South African businesses need to align technology, communication channels and people if they are to stand out in increasingly competitive markets. They have to shift their customer experience and service beyond the “mediocre middle”, if they are to have a differentiator beyond just price, marketing, sales and product.
Overcoming this challenge was one of the focus areas of a recently held Telviva webinar titled “Explore the latest Local and Global Strategies to Enhance Your Customer Experience”, and featuring global keynote speaker Dominic Black, Director of Research Services at Cavell, and Christopher Geerdts, Managing Director at BMIT, who addressed the local market. Kobus van der Westhuizen, CEO and Founder of Trilogy BPO, was a panellist, while the session was moderated by Telviva CEO, David Meintjes.
The rise of the Experience Centre
Dominic Black highlighted the global shift from traditional voice-centric call centres to multi-channel contact centres, and now towards comprehensive experience centres that handle multiple channels like chat and messaging, and introduce automation and self-service.
Despite the growth in new channels, Black pointed out that phone calls and email remain the top preferred methods for customer contact globally, with research showing an increase in users wanting to use phones to communicate with businesses, as they recognise it as a reliable way to get issues resolved. SMS is also seeing solid growth due to high engagement rates and universal accessibility, and while video hasn’t become mainstream, it has niche use cases in enhancing the customer experience.
The South African Customer Experience landscape
According to Geerdts, BMIT’s research confirmed a massive, long-term drop in traditional voice service revenue in South Africa, for both mobile and fixed lines, with platforms such as Microsoft Teams and WhatsApp being seen as alternatives to traditional voice. WhatsApp is especially crucial in South Africa, and is often a digital starting point for customers, with younger customers in particular tending to prefer online support over voice.
Geerdts explained that this was part of a larger digital transformation arc that started in the early ‘90s, progressing through the platform and creator economies, and the Internet of Things. However, he added that South Africa was not yet fully in the “Gigabit society” phase seen in developed economies with widespread, affordable fast internet and high Fourth Industrial Revolution technology adoption. While South Africa follows a similar trajectory for contact centre development, he said these differences were significant for local customer experience strategy.
Shift to Cloud driving growth in SA
BMIT’s research shows that a major growth driver in South Africa is the shift to cloud-based communication. Cloud solutions strongly support remote work, and were proven essential during COVID-19.
A challenge in South Africa is uneven access to reliable home internet. Despite this, cloud adoption in the contact centre space is strong, growing at 10% per annum, while the adoption of the ‘contact centre’ concept itself is also growing rapidly, with a 50% growth in uptake.
Local businesses are embracing Generative AI
Geerdts highlighted Generative AI as the defining development of our time, and as a technology that is capable of accelerating digital transformation, and cautioned that South Africa risks falling further behind globally if it doesn’t proactively adopt AI.
In South Africa, large enterprises are integrating AI into contact centres primarily to enhance agent performance rather than immediate replacement. In these instances, AI provides agents with real-time information, automates routine tasks, and offers predictive insights, freeing up human agents to deal with complex queries and enhancing the overall customer experience.
He pointed out that bots and virtual agents were common, even on WhatsApp in South Africa, offering benefits like rapid information retrieval, faster responses, consistency, and error prevention. However, early implementations can still be frustrating, leading to endless loops.
The webinar also explores:
- Key priorities for contact centre buyers
- Customer experience trends
- Successful AI implementation
- Omnichannel engagement
- Catering to language diversity
- Finding balance between humans and automation
- And more…
Whether you require an inbound/outbound call centre solution for voice or an omnichannel solution integrating multiple digital channels, Telviva’s Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) solution provides comprehensive platforms to streamline your contact centre operations. Contact us today.
