South Africa’s cell community clients’ most urgent want is to be heard and have their issues solved personally, transparently and rapidly – with social media as their key contact level with their service suppliers.
That’s simply one of many main takeaways from DataEQ’s 2026 SA Telecoms Buyer Expertise Index report, which analysed over 653 000 social media mentions throughout X, Fb, and HelloPeter between October 2025 and March 2026. The outcomes confirmed that three of the 5 main cell community operators recorded a internet damaging operational sentiment, after scores throughout customer support, account administration, community high quality and responsiveness on social media platforms had been aggregated. The bottom scores – throughout community high quality and customer support – dragged your complete business’s operational internet sentiment to -8%, revealing a serious hole between what suppliers promise to ship and the expertise clients even have.
A rain spokesperson says the corporate may be proud to guide the pack with an operational internet sentiment of +16%, however acknowledges that the outcomes and insights show that your complete business has loads of room to enhance its providing to raised serve its clients. “We’re continually working to enhance our community high quality, product & service providing and the way in which we have interaction with our clients – and it’s telling that the report reveals that these focus areas are the three which clients maintain as most necessary in deciding on a cell community operator. The report offers us perception into the truth that we’re heading in the right direction relating to offering a dependable knowledge service for our clients and having our brokers capable of resolve many issues rapidly – and following up to verify the client’s subject has been resolved to their satisfaction”.
DataEQ Analyst Tebogo Maluleke says of the outcomes: “What separates the leaders from the remainder isn’t just product high quality. It’s whether or not customers felt the model was on their aspect when issues went mistaken. rain and Cell C generated real, natural reward for service decision and knowledge reliability. The manufacturers in damaging territory weren’t going through remoted complaints; customers described the identical failures repeating, throughout the identical channels, with out decision.”
The rain group acknowledges that customer support ranges can all the time be improved, however that additionally requires nearer collaboration between the group receiving the question and the technical groups which tackle it. “There are such a lot of complicated steps to fixing a difficulty between both recognising it internally or receiving a buyer question – and correcting it and informing our clients that it’s been resolved. The complexity of working a national cell community isn’t going anyplace, so we deal with enhancing inner communication, enhancing AI decision functionality and empowering our groups to deal with challenges straight in order that when points do arrive, they’re resolved extra rapidly and our clients are stored up to date on the end result. It’s clear that belief and transparency have gotten aggressive benefits as clients’ expertise of how their challenges are acknowledged and resolved turns into an more and more necessary differentiator for operators in a aggressive market”.
Extra detailed info from the Sentiment Index is obtainable on the DataEQ web site.
Picture credit score:
Rodion Kutsaiev/ Unsplash
