Tom Lewis is the SVP of Consulting at TTEC Digital and leads the organization’s thought leadership around the intersection of AI and CX.
Urban Dictionary defines “ghosting” as when someone cuts off communication with friends or the person they’re dating without giving any notice.
In their Global Study: How Consumers Share Feedback, 2025, Qualtrics found that customer feedback has fallen to an all-time low. According to the survey, after a bad experience, only 32% of respondents sent feedback directly to the company—down 7.7% since 2021.
Customers are ghosting the brands they used to buy from. Rather than reaching out when they have a poor experience or responding to a survey, customers are saying nothing and going elsewhere.
So, if customers won’t directly tell brands what’s wrong, what can those brands do to remedy the situation? Well, much like when a friend or partner ghosts someone, there are always signs—you just need to know where to look.
In this article, I’ll share how—in an age of feedback burnout—brands can better understand their customers’ needs and pain points even when the signals are subtle.
What To Do When Surveys Don’t Work
Traditionally, brands have sought to understand their customers through voice-of-the-customer (VoC) programs. VoC is the process of gathering and analyzing feedback to understand customer needs and experiences so that the brand can react and evolve to better meet those needs. Traditionally, VoCs relied primarily on surveys and solicited feedback. But as today’s customers are bombarded with so many surveys and requests on their time, more and more they’re choosing to ignore this type of outreach.
That doesn’t mean brands should abandon VoC programs or stop trying to understand their customers. They just need to do a better job listening—and with data, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), they can do just that.
Contact centers receive unsolicited customer feedback every day. If there’s an issue or problem in the business, it’s coming through the contact center in the form of a phone call, email, text or chat.
These customer interactions are a treasure trove of data, which makes organizations data-rich. Unfortunately, without a way to synthesize and extract meaning from these interactions, they’re also insight-poor.
Sources of customer feedback like call transcripts, emails or chat streams are what’s known as unstructured data. Unlike structured data, which fits neatly into a spreadsheet, unstructured data has always been notoriously hard to work with. Now, with AI advances, that’s no longer the case.
An AI solution that’s making good use of unstructured data to drive deeper customer insights is conversation intelligence. With this innovation, brands can harmonize unstructured conversation data from disparate sources into a single data model. From there they can deploy generative AI to apply algorithms for topic modeling, sentiment analysis and more.
Cool, right? Sure, but it’s still just data. The next step is where the rubber meets the road: data visualization. Conversation intelligence serves up data in dashboards that allow users to explore topics, trends and sources of customer friction at a granular level.
Data visualization leads to insights. And those insights can answer important questions—like why your customers are ghosting you.
Turning Customer Insights Into Action
Here’s an example of what conversation insights might look like in action.
Let’s say you run a large restaurant chain. During the holidays, you typically see high gift card sales through your website. This year, however, gift card sales are way down. What’s happening? Is it the economy? Changing dining preferences? New competition?
Or is it an issue with your website that’s interfering with customers completing gift card transactions? If that’s the case, while many customers have simply abandoned the purchase, some of those customers have certainly called your helpline to resolve their purchasing issue. This is exactly the type of insight that conversation intelligence can surface—often before it becomes a serious problem.
The earlier you identify a problem that is easily fixable, the faster you can recoup the lost revenue and mitigate continued customer churn.
Your Customers Are Talking—Are You Listening?
Even if your customers aren’t responding to solicited feedback, they still expect you to know and value them. According to a Salesforce survey, 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.
Brands today can’t afford to be anything less than customer-obsessed. That means you need to listen even when you don’t think your customers are talking. It doesn’t mean you need to be a mind reader. By leveraging advances in AI and connecting data from customer interactions with the departments and roles that can act on that data, brands can do more than just understand why customers are ghosting them—they can prevent the ghosting altogether.
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