Tag: customer complaints

With Black Friday around the corner, South African retailers are gearing up for one of the busiest shopping days of the year. Unfortunately, most are ignoring a vital element in ensuring they are ready for the influx of shoppers. Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become staples of the South African calendar, with shoppers spending billions of Rands on deals.

The Consumer Protection Act (68 of 2008) was launched in 2008 and provides South Africans with key protections against the ambiguous wording and vague language traditionally associated with some contracts and professional literature.

The customer satisfaction gap between South Africa’s banks is closing rapidly, with the digital acceleration brought about by the pandemic being a significant equaliser. Banks are under significant pressure to reinvent their customer value propositions and differentiators at a time when technology and digitisation are making them increasingly invisible to their customers - until things go wrong.

The insurance 'grudge purchase' can open a world of valuable personal engagement and revenue opportunities in a well-designed service ecosystem. As insurance products become more homogenous and industry competition intensifies, insurers need ways to differentiate themselves and stay relevant.

In 1985 the South African insurance industry voluntarily launched the Ombudsman for Long Term Insurance system. The Ombudsman for Short Term Insurance (OSTI) was launched some four years later in 1989. These bodies operated independently and separately from one another until last year.

When South Africa entered into a hard and extended national lockdown on 27 March 2020, banks responded rapidly and empathetically to their account holders' financial crisis. According to the Banking Association of South Africa (BASA), as at 24 October 2020, banks had provided over R50 billion in financial relief – R33,61 billion in payment breaks on credit agreements and R16,71 billion under the loan guarantee scheme – to South African businesses and individuals.

As traditional media strategies faltered, 2020 highlighted the growing relevance of social media marketing and the need for businesses to relook customer engagement. Social media usage soared – both in number of users and amount of time spent on social media platforms.

The relentless drive towards digital banking is making banks ‘invisible’, leaving customers looking for more value, human engagement and diversity of transactional channels according to the South African Customer Satisfaction Index (SA-csi) for banking.