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Navigating Consumer Trends With CRM & AI Technology

Explore the latest consumer trends and how CRM and AI tools can help you stay competitive.

Keeping up with consumer trends is crucial for businesses to maintain a competitive edge. In the “2025 Global Consumer Trends Report” from Qualtrics XM Institute,1 five key consumer trends that will shape the market in 2025 are highlighted, showing the increasing challenges in meeting heightened expectations, building trust, and balancing privacy with personalization. Qualtrics surveyed nearly 24,000 people across 23 countries for this global consumer study about recent experiences with organizations in 20 different industries. The study shows that consumer loyalty is becoming harder to win and easier to lose.

This article explores how leveraging customer relationship management (CRM) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools from industry leaders like Microsoft and Salesforce can provide the necessary insights and capabilities to help organizations navigate these trends effectively and build trust with consumers in the coming years.

Heightened Expectations & Diminished Loyalty

The first trend in the report reveals that despite improvements in experience quality, consumers are likely to stop spending with an organization after a bad experience. This trend puts $3.8 trillion in sales at risk in 2025, up from previous years.2 This was calculated by Qualtrics using study data, World Bank data, and by measuring the frequency of bad experiences, spending changes after a bad experience, and translating the percentages into currency. The calculation also includes $811 billion in stopped spending and $2.18 trillion in reduced spending. Organizations need to prioritize improving poor experiences to help build customer loyalty.

Here are ways to leverage CRM and AI technology to help address this trend:

  • Use CRM and AI tools to track customer engagement, provide predictive analytics, and identify and mitigate issues before they lead to customer churn.
  • CRM tools also can help personalize customer engagements and journeys across multiple channels to meet heightened customer expectations.

Back to Basics: Trust & Communication

The second trend highlights the importance of trust and clear communication in building customer loyalty. Trust is highly correlated with repeat purchases and recommendations.

Understanding the significance of consumer trust is crucial for organizations, as it directly impacts customer loyalty and satisfaction. Trust is crucial for all organizations, though it may manifest differently across industries. No organization is immune to the consequences of broken trust, which can affect feeling comfortable with AI and sharing personal data. It’s important to operationalize trust within your organization, linking it to revenue outcomes like renewal rates or average order value. Trustworthiness should be demonstrated through explicit actions in every decision, communication, and interaction, and through implicit cues like professional web design, clean stores, and well-trained employees. Building trust involves considering both what you do and how you do it.

Here is how CRM and AI technology can help:

  • CRM tools can help you operationalize trust by tracking revenue outcomes like renewal rates or average order value.
  • CRM and AI features can also help unify customer data to provide a 360-degree view, enabling clear and consistent communication, and predictive analytics.

Decline in Traditional Consumer Feedback

The third trend in the study mentions that consumers are providing less feedback, making it harder for organizations to understand and improve poor experiences. Sometimes, organizations lack the needed information to address rising expectations.

Despite the importance of trust and going back to basics, consumer feedback has fallen to a new low. Consumers are increasingly staying silent about their experiences, leaving organizations without the necessary information to understand consumer needs and address rising expectations. Since 2021, the percentage of consumers providing feedback has declined each year, with less than a third now sending feedback directly to companies. Consumers also share less on public channels and with friends and family. The only option that has increased is not telling anyone.

The decline in feedback may be due to a “why bother” factor, as providing feedback requires time and effort. Consumers today often feel it’s not worth it, as some organizations fail to acknowledge receipt of feedback or follow up with actions. This erosion of consumer trust and the ease of switching between brands, combined with survey fatigue from long, irrelevant surveys, contributes to a decline in feedback.

CRM and AI-powered solutions can help you:

  • Gather feedback efficiently with CRM tools and then use AI to analyze the data.
  • Create personalized customer journeys and engage with customers across various channels. Send surveys and feedback forms at different touchpoints in a customer journey, helping you gather valuable insights directly from your customers.
  • Deliver dynamic, personalized experiences in real time. By analyzing customer interactions and feedback, you can tailor your marketing efforts to address specific pain points and help improve customer satisfaction.

