Liezel Jonkheid | Director and Founder | Consumer Psychology Lab | mail me |
South African consumers are in a fragile state – emotionally, psychologically, and financially. The state of our economy, soaring interest rates, crime, political instability, record load shedding, unemployment, the collapse of local service delivery and the build-up to the 2024 national elections are all taking a significant toll on people’s state of mind, and confidence in the country.
We also cannot underestimate the long-term impact that the changes brought about by the pandemic have had on consumer behaviour, triggered by the rapid and profound disruption of legacy business models across many industries. More than two years of building ‘pandemic resilience’ are now amplified by many complicating local and global macro-factors that are leaving consumers feeling a little more than battered, emotional and downright fatigued.
In fact, the FNB/BER consumer confidence index (CCI) released on 23 March shows that consumer confidence plunged to -23 index points, the lowest point since the second quarter of 2022, when floods hit KwaZulu-Natal and the world was coming to terms with the economic effects of the invasion of Ukraine. In fact, the reading of -23 is the third lowest CCI reading on record since 1994 and illustrates consumer concern and stress about their household finances and SA’s economic prospects. Some of the implications include pressure on spending power, which affects tourism, restaurants and entertainment service, not to mention the avoidance of spending on luxury goods.
CX impact
So, what does any of this have to do with customer experience (CX), and the ability of your business to keep your customers? A lot more than you realise. It would be a terrible underestimation not to consider the impact that all the uncertainty – politically, economically, and socially – has on your customers’ already emotional state, their loyalty and what this all means for customer service and experience.
My take on pressing issues, based on personal experience as a CX specialist, observation, and market research:
- Customers are passive-aggressive
Consumers are fighting to be heard, and not always in expected ways. Three years since the pandemic, we see consumers behaving very differently, with high levels of emotion underpinning behaviour. South Africans have internalised a lot of collective angst and frustration, first with the pandemic, followed by last year’s riots, inconsistent but continued load-shedding, and the uncertainty around the upcoming national elections. Uncertainty is at unprecedented levels, and it is not the optimal state for humans to thrive.
These pent-up emotions may be contributing to some of the over-the-top responses to poor service delivery. South Africans typically talk with their feet, but in the absence of empathy for their challenges, consumers are now slamming doors behind them to vent.
Consumers retaliate when their problems remain unresolved, by using other platforms to tell their story, and hence reviews, Hellopeter, Facebook and Twitter have become popular to vent frustrations. Many consumers find that posting their experience on social media is the fastest way to force brands to connect with them. Passive-aggressive behaviour is noticed also in working with a luxury brand’s customer experience tracking over many years.
We hear more than ever before how customers threaten or think about abandoning the brand, due to not feeling heard, despite loving the brand.
- Dehumanised contact
Just consider your most recent engagement to resolve an issue with your bank, internet or cellular service provider, and how long it took you to deal with a human on the other end, after being pummelled through channels of bots, AI and self-service channels that left you in a heightened state of aggravation?
Despite self-help options intended to scale support to many customers, the lack of…
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Read the full article by Liezel Jonkheid, Director and Founder, Consumer Psychology Lab, as well as a host of other topical management articles written by professionals, consultants and academics in the June/July 2023 edition of BusinessBrief.
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