Our Story
East Africa's customer experience intelligence agency — born from the insight that millions of customer voices were going unheard.
Where we came from
CVI grew out of a consumer intelligence practice that had spent years analysing social media conversations for some of East Africa's biggest brands. During a client engagement, we were asked a question that reshaped how we thought about customer feedback: what are our customers actually saying in their online reviews — not one at a time, but all of them?
We pulled every review across every platform. Thousands of them. The patterns were immediate — the same complaints repeating for years, invisible when read individually, unmistakable when read together. Staff members praised by name dozens of times, but nobody at the business had ever counted them. Competitors being recommended in a business's own reviews. Food safety complaints sitting unanswered for months.
The same blind spot appeared at the next business, and the next. Across hotels, restaurants, clinics — every customer-facing business in the region had millions of voices telling them exactly what to fix, what to celebrate, and where to invest. Nobody was listening to the bigger picture.
Since then, CVI has analysed reviews across more than 600 properties, published annual market intelligence reports covering Nairobi hotels, Nairobi restaurants, Zanzibar hotels, Nairobi malls, and Uganda hotels, and built a proprietary methodology that helps businesses across East Africa turn customer feedback into competitive advantage.
Helping businesses delight their customers
We're marketers and operators who happen to have powerful research tools. Everything we do is oriented around one outcome: helping you make your customers happier, more loyal, and more likely to recommend you.
Our intelligence is grounded in serious methodology — peer-reviewed research, cross-platform triangulation, multi-year trend analysis — but the output is always practical. Not a dense academic report. A clear answer to the question every business leader asks: what should we do next?
Built on research experience, not assumptions
Adrian Leshan
Co-founder & Business Lead
Market research and consumer intelligence professional with hands-on experience across social listening, sentiment analysis, consumer segmentation, and competitive analysis at Nendo — one of East Africa's leading digital research consultancies.
Has delivered research for major regional and global brands — analysing datasets of 100,000–500,000+ online conversations to extract strategic insights for senior decision-makers. Holds the Brandwatch Certified Professional qualification, one of the recognised industry standards in media analytics.
Adrian combines research rigour with deep familiarity with the East African market — the expertise needed to build an intelligence agency that understands both the data and the context.
Because your customers are already telling you how to win
Every day, your customers write reviews that contain exactly what you need to know — what delights them, what frustrates them, what would make them come back and bring their friends. That intelligence is sitting in plain sight. The problem isn't that the data doesn't exist. It's that nobody is reading it all at once — seeing the patterns, hearing the bigger message, and turning it into action.
We exist to close that gap. To help businesses listen better, act faster, and give their customers more reasons to come back.