Seventy-two percent of South African consumers say their financial position has stagnated or deteriorated over the past year, and they are responding not by chasing the cheapest option but by scrutinising every purchase more carefully. That finding sits at the centre of the 2026 South African Customer Experience Report, now in its eighth consecutive year, which surveyed 2,000 consumers across income groups and 56 business executives during the second quarter of 2026.
The economic backdrop is specific: 5% inflation, fluctuating oil prices and GDP growth of just 1.2%. Against that pressure, consumers are weighing price against quality, reliability, effort and the risk of a wrong decision. Half of consumers identify finding the best deal as an important quality in customer-facing staff. Only 7% of business leaders recognise this as a priority. That gap is not a rounding error. It is a structural misread.
What changed most sharply is where consumers go before they ever contact a brand. Almost a quarter, 23%, now use AI search tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity to compare products and prices, find deals and discounts, and answer questions. That figure has more than doubled in a year. Yet three-quarters of businesses surveyed have no active strategy for managing how they appear in AI-generated answers.
The shift is moving beyond research into action. Sixty-seven percent of consumers say they would be comfortable allowing AI to fill a shopping cart. Sixty-two percent would use AI to place a meal-delivery order. Around half would allow AI to book travel or medical appointments on their behalf. One in four consumers turns to AI first when they need help solving a problem. Again, only 7% of businesses recognise this behaviour.
Charlie Stewart, CEO of Rogerwilco and one of the report’s authors, frames the implication plainly. Consumers increasingly expect information to be available immediately, easy to understand and capable of answering anything that matters to them. “The quality of any organisation’s digital footprint has therefore become part of the customer experience itself,” he says.
Meanwhile, the consequences of falling short are getting harder to read from the outside. Eighty-one percent of consumers experienced a negative customer experience in the past 12 months, up from 76% in 2024. Yet fewer are saying so publicly. Just 24% post about poor experiences on social media or review platforms, compared with 50% in 2023. Most simply leave.
Amanda Reekie, founding director of ovatoyou, identifies the risk this creates for operators and brand managers. “The danger is that businesses may interpret declining complaints as improving customer experience when customers have simply stopped telling them what is wrong,” she says. Switching, she adds, is increasingly driven by the overall value equation rather than price alone. “The effort to buy, maintain or resolve problems becomes an emotional and practical tax they are not willing to pay for. Wasted time, effort and costly mistakes matter more than price.”
Traditional measurement tools are compounding the problem. Seventy-nine percent of businesses still rely on surveys to collect customer feedback, yet 48% of consumers say they either ignore surveys, give a neutral score despite being unhappy, or report a more positive score than their actual experience warrants. Combined with the drop in public complaints, this produces a false sense of satisfaction at the executive level.
The report, produced by Stewart, Reekie and Julia Ahlfeldt of Julia Ahlfeldt CX Consulting, recommends complementing Net Promoter Score and Customer Satisfaction measures with behavioural indicators: retention, repeat purchases, cart abandonment, complaints, reviews and actual churn. Reekie calls for a composite view. “Businesses need a multi-dimensional, composite view of their customer’s context that combines survey scores with deep consumer research and hard behavioural data like repeat purchases, cart abandonments, and actual churn,” she says.
The report’s conclusion is direct: customer experience no longer begins at the point of purchase. AI has moved it earlier, into the research and comparison phase, where brand promises are tested before a transaction ever takes place. For businesses still optimising the post-purchase journey while ignoring their AI footprint and behavioural data, the question is how much silent attrition is already underway.