Beyond the Survey: The Rise of Observational Customer Experience (oCX)

Executive Summary

In an era where customer feedback pours in from social media, review sites, and chat logs 24/7, traditional survey-based metrics like NPS and CSAT are no longer enough. Forward-thinking businesses are looking beyond the survey to gain a fuller, real-time picture of customer experience. This Emergent Africa paper introduces Observational Customer Experience (oCX) – an AI-driven approach, pioneered by Alterna CX, that mines unstructured feedback (e.g. online reviews, social media posts, support chats) to measure and improve customer experience without relying on surveys. The paper explains why unstructured “Voice of Customer” data has become critical, how oCX works, and the tangible benefits it delivers. A real-world case study of a leading bank illustrates oCX’s impact – from uncovering root causes of dissatisfaction to driving double-digit NPS gains. Senior executives in B2C organisations serving thousands of customers will learn how oCX provides deeper insights, faster responses, and stronger ROI than traditional methods.

Key Takeaways:

• Surveys have limits: Response rates are low (often in the single digits) and scores alone lack context. Traditional metrics like NPS capture only a fraction of customers and issues, and can even be gamed (e.g. “score begging” to boost NPS). Only 4% of CX leaders can tie survey scores to ROI, underscoring the need for a better approach.
• Unstructured feedback is a goldmine: 80–90% of customer feedback lives in unstructured channels – tweets, reviews, comments – where customers speak candidly and in detail. This feedback contains the authentic voice of the customer with rich emotions and root causes that surveys miss. Leveraging AI to analyse these sources enables a continuous pulse on customer experience.
• Observational CX (oCX) delivers deeper insight: oCX is an AI-generated CX metric that assesses experience quality directly from what customers say or write, without any surveys. By aggregating opinions from across channels, oCX pinpoints what drives satisfaction or churn in real time. Organisations using oCX have achieved tangible gains – from 20% fewer complaints and +24 NPS points in retail to 60% NPS increases in under a year – by acting on these richer insights.
• A new CX mindset: Going beyond the survey is not just about technology, but about culture. Companies embracing oCX build a customer-centric culture where feedback flows freely across silos and staff at every level take action on live customer input. The conclusion provides a call to action for leaders to start their oCX journey and outlines how Alterna CX’s platform and expertise can help turn unstructured data into strategic advantage.

Introduction

Customer experience has become a key competitive edge for consumer-facing organisations, from banks and insurers to retailers and ride-hailing apps. Yet, how companies measure customer experience is undergoing a fundamental shift. For decades, the go-to yardstick has been the survey – epitomised by metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT). In fact, over half of companies worldwide have used NPS as a primary CX measure. These metrics gave executives a simple number to track. However, as customer expectations soar and digital channels multiply, relying solely on periodic surveys is proving woefully insufficient.

Traditional surveys capture only a small, self-selecting sample of customers, often weeks after an experience. Many customers never respond due to survey fatigue, meaning much of their feedback is never heard (typical survey response rates can be as low as 5–30%). The feedback that is collected tends to be surface-level – a score or a few tick-box answers – with maybe a short comment if you’re lucky. This leaves CX teams guessing at the “why” behind the scores. Time lag is another issue: by the time quarterly survey results are compiled, customer sentiment may have already shifted.

Crucially, survey metrics often fail to drive action. Senior leaders increasingly question what to do with an NPS number on its own. A score can flag a problem exists, but not pinpoint the cause. Teams can even get caught “chasing the score” – engaging in “score begging” (encouraging only happy customers to respond) or other games to boost metrics, rather than fixing root issues. An uptick in NPS doesn’t automatically translate into better retention or revenue, so it can lose credibility in the C-suite. It’s telling that only 4% of CX leaders believe their measurement system lets them quantify CX’s ROI. In short, traditional survey-based approaches are too narrow, too slow, and too disconnected from real drivers of customer behaviour.

Forward-thinking organisations recognise that CX measurement must evolve. The richest insights today lie beyond the confines of structured surveys – in the vast ocean of unstructured customer feedback that customers are constantly generating. To truly understand and improve experiences, companies need to “go beyond the survey” towards a more continuous, comprehensive, and insightful approach. This paper explores that new approach, known as Observational Customer Experience (oCX). We’ll discuss what oCX is, why it has risen to prominence, and how B2C brands are leveraging it – with a spotlight on Alterna CX’s oCX methodology. A case study from the banking sector will illustrate how oCX can transform a CX program. Finally, we conclude with practical steps and a call to action for executives who want to move past surveys and unlock the full voice of their customers.

