Over Half of Consumers Now Ignore Brand Surveys, Quantum Metric Exec Warns

More than 50% of consumers stop responding to direct surveys and silently walk away from brands that ignore them, according to Mark Treschl, general manager of voice of customer at Quantum Metric and co-founder of OpinionLab.

Treschl laid out his case in a new episode of the Conversations with MarTech podcast series. His core argument: traditional voice-of-customer programs built on long-form surveys, endless feedback requests and Net Promoter Scores are failing both consumers and the brands that rely on them.

The stakes are direct. Every survey a customer abandons is a signal a brand never receives.

What does Treschl say is broken?

The episode identifies several structural failures in how companies listen:

• Survey fatigue: More than half of consumers have stopped answering direct survey requests and quietly defect from brands that ignore them.
• The "NPS lie": Treating Net Promoter Score as a business strategy or as a compensation plan pushes companies to manage the number rather than help the customer.
• Organizational silos: At the 09:44 mark of the episode, Treschl states plainly: "Brands have created silos."

For practitioners, the NPS critique cuts closest to the bone. When a score becomes a target tied to pay, teams optimize for the metric. The customer experience itself becomes secondary.

What replaces the survey?

Treschl proposes pairing session-based user behavior data with attitudinal data. The combination, he argues, produces predictive feedback rather than retrospective scores — insight about what a customer will do, not just what they said after the fact.

He also targets what he calls the "silent majority": the large middle curve of customers who never fill out a survey at all. AI and lookalike modeling, he says, can quantify that population instead of leaving brands to extrapolate from a shrinking, self-selected pool of respondents.

His analogy for the shift is the thermometer versus the thermostat. Legacy voice-of-customer programs are thermometers: they report the news after it has happened. A modern program acts as a thermostat — a real-time system that triggers action while the customer is still engaged.

What does this change for marketing teams?

The practical reorientation is from volume to quality. Treschl argues teams should stop chasing a higher volume of feedback and instead capture targeted, higher-quality insights. The outcome he points to is improved retention and lifetime value, not a bigger response dataset.

Culture also plays a role in whether any of this works. The episode examines, at the 18:54 mark, how much organizational culture determines whether feedback gets acted upon rather than merely collected.

The full episode also covers what the future of voice of customer looks like (11:00), the outcomes possible with a modern strategy (15:35), and what Treschl calls the biggest lie marketers tell themselves (20:46). It is available on Buzzsprout, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and Spotify.

For teams still anchored to NPS targets and quarterly survey blasts, the message is blunt: the customers who stopped answering are already gone.