Voice still handles the majority of customer interactions in South Africa, yet you would not know it from the way our industry talks.
Spend five minutes at any conference or on LinkedIn and you would assume the contact centre has already become an AI laboratory. Automation is the headline. Generative AI is the future. Bots are the strategy. The conversation is almost entirely about what’s next. Very little of it is about what is still carrying the business today.
Because today, in South Africa, that is voice.
The 2025 ContactBabel Inner Circle Guide to South African Contact Centres shows that 59% of inbound interactions are still handled by live telephony. Digital sits at 35%. That is growth, yes. But it is not dominance. Voice is still the primary channel customers use when they need something resolved. More importantly, it is the channel they use when things go wrong.
The same research shows that live telephony is the most recommended channel for complaints and sales enquiries. When money is involved, when trust is shaken, when urgency rises, customers do not double down on chatbots. They pick up the phone. Digital may begin the interaction, but voice still decides the outcome. And escalation is not a fringe scenario.
Roughly a quarter of inbound calls come from customers who have already tried to resolve their issue online. Web chat does not contain everything either – around 22% of chats require another channel to complete the journey. Social media escalates even more frequently. Digital is expanding, but it is not resolving complexity at scale. Yet this is where the imbalance starts to show.
Despite voice carrying the majority of inbound volume and absorbing the emotional weight of escalation, more CX investment is directed towards digital than telephony. Over half of CX budgets are focused on digital channels, while voice receives less. We are pouring money into expansion while the stabilising layer carries the pressure.
This is not an argument against AI. South Africa is actually ahead of many mature markets in AI adoption. Sixty-six percent of contact centres report some level of AI use, and very few see it as a headcount reduction tool. AI is being positioned correctly as a performance enhancer. That is healthy. But automation does not eliminate complexity; it simply changes how it is experienced.
When a chatbot cannot interpret nuance, the call centre absorbs it. When self-service frustrates a customer, the voice agent inherits the tone of that frustration. When digital journeys stall, voice becomes the repair mechanism. If that repair mechanism is not integrated, connected and context-rich, the damage compounds.
The irony is that South Africa is operationally strong in voice. Average speed to answer sits at 27 seconds. Abandonment rates are low. First-contact resolution is high. These are not signs of a declining channel. They are signs of a disciplined one. And yet voice is rarely framed as strategic.
We speak about it as infrastructure. As legacy. As something to be optimised quietly while the real innovation happens elsewhere. That framing is dangerous. Because voice is not the past. It is the convergence point of everything else we are building.
Half of South African contact centres acknowledge that siloed channels are preventing a full omnichannel view of the customer. That is not a technology shortage. It is an integration failure. Customers do not think in channels. They think in problems. When they move between digital and voice, they expect the organisation to move with them. Too often, it does not.
The agent becomes the integration layer, reconstructing context manually while the customer waits. That reconstruction costs time, trust and money. It also masks the real issue: we are expanding faster than we are connecting.
South Africa is not behind. Cloud penetration is high, AI adoption is strong and digital usage is growing. But maturity is not measured by the number of channels you offer. It is measured by how well they work together and how well the escalation channel is protected.
Voice is still where accountability lives, and until digital channels can fully resolve complexity without escalation, voice will remain the anchor of customer experience. It is where trust is rebuilt. It is where emotion is managed. It is where reputations are protected. AI may shape the horizon but voice still carries the heavy load of it all.
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