1. The Limitations of Survey-Centric CX Measurement

It’s important to first understand why surveys alone fall short in today’s environment. While metrics like NPS and CSAT are familiar and easy to track, they come with several inherent limitations:

• Low Participation & Bias: Customers are drowning in survey requests, leading to declining engagement. Many companies now see single-digit response rates for email surveys. The voices captured are not always representative – you might mostly hear from very happy or very unhappy customers, skewing the results. Others may ignore the survey or abandon it midway, especially if it’s long. This introduces response bias. And because surveys are solicited feedback, there’s a risk respondents tell you what they think you want to hear. Some front-line teams even practice “score begging” – nudging only satisfied customers to fill out surveys – which further biases results.
• Shallow Insights: A numeric score or multiple-choice response lacks nuance. Traditional surveys force customers into predefined choices, so you learn that a customer is dissatisfied but not why. Open-ended comment boxes help, but these often receive brief answers, and manually analysing them at scale is impractical. As a result, many firms end up with a scorecard that says “CX went up or down” but little insight into root causes. Leaders lament that an NPS score offers only a symptom, not a diagnosis. “A numerical score alone can’t tell you what is popular or problematic”, as one industry analysis noted – whereas mining free-form comments can pinpoint recurring issues (e.g. many complaints about “slow app login” or “long in-store queues”).
• Slow and Siloed Feedback: Traditional CX measurement is like looking in the rear-view mirror. Customer sentiments might be collected this week, but by the time the survey closes, data is cleaned, and reports are prepared, weeks or months have passed. Opportunities to intervene early are lost. Also, surveys tend to occur on a set schedule (e.g. post-transaction or quarterly) and often focus on one channel or touchpoint at a time. This siloed approach can miss the bigger picture. An issue that spans multiple touchpoints might not be evident in any single survey. The business is effectively flying blind between survey cycles. In fast-moving markets, this lag can be fatal – by the time you realise customers are unhappy, thousands more have had the same bad experience. As we’ll see, one major bank found that waiting for monthly NPS reports meant “opportunities to improve daily were being missed”.
• Lack of Actionability & ROI Linkage: Perhaps the biggest criticism is that survey scores don’t easily translate into actionable improvements or financial outcomes. Teams can become fixated on moving the number rather than fixing underlying problems. Without understanding why customers gave a certain score, improvement efforts might target the wrong things. Moreover, improving a survey metric doesn’t always yield immediate business results – you can raise NPS a few points and still see churn or costs remain unchanged in the short term. This disconnect makes executives question the value of obsessing over the score. A McKinsey study found only 4% of companies could calculate the ROI of their CX improvements from their current measurement systems. In other words, 96% are investing in CX “blind,” hoping a better survey score eventually pays off. This is clearly not sustainable when every investment must prove its worth.

In summary, surveys provide a necessary baseline but an insufficient story. They offer a snapshot of customer sentiment that is too narrow (small sample), too slow, and too shallow to drive strategic CX management in the modern landscape. Companies need more continuous, granular, and authentic insight into customer experience – which is why they are turning to unstructured feedback for answers.

2. The Rise of Unstructured Customer Feedback

Meanwhile, customers haven’t stopped giving feedback – they’re just doing it on their own terms. Every day, consumers are tweeting about service mishaps, posting detailed reviews of products and apps, venting in Facebook comments, chatting with support agents, and more. This wealth of commentary, complaints, and praise is streaming in real time across the digital world, largely outside the confines of company-issued surveys.

This unstructured feedback – which includes social media posts, online reviews, forum discussions, support call transcripts, live chat logs, and open-ended survey responses – has exploded in volume. Studies estimate it accounts for 80–90% of all customer feedback data. Think about that: the vast majority of what customers are saying about your brand is likely not coming through your survey program, but through these unsolicited channels. For businesses, this represents a massive untapped resource of customer insight.

What makes unstructured feedback so valuable? Unlike a numeric survey score, it is rich in detail and emotion. Customers use their own words to describe exactly what they experienced and how they feel. They might highlight specific pain points (“the delivery was two days late and the packaging was damaged”), express emotions (“I felt insulted by the tone of the email support”), or suggest improvements (“I wish the app had a dark mode option”). In other words, unstructured feedback captures the authentic voice of the customer – their stories, frustrations, and ideas – without the filter of predefined survey choices. This candour and context make it a goldmine for understanding why customers are satisfied or not.

Several key advantages emerge from tapping into unstructured feedback:

• Candid, Unfiltered Sentiment: Because it’s usually unsolicited, unstructured feedback tends to be more honest. Customers share their thoughts organically, not because they were prompted by a survey. There’s no artificial survey setting or leading questions to sway them. As a result, companies get a truer read on customer sentiment – the cheers and the rants – including from segments that often ignore surveys. For example, younger, digital-native customers may never fill out an email survey, but they’ll freely tweet or post on Instagram about their experience. Capturing these voices ensures you’re hearing everyone, not just the handful who answer surveys.
• Depth and Diagnostic Power: Unstructured comments often contain the why behind the what. Customers don’t just say “I’m unhappy” – they explain what went wrong. Common threads in reviews can quickly point to root causes: e.g. dozens of customers mentioning “slow check-out process” or “confusing billing errors” spotlight exactly what needs fixing. This level of detail allows CX teams to move from abstract scores to concrete action. Patterns in text feedback effectively provide a roadmap of customer pain points and desires, which is invaluable for product improvement, service training, or process changes. In contrast, a flat 3/5 satisfaction score doesn’t tell you much about what to do next.
• Real-Time Pulse: Customers express feedback in the moment, so unstructured channels offer a continuous, real-time stream of insight. A spike in negative tweets today can alert you to a problem (say, a website outage or a policy change backlash) immediately, rather than weeks later when a survey might catch it. Monitoring unstructured feedback thus gives an early warning system for emerging issues. If a new fee introduction is causing anger, or a competitor’s product is being praised, you’ll know right away. This enables a much faster response, preventing issues from snowballing. It’s often said that traditional metrics tell you last quarter’s customer happiness, while unstructured data can tell you this morning’s. In fast-moving industries like food delivery or mobile banking, that speed is critical – an issue can go viral in hours, so days-old data isn’t good enough.
• Broader Coverage: Because unstructured feedback comes from many channels, analysing it can give a holistic view of the customer journey. Customers might discuss a mobile app issue on an app store review, a store experience on Google, and a delivery problem on Twitter. If you only look at one channel or send a survey about one touchpoint, you see just a slice. Aggregating all this unsolicited feedback provides a 360° view of customer experience across touchpoints. It’s not limited to those who used one channel or responded at one moment – it’s the sum total of experiences being discussed. Furthermore, customers often compare brands openly (e.g. “my previous insurer handled claims faster”), so unstructured data can even give you competitive benchmarks that surveys usually don’t.

