Kathy Gibson reports – Customer service in South African is in a unique space: although there’s high smartphone adoption, the last-mile experience is still missing.
Julian Dawkins, principal product marketing manager at Infobip, believes the country – and the continent as a whole – offer a unique opportunity.
In South Africa, Infobip research indicates that there will be a $20-billion e-commerce opportunity by 2027. But only 5% of these are conversational opportunities today.
At the same time, only 12% of local retailers are using WhatsApp channels, despite the fact that WhatsApp has the second-highest penetration in this market at 78,89%.
“We are seeing theadoption of AI agents,” Dawkins says. “But it’s a trickle down in terms of cost compared to live agents.”
South African consumers are well acquainted with the super-app – but there are a number of strong players, so users still find themselves interacting with various super-apps for different use cases.
“You may be doing all your banking through one company, and all your payments with another, and deal with yet another to finish the conversation,” Dawkins points out.
Currenlty, the most common use case for conversational use cases with WhatsApp is self-serve banking, followed by buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) applications.
Insurance quotes and claims handling are also seeing some use, followed by automated load and credit journeys, and flash sales and payday alerts.
“What is lacking is last mile delivery,” Dawkins says. “South Africa has 11 official languages, but must chatbots are English.”
At the same time, legacy banking and telco systems means some modern tools can’t connect. And load shedding can take contact centres offline unexpectedly.
With monthly salary cycles, South Africans battle with cashflow issues. And many consumers in the informal economy fall outside of standard CRM profiles.
There can be some complex legal issues associated with unified portals as well, Dawkins points out. This is compounded by high fraud rates that force over-verification at every touch point.
He adds that a concerning feature of most South African consumers is the fact that they tend to ignore automated messages
As artificial intelligence (AI), and particularly agentic AI, develop, the tools for bridging the last mile are evolving now, Dawkins adds.
Infobip yesterday launched its AgentOS into the South African market, helping to orchestrate agents and create a smooth experience for consumers.
The new platform builds on Infobip’s AI Agents, an intelligent foundation for autonomous customer communications.
AI communication models enable autonomous customer communications, hyper-personalisation and highly engaging content across multiple channels. However, AI agents need a unified view of all customer touchpoints to deliver such benefits.
Businesses need to eliminate data silos, but readiness is low and few enterprise AI agent projects reach production due to unstructured data and internal barriers.
AgentOS helps to overcome these barriers, operationalising AI safely and at scale across the enterprise.
AgentOS combines Infobip’s Conversational Customer Data Platform with real-time journey orchestration to deliver one and two-way contextual engagement across all natively integrated channels.
With its human-in-the-loop model, AI manages scalability and efficiency while human specialists intervene to address complex issues, continuously training and refining the AI agents.