Balancing AI Hype & Skepticism

The fourth trend focuses on AI skepticism. While organizations advance toward an AI-powered future, consumers are becoming more cautious. There is widespread concern about responsible AI use and its impact on the quality of their experiences. Starting last year, respondents were asked about their comfort level with performing various activities using AI, such as checking order status or seeking medical advice. On average, the percentage of consumers comfortable with using AI for these tasks dropped by 11 percentage points year over year. Despite having more time to familiarize themselves with the technology, consumers today feel less comfortable using AI than they did a year ago.

However, when asked about using AI for specific organizational tasks, almost 50% of consumers still feel comfortable. In contrast, only about a quarter of consumers trust organizations to use AI responsibly. This indicates a significant gap between consumers’ perceptions of AI in general and its application for specific tasks. Organizations are likely to have more success by focusing on how AI can help consumers achieve their goals, such as checking order status or getting medical advice, rather than just promoting AI for its own sake.

In addition, consumers’ concerns about AI usage are evolving. Compared to last year, they are less worried about AI impacting the quality of their interactions with organizations and more concerned about the ability to connect with a human. More than half of consumers cite this as a top concern. To successfully integrate AI into customer experiences, organizations need to balance efficiency with the human touch, using AI to enhance rather than replace genuine human connections.

A key point here is about focusing on the use of AI in areas that will have the most impact. This involves identifying what customers are trying to achieve and finding opportunities to help them reach their goals more smoothly and efficiently. Journey maps are highlighted as a great tool to assist in this process.

How organizations can leverage CRM to balance AI hype and skepticism:

  • Enhance transparency by clearly communicating how AI is used to improve customer experiences.
  • Demonstrate AI’s benefits, such as faster service and personalized experiences, to help alleviate consumer skepticism.

Privacy & Personalization Paradox

Consumers desire both privacy and personalization, creating a challenge for organizations. The fifth trend highlights this paradox. While 64% of consumers prefer to buy from companies that tailor their experiences to their specific needs, 53% are highly concerned about the privacy of their personal information, and only 33% trust companies to use their data responsibly. One surprising finding is that only 27% of customers feel comfortable with organizations using various types of unsolicited data, such as demographic information, web behavior, contact center conversations, and social media posts, to personalize their experiences. Even for seemingly harmless data like purchase history, only 45% of consumers are comfortable with its use for personalization.

Consumers feel uneasy about not having explicit control over their personal information, worrying about data being shared with third parties, using their data without consent, or contributing to profiles they don’t fully understand. This presents a significant challenge for organizations in 2025: delivering tailored interactions that earn lasting loyalty while building trust through ethical and transparent data practices.

How CRM and AI tools can help address this paradox:

  • CRM system settings allow for advanced data security and user permissions. When your organization manages and secures personal data within a secure CRM system, this helps your organization follow privacy regulations.
  • Modern CRM systems provide data privacy through robust security measures while enabling personalized marketing, helping you boost experiences with trusted, secure, and ethical AI.

The Bottom Line

According to Qualtrics, bad experiences come with a growing cost.3 The “2025 Global Consumer Trends Report” highlights the critical consumer trends that will shape the market in the coming year, emphasizing the need for organizations to adapt and innovate. By leveraging CRM and AI tools from Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, organizations can effectively navigate these trends and strengthen customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Business Technology Services at Forvis Mazars has certified partnerships with Microsoft and Salesforce. Our experienced technology consultants provide CRM and enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform analysis, design, implementation, upgrade, training, and support services. We help organizations define and execute their digital transformation journeys. As your organization moves forward, our professionals can help you embrace technology to stay competitive and thrive in an evolving consumer landscape. Connect with us today to discuss how to enhance your CRM strategy.

  • 1 “2025 Global Consumer Trends Report,” qualtrics.com.
  • 2“$3.8 Trillion of Global Sales are at Risk Due to Bad Customer Experiences in 2025,” xminstitute.com, October 15, 2024.
  • 3“$3.8 Trillion of Global Sales are at Risk Due to Bad Customer Experiences in 2025,” xminstitute.com, October 15, 2024.

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