The value is clear: unstructured feedback contains authentic, detailed, timely, and wide-ranging insights that traditional surveys miss. The challenge, of course, is making sense of this mountain of messy data. Reading thousands of comments manually is impossible. This is where advances in Artificial Intelligence – particularly Natural Language Processing (NLP) – come in. Modern AI can process human language at scale, detecting patterns, sentiment, and topics across millions of words. By applying AI to unstructured feedback, companies can automatically discover what customers care about most (be it a frequent complaint or a beloved feature) and even quantify the overall sentiment. This unlocks comprehensive, real-time CX intelligence that far surpasses any single survey metric.

In the next section, we introduce Observational Customer Experience (oCX) – a methodology that formalises this analysis of unstructured feedback into a practical, repeatable metric and framework for action. oCX essentially allows organisations to measure and manage customer experience directly from the voice of the customer, without relying on surveys. It leverages the power of AI to turn the chaos of customer comments into clear, actionable insights and metrics. Let’s explore what oCX is and how it works.

3. What is Observational Customer Experience (oCX)?

Observational Customer Experience (oCX) is a new approach to CX measurement and improvement that centres on observing what customers are saying and feeling in their natural feedback channels, rather than asking them via surveys. In simple terms, oCX is an AI-powered metric and methodology that evaluates CX quality using unsolicited, unstructured feedback from customers. It was pioneered by Alterna CX as a way to accurately gauge the health of a company’s customer experience without deploying a survey at all.

At its core, oCX flips the traditional model on its head: instead of sending out questions and waiting for answers, you harvest the answers already out there in social media, review sites, emails, chat transcripts, and open-text survey fields. Using advanced analytics, you interpret this rich feedback to discern how happy or unhappy customers are and why. The end result is an observational CX score (oCX score) that serves as an objective metric of customer experience, analogous to an NPS or satisfaction score but derived entirely from actual customer expressions.

Key characteristics of oCX include:

• No Surveys Required: oCX does not depend on soliciting feedback via questionnaires. This means no survey fatigue, no low response rates, and no response bias to worry about. You’re not inconveniencing customers with forms or influencing their answers. Instead, oCX listens quietly to what they’re already saying. As a result, the oCX metric can be seen as more objective and candid – it’s an honest reflection of customer sentiment “in the wild,” with no risk of survey design mistakes or gaming the system.
• AI-Generated Metric: oCX leverages Artificial Intelligence (particularly NLP and machine learning) to analyze text at scale and assign it a score. Alterna CX’s approach, for example, involves training AI models on datasets where customers left both a written comment and a known rating (like an NPS or star rating). By learning these patterns, the AI can predict a satisfaction score (0–10) for new pieces of text. In effect, the model reads a customer comment and infers how positive or negative the experience was, much like a human might gauge sentiment, but with statistical consistency. It can discern the difference between “pretty good overall” and “exceptional service!” and score them appropriately. This predicted score per comment is the basis of oCX.
• Aggregated and Standardised: An individual comment’s score is useful, but the real power comes from aggregation. An oCX platform will aggregate hundreds or thousands of comments to produce an overall score or index for a product, business unit, or entire brand. For instance, it might calculate what percentage of comments indicate a promoter-level experience vs detractor-level, and derive an NPS-like figure from unstructured data. Alterna CX typically presents an oCX Score on a scale similar to NPS (e.g. -100 to +100) that summarises the balance of positive vs negative sentiment in customer feedback. This score can be tracked over time and compared across units, much like one would with NPS. Crucially, because it’s based on textual feedback, it comes with rich diagnostic info (more on that in a moment). The oCX Score provides an easy benchmark (e.g. “our oCX this month is +50”), allowing leaders to gauge CX performance at a glance and set targets (e.g. “let’s aim to improve to +60 by year-end”).
• Multi-Channel and Holistic: Observational CX methods pull in data from wherever customers are voicing their opinions – social media, review sites, chat logs, complaint databases, and even open-ended survey comments. This means the analysis is omni-channel and not siloed by channel. You get a unified view of customer experience across all touchpoints. For example, an oCX score for your airline might combine passenger feedback from Twitter, Skytrax reviews, post-flight survey comments, and call centre transcripts. This comprehensive lens ensures the metric reflects overall CX, not just, say, the call centre performance. It also means competitor and market feedback can be included (since public reviews often mention competing brands), allowing for benchmarking. In fact, Alterna CX often publishes industry oCX benchmark reports ranking companies by their observational CX scores – effectively showing who leads in customer love according to what people publicly say.
• Continuous & Real-Time: Because data sources like social media are continuous, oCX can be updated in near real-time. New customer comments flow in daily, and the AI can score them instantly, so the oCX score dynamically reflects the latest sentiment. This gives companies a real-time pulse of CX health. As one observer put it, “Traditional metrics might tell you last quarter’s customer happiness; oCX tells you this morning’s.”This immediacy enables a shift from reactive to proactive management. Rather than waiting for a quarterly report, teams can respond to emerging issues right away (more on that in the case study).
• Explainable and Diagnostic: Beyond the top-line score, an oCX system provides drill-down insights. Since the AI analyses text for patterns, it can report on common themes, sentiment drivers, and emotion cues. For example, it might show that in March, “delivery time” and “customer service attitude” were the most talked-about topics in negative comments, contributing to a drop in the oCX score. It can surface that 50% of detractor comments mentioned “late delivery”. This context is incredibly actionable – it tells you what to fix. Unlike a black-box score, oCX is typically delivered via dashboards that let users slice the data by topic, sentiment, product, location, etc., to uncover root causes. In short, oCX marries the quantitative tracking of a metric with the qualitative richness of open feedback.

