Report preview: The 2025 reality of using customer feedback

When was the last time you stared at a pile of support tickets or reviews and thought, “There’s truth in here, but I don’t have the time or resources to find it.” Last week? Yesterday? 

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We hope it gives you comfort to know you’re not alone. This spring, Unwrap partnered with Gatepoint Research to ask senior product leaders how they actually work with qualitative feedback across tech, finance, retail, and hospitality. The goal wasn’t to write another “state of…”, it was to surface what’s real for senior leaders now and connect the dots to how Unwrap provides real solutions. 

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Here’s a sneak peek at what the data showed: 

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Good intentions are high. Execution…not so much.

Leaders overwhelmingly say qualitative feedback matters, with most calling it strategic to the roadmap. But here’s the rub: a sizable chunk of respondents also told us they could be doing more with it. 

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That gap between belief and behavior shows up in backlogs full of untagged feedback or support tickets that never translate into decisions. It’s not that teams don’t care; it’s that the last mile—from identifying concrete patterns to roadmap prioritization—is a struggle to complete.

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The 2% reality

Only a very small slice of teams report fully automated feedback analysis, just 2%. Most are stitching together exports, homegrown dashboards, and hand-tagging processes that eat up time and introduce inconsistency. 

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If you’ve felt like you’re constantly “almost” caught up, that’s the pattern we heard: progress, but not quite; signal, but found too late.

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Efficiency is the exception, when it should be the rule

When we asked leaders how efficiently they can spot trends in unstructured feedback, only a tiny cohort said “very efficient” (7%). 

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The majority? Two-thirds said “it depends,” which could mean by team, queue, and week. That inconsistency is the enemy of confident roadmap planning; it’s also why smart teams are shifting from sporadic customer feedback audits to continuous, automated listening.

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What the most customer-obsessed teams are doing differently

Based on the survey responses, a clear picture emerged of how high-performing orgs can use customer feedback a decisive tool:

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• Unify the sources. Support tickets, surveys, reviews, calls, bring them all into a centralized platform.
• Detect continuously. Don’t wait for quarterly slide decks to stay in the know. Get alerted to emerging themes as they’re cropping up.
• Quantify impact. Volume + sentiment + segment/customer value turns feedback entries into clear paths for action.
• Make it shareable. Centralized views for product, support, and leadership keep everyone working from the same customer truths.
• Wire it to delivery. Link prioritized insights into your planning tools so tracking action isn’t a separate project.

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The operating shift that can happen is moving from “we try to listen” to “we ship based on what we learn.”

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Where Unwrap fits in

Unwrap turns qualitative customer feedback into quantified signals you can defend across your organization. It brings all your feedback together, auto-clusters themes, scores impact, and allows you to pipe customer insights into your existing project workflows so the distance from customer voice to shipped value gets a lot shorter.

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Want the full picture?

This is just the surface. In the complete, gated report you’ll get access to the entire report and its insights. If you’re a product leader trying to get closer to your customers, while also moving faster, it's a strong barometer for where others stand, and how you can get ahead. 

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Get the report: The 2025 Reality of Using Customer Feedback.