{"id":539933,"date":"2024-06-06T16:58:09","date_gmt":"2024-06-06T14:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=539933"},"modified":"2024-06-06T16:58:09","modified_gmt":"2024-06-06T14:58:09","slug":"south-africans-hate-their-network-operator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/telecoms\/539933-south-africans-hate-their-network-operator.html","title":{"rendered":"South Africans hate their network operator"},"content":{"rendered":"

South Africa’s Internet service providers and the telecommunications industry have the lowest net customer sentiment out of all sectors in the country, according to a new PwC report.<\/p>\n

PWC has released its customer sentiment index, which tracked Internet service providers (ISPs) and telecommunications as separate sectors.<\/p>\n

The report tracked over 1,617,345 mentions of South Africa’s telcos, namely Cell C, MTN, Rain, Telkom, and Vodacom, from 1 January to 31 December 2023.<\/p>\n

Both the ISP and the telecoms industry had net negative customer sentiment scores of -41.2% and -18.8%, respectively.<\/p>\n

This seems to be a recurring trend for the telecoms industry.<\/p>\n

The report notes that “customer sentiment in the telecommunications industry appears to be significantly more negative than other industries such as retail, banking or insurance.”<\/p>\n

For reference, the index gave the retail and banking industries scores of 8.8%\u00a0 and 23.5% respectively.<\/p>\n

Only Rain had a positive public sentiment score (9.2%) of all the telcos studied.<\/p>\n

It found that Rain had done tremendous work to improve its public sentiment as this score is a 67.5 percentage point jump from 2020.<\/p>\n

PwC said this increase was due to the “effective use of interactive competitions that helped generate positive feedback towards products and offerings.”<\/p>\n

Therefore, it is important to differentiate between public sentiment and customer satisfaction.<\/p>\n

Customer satisfaction data collected using a survey<\/a> will not be an aggregate of all mentions but rather direct questions or ratings concerning the quality of the service.<\/p>\n

However, public sentiment collected from social media can be inflated by encouraging positive interactions for competitions and the like.<\/p>\n

It should be noted that Rain is not the only operator that does this \u2014 its competitors also regularly run giveaways on their social media channels.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

PwC’s report argued that ISPs’ low customer sentiment is due to service issues and network quality complaints.<\/p>\n

Negative sentiment towards telcos also came down to service issues relating to poor feedback and issue resolution.<\/p>\n

Customer service, accounting for 27.7% of all industry conversation, was particularly poor, although it improved to -87.7% from -90.6% in 2022.<\/p>\n

This is not surprising, as people generally take to social media to engage with a company when they are discontent with service they have received.<\/p>\n

PwC said the majority of these customer service contacts were directed at call centres, suggesting that South Africans still rely heavily on this channel for support.<\/p>\n

Out of all channels of contact, however, mobile apps were the channel that yielded the least negative sentiment.<\/p>\n

Network coverage, mobile data reliability, and complicated SIM card processes were the most common pain points identified.<\/p>\n

As a result, the report identified a “significant number” of telco customers that showed a sentiment of unfair treatment.<\/p>\n

However, Telcos realised positive sentiment towards their reputational campaigns and promotional content from influential authors.<\/p>\n

“As such, telecoms should continue leveraging marketing strategies to drive reputational positivity and focus on improving customer experience.”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

South Africa’s telecoms and ISP sectors ranked at the bottom of PwC’s customer sentiment index.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341175,"featured_media":539951,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[355,35,42,43716,109,41],"class_list":["post-539933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-telecoms","tag-cell-c","tag-headline","tag-mtn","tag-rain","tag-telkom","tag-vodacom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539933"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539933"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":539959,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539933\/revisions\/539959"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}