To illustrate, consider an oCX dashboard from Alterna CX’s platform. It might display an overall oCX Score for the company and a trend line over time, alongside a breakdown of topics driving that score (see figure below). Individual customer comments are listed with their sentiment (positive/negative) and categories, allowing managers to read verbatim feedback. The system could highlight spikes in certain complaints or emerging new issues. In the sample dashboard, you can see how feedback is collated and scored: the interface shows a selection of recent customer comments, each tagged by sentiment and theme, and a summary score that has risen from 25 to 85 – indicating significant CX improvement. Such a tool enables teams to move from anecdote to analysis, focusing on the biggest priorities revealed by customers’ own words.

With oCX, organisations finally have a way to quantify the unstructured. It delivers an objective metric like NPS, but one that is grounded in what customers actually say, not just what they checkbox. This makes oCX both a measurement tool and a management system – it captures the state of CX and guides the response.

4. How oCX Works – The Alterna CX Approach

Now let’s delve into how an oCX program is implemented in practice, using Alterna CX’s methodology as an example. The process can be broken into a few key steps enabled by technology and analytics:

a. Data Ingestion from All Channels: The first step is to gather customer feedback from every relevant source. Alterna CX’s platform comes with 85+ ready connectors to ingest data from social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), review platforms (Google Reviews, App Stores), CRM systems (for complaints and tickets), live chat transcripts, emails, and traditional survey comments. For a bank, this might mean pulling in tweets mentioning the bank, comments on its Instagram ads, App Store reviews of its mobile app, transcripts of support chats, and open-text responses from its customer satisfaction surveys – all into one unified database. This comprehensive capture ensures no voice is left unheard. In one retail case, combining data from five Voice of Customer channels into a unified view was critical to seeing the full picture.

b. Natural Language Processing & Classification: Once the text data is collected, AI models get to work analysing it. Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques parse each comment to determine sentiments, emotions, and topics. For example, the system can identify if a review expresses anger, frustration, joy, or delight, and it can tag the comment with relevant themes (e.g. “delivery time,” “mobile app usability,” “staff friendliness”) even if the customer doesn’t use those exact words. This automated coding of qualitative data is far more advanced than basic keyword search – modern NLP uses context and machine learning to accurately capture what each feedback is about and the sentiment behind it. Alterna CX even incorporates emotion analytics beyond simple positive/negative sentiment, helping brands distinguish nuanced feelings (like disappointment vs. confusion) in customer text.

c. AI Scoring Algorithm: The heart of oCX is the scoring engine. Alterna CX employs techniques like Gaussian Mixture Models combined with sentiment analysis to score each piece of feedback. In essence, the AI was trained on historical data where customers gave both written feedback and a structured rating. From this, it learned patterns – certain words, phrases, and emotions in text that correlate with promoters (happy customers) or detractors (unhappy customers). For a new comment with no rating, the model can predict an oCX score on a 0–10 scale. For instance, a comment like “Absolutely loved the quick service and friendly staff!” might be scored 9.5 (promoter level), whereas “Terrible experience – my order was wrong and support was unhelpful” might score 2.0 (detractor level). The model is nuanced: it recognises degrees of satisfaction and can tell that “it was okay, I guess” is a lukewarm 6 or 7, not a 10 or a 1. By scoring every single feedback item, oCX quantifies qualitative data.

