Capitec has announced Pulse, an artificial intelligence (AI) capability that changes how clients experience support through its contact centre.
For the first time, clients are assisted by contact centre agents who already know what issues to address at every interaction. This eliminates the frustration clients can feel when needing to explain an issue from scratch at exactly the moment when clarity and speed matter most.
Pulse is an AI-enabled tool, triggered when a client contacts the support call centre through the Capitec app. It draws on contextual information about a client’s situation in real time as they make contact, giving agents an immediate, accurate picture before a question is asked.
“With Pulse, real-time support begins with understanding rather than interrogation,” says Andrew Baker, CIO at Capitec. “Faster resolution is part of it, but what we are really solving for is delivering an effortless experience for our clients when they are feeling the most frustrated.”
Removing friction when it matters most
When something goes wrong, the last thing clients need is to have to repeat themselves. Yet traditional call centre support often begins with a series of questions: Who are you? What happened? When did it start?
Those first few minutes can feel slow and frustrating, especially when a transaction has been declined, a service is disrupted, or an account query is urgent. Pulse removes that friction by helping agents to understand the client’s situation before the conversation begins.
Pulse brings information together so that agents already have the context when the call begins. In practice, that means an agent has information ready about what the client has experienced (whether a declined transaction, service disruption, or a query around account limits) and how best to help them.
This way, clients spend less time explaining and more time getting the support they need.
Testing data over three months shows the tool’s impact on client support efficiency. Without Pulse, agents in the testing group took approximately 7% more time to resolve issues compared to the all-agent average for Capitec’s client care centre.
Once this group started using Pulse, they reduced their call handling times by up to 18%, a net performance improvement of 26%.
“These results show that when you remove friction at the start of an interaction, everything changes. Clients feel heard from the outset, and agents can focus on what they are there to do: solve the problem,” says Baker.
Pulse activates only when a client contacts Capitec for support, and only during that interaction. It analyses limited data necessary to diagnose and help resolve a specific issue. The tool is event-triggered, time-limited, and used exclusively during active support interactions to resolve problems safely while protecting clients.