What's the Way to the Turkish Customer's Heart? 4 Surprising Truths from the KPMG Report

This is exactly where KPMG’s “Türkiye Customer Experience Excellence 2025-2026” report comes to the rescue. But what makes this report important isn’t just that it confirms the general trends; the real story lies in its surprising findings, which upend the conventional wisdom about customer loyalty. Let’s take a closer look at the 4 critical points that shed light on the future of customer experience in Türkiye.

1. AI Gets a Promotion: No Longer an Assistant, but an “Autonomous Manager”

Technological change is no longer just a matter of small improvements; the role of AI is changing fundamentally. To make sense of the shift, let’s sort AI into three categories:

• Traditional AI: Looks at the past and makes predictions.
• Generative AI: Takes data and produces new content.
• Agentic AI: Meet the new playmaker! Systems that pursue goals on your behalf and get work done on their own.

AI is no longer just a “tool.” With Agentic AI, technology senses, reasons and manages. This opens the door to a new era that the report calls “Total Experience (TX),” one that makes life easier for everyone from customers to employees. In other words, AI is no longer an assistant that delivers efficiency; it is a “strategic partner” that solves problems before you even notice them.

Gökhan Mataracı of KPMG Türkiye sums up the situation this way: “As we enter the era of total experience powered by Agentic AI, the issue is no longer which technology is used; it is how technology is positioned within an integrated architecture that elevates the quality of the experience and turns it into a sustainable competitive advantage.”

2. In the Age of Inflation, “Speed” Has Fallen Out of Favor; “Trust” Is Now King

When wallets get squeezed, we all become more selective, right? According to the report, 94% of respondents have changed their shopping habits because of inflation. With money this precious, the question “Is the service I’m getting worth it?” has grown louder.

Here’s the interesting part: “Speed and Convenience (Time and Effort),” which used to win us over, no longer moves us. That’s because being fast is no longer a perk but a must (a hygiene factor). Nobody will praise you for being fast, but if you’re slow, they’ll write you off.

So what wins customers over? “Honesty” and “Sincerity.” The data is very clear: while the return on investment in speed is falling, investment in honesty and personalization is boosting loyalty. In other words, the way to the customer’s heart today runs not through speed but through the sense of trust you instill.

3. The Human Paradox: The More Technology We Have, the More We Seek Human Contact

We’re facing a very interesting contradiction: the more we get used to AI, the more we fear the absence of a “human touch.”

When we look at customers’ concerns, a surprising picture emerges: worries such as “Is my data safe?” or “Will my transaction get stuck halfway?” have eased somewhat (though they remain the biggest concerns). But the fear of “What if I can’t reach a human?” has shot up to 43%! The rate is even higher among female consumers; they want empathetic, one-on-one support. Men, by contrast, are more in “just fix my problem, I don’t care how” mode.

In short, no matter how smart your bots are, your customers want a guarantee that when a problem comes up, they can talk to a flesh-and-blood human as “Plan B.”

4. The Anatolian Anomaly: “Knowing Your Name” Is Worth More Than a Perfect App

You’d generally expect the best customer experience scores to come from metropolises like Istanbul, right? Think again. The champions are the Eastern Black Sea and Southeastern Anatolia regions!

Why? Because the “culture of personal relationships” is still very strong there. Simple human touches, such as knowing a customer’s name and asking how they’re doing, send loyalty through the roof. On top of that, new investments in these regions are creating a strong sense of “improvement and development” among local people.

This “Anatolian Anomaly” reminds us that a perfectly designed but soulless digital screen is sometimes no substitute for a warm “Welcome, Ahmet Bey.”

Editor’s Note: The Future Lies in Human-Centered Technology

The KPMG report’s core message is actually very clear: technology is a means, not an end.

The companies that win in 2025 won’t be the ones with the best AI, but those that can blend that AI with unshakable honesty and a deep human connection. As we build autonomous systems, the question we need to ask ourselves is: “Are we doing this to replace people, or to amplify their value?”

*The full report is available here.