d. Aggregation to oCX Score: Next, the platform aggregates all those individual scores into a higher-level oCX Score for the desired scope (e.g. for a product, store, or overall brand). One common method is analogous to NPS: calculate the percentage of promoter-level comments (e.g. those scored 9–10) minus the percentage of detractor-level comments (scored 0–6). This yields an index from -100 to +100. Other approaches might use an average score or a weighted composite. Alterna CX typically presents the result as a single oCX metric (often on a +100 scale) that can be tracked over time and compared across units. This normalisation is important – it means executives get a familiar-looking KPI (e.g. “oCX Score = +50”) that they can readily monitor on dashboards and reports. Because the scoring is automated and continuous, this number updates as new feedback comes in, providing a live barometer of CX. Alterna also uses these scores to produce benchmarks and rankings – for example, publishing a leaderboard of the top brands in an industry by oCX score. (One such report crowned a digital bank #1 in its country and #5 globally for oCX, demonstrating how companies can be competitively evaluated on customer experience through observational data.)

e. Dashboarding and Alerts: The aggregated insights are then delivered to users via intuitive dashboards and automated alerts. Real-time dashboards allow different teams in the organisation to explore the data relevant to them. For instance, a branch manager can log in and see their branch’s latest oCX score and read through the day’s customer comments about that branch. A product manager can filter feedback to just their product and see what customers are saying post-launch. Senior executives might view an overview of the whole company’s oCX, with the ability to drill down into regions or channels. Alterna CX made a point of enabling over 10,000 employees at one client to access oCX insights tailored to their role – effectively democratising customer feedback across the organisation. This transparency drives engagement: employees start checking their feedback dashboards as regularly as sales reports, making CX a daily conversation.

Alongside dashboards, alert workflows are set up for proactive response. Users can be notified instantly when certain conditions occur – for example, if the oCX score for mobile app feedback drops by more than 10 points in a week, or if a high-value customer posts a scathing comment. Akbank (in the case study below) configured alerts so that if a VIP client gave a low survey score or if a spike in negative sentiment about a service was detected, an immediate task was assigned to the responsible team. This kind of integration (e.g. linking to CRM to create a follow-up case) ensures no critical feedback slips through the cracks. Problems can be acknowledged and addressed within hours, turning around unhappy customers or fixing issues before more customers experience them.

Through these steps, oCX operationalises the analysis of unstructured feedback into a concrete system. It’s important to note that oCX doesn’t necessarily replace traditional metrics entirely – rather, it augments and enriches them. Many organisations use oCX alongside NPS/CSAT, feeding the open-ended responses from surveys into the oCX analysis too. The combination can be powerful: surveys provide structured ratings and oCX provides the qualitative “why” and picks up what surveys miss. However, some companies are finding that oCX on its own can serve as a more reliable barometer of customer experience, given its objectivity and breadth. As Alterna CX notes, with oCX “there’s no risk of annoying customers with questionnaires or skewing results by who responds” – it measures CX as it truly is, not as it’s prompted.

5. Case Study: Proactive Customer Experience at Akbank

To see oCX in action, let’s examine a real-world example. Akbank, one of Turkey’s largest banks (also among Europe’s leading banks by customer base), embarked on an oCX-driven transformation of its customer experience program. The journey of Akbank vividly demonstrates moving beyond traditional NPS to a more proactive, insight-rich approach.

Challenge: Akbank had a well-established CX practice centred on transactional NPS surveys. After key interactions (like branch visits or mobile app transactions), customers were asked to rate their experience. By 2017, however, the bank realised this approach was falling short of its needs. Surveys were being collected, but insights were not reaching the front lines in time. Branch managers and call centre teams often lacked a timely view of customer feedback – they might only see their NPS results weeks later in a monthly report. This lag meant employees felt disconnected from the feedback process, and engagement in the CX program waned.

Moreover, Akbank had a growing volume of open-ended comments from surveys, plus customers frequently voicing opinions on social media, but there was no integrated way to analyse these texts. The bank’s CX team was essentially data-rich but insight-poor: they had lots of comments and complaint notes, but extracting meaning (trends, root causes, sentiment) from them was manual and ad-hoc. Opportunities for improvement were being missed because the bank couldn’t see the full picture of customer sentiment across channels. In summary, the traditional approach left Akbank flying blind between survey reports – too slow, siloed, and not actionable enough for a bank aiming to be customer-centric.

Solution: In 2017, Akbank partnered with Alterna CX to revamp its CX measurement and management system using AI. The goal was to enable proactive customer experience management – catching issues in real time and empowering staff with continuous insights. Alterna CX’s platform was implemented as a “listening and analysis engine” across all major touchpoints. Rather than relying solely on periodic surveys, the new system would capture feedback from every channel and deliver it in real time to the people who could act on it.

Concretely, Alterna CX set up data feeds from branches, call centres, mobile and internet banking, and social media. Millions of transactions occur daily at Akbank; the platform intelligently sampled these to send short post-transaction surveys (to keep some structured NPS input) and, at the same time, ingested unsolicited feedback like tweets or public comments about the bank. Crucially, every open-ended comment a customer provided (whether in a survey text box or on social media) was funnelled into Alterna CX’s text analytics engine. The AI analysed these comments in Turkish and English, categorising issues (e.g. “ATM service” vs “mobile app UI”) and determining sentiment. Akbank thus obtained a unified, 360° view of the Voice of Customer – whether the feedback came from a branch visit survey or a Twitter mention. The system also kept tabs on competitor mentions to give context (for example, if customers were praising a fintech competitor’s feature, Akbank would know).

