AI has changed the game by empowering consumers with access to detailed product, price and information. While current and prospective customers want deals, discounts and value, they are using AI Search before engaging with an actual brand or business, finds the 2026 South African Customer Experience Report.
With a 5% inflation rate – the highest in two years – the oscillating oil price and stagnant economic growth of a meagre 1,2%, consumers are battling it out with brands and businesses that show little empathy for their customers.
While 72% of consumers report that their financial position has either stagnated or deteriorated over the past year, half (50%) of consumers say helping them find the best deal is an important quality when dealing with customer-facing staff. Only 7% of business leaders identify this as a priority however. This growing gap reflects a fundamental shift in the role customer experience plays in people’s lives.
The report, now in its eighth year, is based on insights from 2 000 low to high income earning consumers and 56 business executives surveyed during the second quarter of this year. The 2026 study shows that money is tight and the decision to buy anything is even tighter.
The 2026 report is annually produced by co-authors Rogerwilco CEO, Charlie Stewart, online research platform ovatoyou’s Founding Director Amanda Reekie and Julia Ahlfeldt of Julia Ahlfeldt CX Consulting. It should be noted that an online survey results in a self-selected sample, which tends to be more homogenous (higher likelihood of the same answers) than a survey based on random sampling.
Doing the maths
Consumers are not only cost-cutting, they are calculating the risk and reward at the till point, questioning if what they want is worth buying.
Shoppers across the board are asking if purchases are worth their price, value, and calculating if they should spend their hard-earned cash on products or services.
The economy aside, AI has changed the game by empowering consumers with access to detailed product, price and information. While current and prospective customers want deals, discounts and value, they are using AI Search before engaging with an actual brand or business.
What this means for any commercial product or service is that potential buyers are informed about the brands or businesses they may buy from before they even directly engage with them.
And if they don’t find what they want, consumers silently leave without said brands and businesses even knowing: almost half of survey respondents reported that they would stop shopping or use the services of a business that had disappointed them with a poor experience.
Agentic AI puts the power in consumers’ pockets
Technology, turbocharged through agentic AI, gives consumers more ways to interrogate brands before deciding whether to buy from them.
AI search is a customer’s first port of call. It is now firmly part of the customer experience with almost a quarter of consumers (23%) using AI Search (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, etc.,) to compare products and prices, find discounts and deals and “Ask Anything” questions. Within just a year this behaviour has more than doubled, yet three quarters of the companies surveyed do not have an active strategy to manage how they appear in AI-generated answers.
Today, consumers want immediacy, access to easy information and answers to complex questions, based on their unique needs. Looking for a new car? Comparing holiday destinations? Need to know whether Pick n Pay or Checkers offers better deals? AI Search is what consumers are using. And it is happening in milliseconds.
This matters to brands and businesses as when customers encounter them, they need evidence that answers their questions and helps them decide what to buy what, where.
“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,” reveals Rogerwilco CEO Charlie Stewart.
Of significance, AI use is moving beyond search into action. Some 67% of consumers say that they would be comfortable with AI to fill a shopping cart, with a noteworthy 62% saying that they would be comfortable to place a meal-delivery order online while around half claim that they would hand over the reins to AI to book travel or even medical appointments, among everything else.
“AI is more than just another Google,” says Julia Ahlfeldt, “Consumers aren’t only using it to find information, they’re starting to use it to make decisions and take action on their behalf.”
At the other end of the customer journey, when consumers need help solving a problem, one in four turns first to AI for answers. Yet just 7% of businesses recognise this, with a third (32%) still assuming customers would rather call a contact centre.
Calculating costs
While money is tight, consumers are not just tightening their belts, they want more value. Consumers are now applying a broader value equation to their purchasing decisions, weighing price against quality, reliability, effort and the risk of making the wrong decision.
“Consumers are making every Rand count and every purchase is now a high-stakes calculation. Every hidden fee, out-of-stock item, defective product or confusing return policy increases the perceived cost of doing business,” comments Ahlfeldt.
Saving time, effort and avoiding costly mistakes are the new guardrails in this financially constrained environment. And value is more important than price.
Silent deal-breakers
During the past 12 months, this year’s report found that 81% of consumers experienced a negative customer experience. This is up from 76% in 2024. Yet many are staying quiet about it: just 24% post about poor experiences on social media or review platforms, compared to 50% in 2023.
They simply leave: Silence should not be mistaken for satisfaction.
“The danger is that businesses may interpret declining complaints as improving customer experience when customers have simply stopped telling them what is wrong,” says Reekie.
She goes on to say that “when respondents explain why they switch brands, it is rarely a simple reaction to a price change. Instead they describe a tipping point where the total value equation no longer makes sense. 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,” she says.
False feedback
This year’s report suggests that there is another challenge to take firm note of: traditional customer experience measurement may provide businesses with only part of this fast changing picture.
While surveys remain the dominant way organisations collect customer feedback, 79% of businesses still use them. However, the customer research shows that survey responses do not always accurately reflect their experience.
Almost half (48%) of consumers either ignore surveys, provide a neutral score despite being unhappy, or give a more positive score than the experience itself. Combined with the decline in public complaints, this creates the possibility of a significant blind spot: customers may appear satisfied in CX dashboards while their actual behaviour tells a different story.
The report argues that organisations therefore need to complement traditional metrics such as NPS and CSAT with behavioural evidence including retention, repeat purchase, abandonment, complaints, reviews and switching behaviour.
“This isn’t about throwing out traditional metrics like CSAT or NPS, but more about contextualising them. 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.” says Reekie.
The new Economics of CX
What the outcome of this year’s report clearly reveals is that a new CX Economy exists. And it’s being driven by consumers who are less financially strong yet who use AI Search to give them the power to find what they want, immediately.
Consumers are far more digitally empowered to research, compare and interrogate purchasing decisions. They want better deals but not necessarily the cheapest alongside the confidence that the value promised will actually be delivered. Several will not give businesses another opportunity to persuade them otherwise.
“Customer experience is no longer simply about what happens after somebody buys from you,” says Stewart. “Increasingly, it determines whether they buy from you at all. South Africans are doing the maths, comparing prices, using reviews and online Search while increasingly turning to AI to test what brands tell them. Businesses can make promises, but customer experience provides the proof.”
The value of Value
For organisations, the implications are clear: CX is no longer simply about service and delight. It’s not enough to offer a good deal while ignoring operational faultlines. Consumers are carefully weighing up their decisions, and quietly leaving the brands that break their trust. With AI at their fingertips, and what it says just about anything asked, we have entered a new era of Customer Experience.
The economy will likely continue to suffer, the oil price will oscillate and the SARB may or may not hike interest rates in September. Whatever happens economically, today’s consumer wants more bang for their buck and are happy to disappear never to reappear or explain why they no longer want to buy from brands and businesses that don’t offer to give them what they need: trust, value, convenience, reliability and confidence.
The rules of CX are being rewritten.