, and 52 percent have no formal process for acting on the feedback they do collect,” the report’s authors said, adding that 51 percent of digital employees polled said they have stayed silent about a broken internal tool because they didn’t think it would change anything. And 45 percent of them said broken tools get in the way of helping customers at least weekly.

But there is a solution.

“With survey response rates declining and less than half of leaders having a formal process for acting on the feedback they do collect, closing the gap will require moving past treating customer listening as a siloed, survey-first program,” the report’s authors said. “That means combining qualitative feedback with the behavioral data teams already have, and creating opportunities to expand access to VoC [voice of customer] insights across the enterprise.”

Timing also matters. The report noted that as shoppers use AI to discover brands, the cost of a slow response, or none at all, to feedback can force customers away.

To address these issues, Quantum Metric is launching Quantum Metric Voice of Customer (VoC), a solution the company said that connects customer feedback directly to behavioral session data. “Built natively into the Quantum Metric platform, VoC gives every enterprise team a way to combine direct and indirect customer feedback with observed behavior,” the company said in a statement. “This allows digital teams to understand what customers need, quantify how many customers are affected, and act on it, all from within the same platform.”

Quantum Metric said it will offer an in-depth look at the solution during a virtual event to be held on Sept. 16.