Alterna CX then deployed dashboards and tools to democratise the insights. Over 10,000 Akbank employees, from front-line tellers and call agents up to executives, were given access to oCX dashboards tailored to their role. A branch manager could see daily updates of their branch’s customer feedback: the current oCX score, recent comments, NPS trend, and top complaint themes for their branch. This daily feedback loop was a game-changer – instead of waiting for a monthly survey summary, managers saw yesterday’s customer sentiments today. Meanwhile, senior leaders saw an aggregate oCX score for the entire bank, with the ability to drill down by region, channel or segment to identify pockets of friction or success. By making customer feedback transparent and accessible to all departments, Akbank fostered a culture where every team could monitor and improve their part of the customer journey. Employees reportedly became highly engaged, checking their feedback dashboards as frequently as their sales numbers – a clear sign that CX had become front-of-mind daily.

Another vital component was the introduction of real-time alerts and closed-loop follow-up. Alterna CX configured the platform to trigger alerts for defined scenarios. For instance, if a high-net-worth customer gave a low satisfaction score or wrote a scathing comment, an alert would immediately flag the responsible relationship manager to intervene. Similarly, if the AI detected a spike in negative sentiment about a particular service (say, mobile banking logins failing), it would automatically notify the IT operations team to investigate promptly. These alerts were integrated with Akbank’s CRM, so they generated cases that had to be addressed – ensuring accountability. Thanks to this, Akbank established a 24-hour response rule for critical feedback: unhappy customers received a follow-up call or solution within a day, often surprising them in a good way (customers who only vented on Twitter were impressed when the bank reached out to fix the issue). The bank effectively shifted from a reactive stance – where issues might be identified in quarterly reviews long after many suffered them – to a proactive stance where it tackled pain points almost in real time.

Results: Since rolling out the AI-driven oCX program, Akbank has seen remarkable improvements, both quantitative and qualitative. While the bank’s specific metrics are confidential, Alterna CX reports and analogous case studies give a sense of the impact:

• Faster Issue Resolution: By responding to problems as soon as they surface, Akbank dramatically improved its response times. In a similar Alterna CX deployment, an online broker reduced its first response time to dissatisfied customers by 70% by contacting them within 24 hours. It’s reasonable to infer Akbank achieved comparable efficiency gains. Quicker engagement has helped “close the loop” with the vast majority of unhappy customers, often turning would-be detractors into neutral or even satisfied customers by solving their issues. In one Alterna CX case, 96% of all NPS detractors were followed up and resolved, contributing to a +30 point NPS increase at that firm. Akbank’s own use of automated alerts and personal follow-ups likely yielded similar outcomes: more saved customers and preventable churn.
• Improved CX Metrics & Loyalty: With a clearer understanding of what to fix (and fixing it faster), Akbank has been able to elevate its customer satisfaction metrics beyond what the old survey-centric approach achieved. While Akbank’s exact NPS uplift isn’t public, Alterna CX has documented substantial gains for clients adopting oCX. For example, Koçtaş, a major home improvement retailer, improved its NPS by 60% in just nine months by addressing issues identified through AI analysis of customer feedback. CarrefourSA, a leading retailer, similarly saw complaints drop 20% and NPS rise by 24 points after implementing AI-driven VoC analytics. These results underscore the kind of lift possible when organisations act on deep insights from unstructured data. It’s likely that Akbank, by systematically rooting out friction points (like simplifying a cumbersome process that was drawing ire, or retraining staff on an issue customers frequently mentioned), has enjoyed significant improvements in customer satisfaction and loyalty indices. Indeed, internal culture surveys at the bank showed higher customer-centricity scores, indicating that employees believed customer happiness was improving.
• Operational Efficiency & Focus: The oCX program didn’t just boost scores – it also helped Akbank use its resources more wisely. By having a continuous pulse on customer feedback, the bank could spot trends and allocate budget to the most impactful CX fixes with confidence. Senior management found it easier to prioritise investments now that they had data-driven evidence of what mattered to customers most. For instance, if unstructured feedback pointed to repeated complaints about online banking downtime, more funds could be justified for IT improvements. Conversely, if a feature wasn’t mentioned as a pain point, maybe an expensive overhaul of it could be deprioritised. This sharper focus ensured CX improvement efforts delivered better ROI – solving real customer issues, not guessing.
• Cultural Shift to Customer-Centricity: One of the most profound changes was cultural. Thanks to real-time, transparent feedback, Akbank’s teams became far more customer-centric in their daily work. Customer experience was no longer an abstract KPI reported occasionally; it turned into an ongoing, company-wide conversation. Every department could see how it was performing through customers’ eyes, every day. This visibility created a healthy competition and motivation internally: teams took pride in improving their oCX scores and celebrating positive feedback, and they worked urgently to address negative feedback. In meetings, leaders discussed recent customer comments and what actions were being taken – making the voice of the customer a guiding light for decision-making. In essence, oCX helped embed customer empathy into the organisation’s DNA, breaking down silos between departments because everyone rallied around a common goal: delivering a great customer experience.

Akbank’s experience demonstrates how a large, traditional institution can successfully adopt AI-driven, observational CX methods to modernise its approach. By moving beyond the survey, the bank unlocked a richer understanding of its customers and empowered its people to respond swiftly. The results were not only seen in happier customers (and improved loyalty) but also in a more agile and customer-focused workforce. This case exemplifies the central premise of oCX: when you actively listen to all your customers, all the time, and act on what you hear, you can elevate customer experience to new heights.

