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, says the report.

Only 7% of business leaders identify this as a priority however. This growing gap could reflect a fundamental shift in the role customer experience plays in people's lives, adds the report.

The 2026 South African Customer Experience Report, now in its eighth consecutive year, is based on insights from 2 000 low to high income earning consumers and 56 business executives during the second quarter of this year, the 2026 study aims to show that money is low and the decision to buy anything is even lower.

The 2026 report is annually produced by Co-Authors, Charlie Stewart, CEO of Rogerwilco, Amanda Reekie, Founding Director of ovatoyou and Julia Ahlfeldt of Julia Ahlfeldt CX Consulting.

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, says the report.

The economy aside, AI works to empower consumers with access to detailed product, price and information. While current and prospective customers may want deals, discounts and value, they are using AI Search before engaging with an actual brand or business, says the report.

What this could mean 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, adds the report.

If they don't find what they want, consumers may 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, says the report.

AI search is a customer's destination. It is now becoming part of the customer experience with almost a quarter of consumers — 23% — using AI Search — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and others — to compare products and prices, find discounts and deals and "Ask Anything" questions. Within 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, adds the report.

Today, consumers want immediacy, access to easy information and answers to complex questions, based on their unique needs. AI Search is what consumers are incresingly using, adds the report.

This matters to brands and businesses because 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," says Charlie Stewart, CEO of Rogerwilco.

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 62% saying that they would be comfortable to place a meal-delivery order online while around half claim that they would allow AI to book travel or even medical appointments, among everything else, says the report.

"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. 7% of businesses recognise this, with a third — 32% — still assuming customers would rather call a contact centre, says the report.

Calculcting Costs

While money is scarcer, consumers 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, says the report.

"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," adds Ahlfeldt. 

Saving time, effort and avoiding costly mistakes are the new guardrails in this financial environment. And value is becoming more important than price, says the report.

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: 24% post about poor experiences on social media or review platforms, compared to 50% in 2023, says the report.

They leave: The reports says that 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.

"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," Reekie adds. "Wasted time, effort and costly mistakes matter more than price." 

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, says the report.

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, says the report.

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 aims to reveal 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.

"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 that 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, says the report. 

Today's consumer wants more for what they pay and are liekly to stop buyinh from brands and businesses that don't offer to give them what they need: trust, value, convenience, reliability and confidence, concludes the report.

View the full report here.

For more information, visit www.rogerwilco.co.za. You can also follow Rogerwilco on Facebook, LinkedIn, or on X.

*Image courtesy of contributor