6. Business Impact: Why oCX Matters for B2C Executives

For senior leaders in B2C organisations, the ultimate question is: How does adopting an observational CX approach translate into business value? Based on industry reports and Alterna CX’s client results, the impact is compelling. By embracing oCX, companies can expect:

• Deeper Insights & Better Decisions: oCX brings clarity to the chaos of customer opinion. Executives get concrete evidence of what drives satisfaction or churn, enabling smarter strategic decisions. Instead of guessing what might improve CX, leaders can pinpoint the exact pain points (e.g. “delivery delays in Region X are our top complaint”) and target investments accordingly. This data-driven approach increases the success rate of CX initiatives, as changes are aligned with what customers truly want. One insurer found that making unstructured feedback available to all departments led to company-wide transparency and much easier buy-in for CX improvements – teams could clearly see the issues and the rationale for fixing them.
• Improved Customer Satisfaction & Loyalty: Organisations that act on oCX insights consistently report significant uplifts in customer satisfaction metrics. We’ve already cited examples like +24 NPS points in retail after tackling key complaints, or +60% NPS in 9 months in home improvement retail by focusing on feedback-driven fixes. These are not just numbers – they indicate thousands more happy customers and fewer detractors. Happier customers exhibit higher loyalty, leading to repeat business and positive word-of-mouth. For instance, by resolving issues promptly (like Akbank reaching out within 24h to unhappy clients), companies can convert many detractors into neutral or even loyal customers. In one case, closing the loop with 96% of detractors contributed to a 30-point NPS surge, reflecting a large swing in customer sentiment. Such improvements often correlate with reduced churn and increased customer lifetime value, directly benefiting the bottom line.
• Faster Response & Reduced Churn Risk: An oCX-driven organisation can detect and resolve issues faster than ever before. This agility is crucial in preventing small fires from becoming raging infernos on social media. By responding in real time to emerging complaints (thanks to alerts and live dashboards), companies can often fix problems before they escalate. This not only rescues individual customer relationships (preventing those customers from defecting), but also protects the brand from reputational damage. For example, if a surge of negative reviews about a faulty product update is caught within a day, the product team can roll back or patch it before the issue affects more users or gets press attention. Faster responsiveness was linked to a 70% reduction in first response time at one broker after implementing oCX workflows. In today’s viral environment, such responsiveness is a competitive advantage – it can literally save millions in potential lost revenue or PR crises.
• Operational Efficiency & Focus: oCX helps companies allocate resources more effectively. With a clear view of what matters to customers, teams stop wasting effort on minor issues or internal hunches that don’t resonate with customers. They focus on the changes that will move the needle for CX. This prioritisation not only accelerates improvement, it often yields cost savings. For example, if oCX analysis shows customers barely mention a particular feature, the development team might deprioritise that feature’s enhancement and instead fix something customers complain about frequently – getting a bigger CX bang for the buck. Additionally, automated text analytics reduces the manual labor of combing through feedback. One retailer receiving 4+ million customer signals a month could never manually read them; with AI, they turned this data deluge into actionable intelligence while freeing staff to work on solutions rather than data crunching.
• Stronger Customer-Centric Culture: Perhaps one of the less tangible but hugely important benefits is the cultural transformation. Companies that implement oCX often report that it galvanises the organisation around customer experience. When frontline employees see customer comments in real time – both praise and complaints – it creates a sense of accountability and motivation that no quarterly report can match. Teams celebrate positive feedback, which boosts morale, and they feel empowered to fix negatives immediately, which boosts purpose. Making oCX scores and insights a visible metric across the company reinforces that everyone owns CX, not just the CX department. Over time, this drives a shift where decisions at all levels start with “what’s best for the customer?” because the Voice of Customer is constantly present. Companies like Akbank saw CX become an “ongoing conversation at all levels” rather than a periodic concern. A strong customer-centric culture, in turn, correlates with better customer experiences and loyalty – it’s a virtuous cycle.
• Measurable ROI and Alignment with Business Outcomes: Ultimately, an oCX approach can tie customer experience efforts more directly to business outcomes. Because it casts a wider net and produces more data (including links to specific issues), it is easier to correlate CX actions with changes in customer behavior. For example, reducing complaints by 20% likely means fewer repeat calls (lower support costs) and potentially higher retention. If NPS goes up 60%, one can look at corresponding improvement in renewal rates or cross-sell uptake. Moreover, by including unstructured feedback, companies can identify the factors that truly drive loyalty (maybe ease of use, trust, and service quality come out as top themes) and invest in those, rather than chasing a metric for its own sake. Over time, this builds a strong case to the C-suite that CX improvements are delivering financial returns – silencing the sceptics who earlier questioned the ROI of CX due to lack of linkage.

To summarise, oCX isn’t just a new metric – it’s a catalyst for improved performance and competitive advantage. It takes the guesswork out of understanding customers by continuously telling you, in customers’ own words, what’s working and what’s not. For B2C executives dealing with thousands or millions of customers, this is a game-changer. It means being able to base strategic decisions on real customer intelligence, act on problems before they hurt your brand, and rally your entire organisation around delighting customers. In a world where customer expectations are ever-rising, oCX offers a way not only to keep up but to get ahead by truly listening to the customer’s voice at scale.

Conclusion

Customer experience leaders have long sought the “holy grail” of understanding customers better and delivering experiences that create loyalty. In the past, surveys and scores were the primary tools available – useful, but limited. Today, the landscape has shifted. The voice of the customer is louder and more ubiquitous than ever, echoing across the internet in countless forms. Forward-looking organisations realise that to stay competitive, they must harness this chorus of unstructured feedback. Observational Customer Experience (oCX) has emerged as the method to do so, turning what was once an overwhelming cacophony of customer comments into clear, actionable insight.

As we’ve discussed, oCX goes beyond the survey in every sense: it listens to all customers, not just the tiny fraction who respond to questionnaires; it provides rich context and real-time awareness, rather than static snapshots; and it inspires concrete actions grounded in what customers actually say and feel. Companies adopting oCX are seeing quantifiable benefits – faster issue resolution, higher NPS/CSAT, and improved customer retention – as well as a cultural transformation towards customer-centricity. They are, quite simply, getting closer to their customers.

Meanwhile, those who cling solely to traditional metrics risk falling behind. If your organisation is still judging its customer experience through an occasional survey and missing out on the 80% of feedback happening elsewhere, you’re likely missing the bigger picture and the agility to respond to it. In an age where a single viral tweet can reshape public perception of your brand overnight, not listening is not an option. By the time a quarterly survey alerts you to a problem, an observational approach might have not only alerted you but helped you fix it, turning a potential crisis into an opportunity to shine.

The takeaway for senior executives is clear: embrace a more observational, AI-driven approach to CX, or risk customer experience blind spots that can hurt your business. This doesn’t mean abandoning all surveys – it means augmenting and evolving your CX program to leverage the wealth of data customers willingly provide through their actions and words every day. The technology and techniques are now mature to do this at scale, as demonstrated by Alterna CX’s oCX platform and others.

“Beyond the survey” is more than a tagline; it’s a new paradigm for customer experience management. It’s about meeting customers where they already are (talking on social media, writing reviews, chatting with support) and extracting insight and value from those interactions continuously. It’s about building listening posts on every channel and turning that into organisational learning and improvement.

In conclusion, Observational Customer Experience offers a path to deeper customer understanding, greater loyalty, and ultimately, competitive advantage for those willing to invest in it. Companies like Akbank, Koçtaş, CarrefourSA and others have shown that the effort pays off in both CX metrics and business outcomes. As AI and analytics capabilities continue to advance, this approach will only become more powerful and essential. The time is now for executives to champion oCX in their organisations – to not just collect customer feedback, but truly listen and act on it. Those who do will forge stronger relationships with their customers, innovate faster based on real insights, and differentiate themselves in crowded markets through superior experience. In the world of customer experience, the winners will be those who look beyond the survey and embrace the full spectrum of the customer’s voice.

Call to Action

For business leaders ready to elevate their customer experience, the next step is clear: move beyond reliance on surveys and start harnessing the rich trove of unstructured feedback your customers are already giving. This could begin with a pilot oCX project – for example, analysing a few months of online reviews and social media comments to see what new insights emerge compared to your last survey. The findings will likely surprise you and highlight immediate opportunities for improvement.

We encourage you to explore Alterna CX’s oCX platform and methodology as a proven means to implement this approach. Alterna CX offers AI-driven tools that can quickly ingest and analyse your customer feedback from all channels, delivering an oCX score and detailed diagnostics tailored to your business. Consider scheduling a demo or consultation with Alterna CX – using your own organisation’s data – to witness firsthand how oCX can uncover what your customers love, loathe, and wish for. Seeing is believing: when you watch the AI analyse thousands of comments in minutes and pinpoint issues or wins that you hadn’t fully recognised, the value becomes immediately apparent.

Internally, begin discussions with your CX, marketing, and data teams about integrating observational metrics into your existing dashboards. Identify where the gaps are in your current customer listening – is it social media, third-party review sites, or support call transcripts? – and prioritize closing those gaps with an oCX approach. Small steps, like deploying text analytics on your open-ended survey comments or setting up alerts for social media sentiment swings, can build confidence and quick wins.

Most importantly, make “customer voice everywhere” a mantra for your organisation. Encourage teams to share and discuss unstructured feedback in team meetings. Celebrate insights that come from outside the survey form. As you incorporate oCX, be sure to communicate its purpose across the company: it’s there to help everyone do their job better by keeping a finger on the customer’s pulse at all times.

The rise of Observational Customer Experience marks a turning point in how we understand customers. It’s an approach whose time has come, driven by technology but fundamentally about empathy at scale. Don’t let your organisation be left behind still waiting on yesterday’s survey reports. Step into the future of CX management – a future where you listen continuously, learn deeply, and act decisively on the voice of the customer.

Ready to get started? Contact Alterna CX or Emergent Africa to learn how oCX can be tailored to your business. Whether you are in banking, insurance, retail, food delivery, or any B2C sector, observational insights can illuminate the path to happier customers and better results. It’s time to transform how you measure experience – it’s time to go beyond the survey and embrace the power of oCX.