South African Consumers Now Seek AI Answers Before Reaching Out to Brands, Report Shows

South Africa's 2026 Customer Experience Report, now in its eighth consecutive year, opens with a number that should unsettle any retail strategist: 23% of consumers now turn to AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity before contacting a brand directly. That figure more than doubled within a single year. Three-quarters of the businesses surveyed have no active strategy for managing how they appear in AI-generated answers. The report, produced by Charlie Stewart of Rogerwilco, Amanda Reekie of ovatoyou, and Julia Ahlfeldt of Julia Ahlfeldt CX Consulting, drew on surveys of 2,000 consumers and 56 business executives conducted during the second quarter of 2026. Its findings land against a difficult economic backdrop: 5% inflation, fluctuating oil prices, and GDP growth of just 1.2%. Under those conditions, 72% of consumers say their financial position has stagnated or deteriorated over the past year. They are not simply hunting for the cheapest option. They are weighing price against quality, reliability, effort, and the risk of a wrong decision. That scrutiny shows up in a striking gap between what consumers want from staff and what businesses think they want. Half of all consumers identified finding the best deal as important in a customer-facing interaction. Only 7% of business leaders recognized it as a priority. That is not a rounding error. It is a fundamental misalignment. Stewart articulated what the AI shift means in practice. Consumers expect information to be immediate, clear, 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 said. The adoption of AI tools is moving well beyond research. Sixty-seven percent of consumers said 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. One in four consumers turns to AI first when they need help solving a problem. Again, only 7% of businesses acknowledged recognizing this behaviour in their customer base. By contrast, the signals businesses rely on to measure satisfaction are becoming less reliable. 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, down from 50% in 2023. Most simply leave. Reekie named the risk directly. "The danger is that businesses may interpret declining complaints as improving customer experience when customers have simply stopped telling them what is wrong," she said. Switching behaviour, she added, is driven by the overall value equation, not 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 for customer feedback. Yet 48% of consumers reported that 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 what the report describes as a false sense of satisfaction at the executive level. The report recommends that businesses move beyond Net Promoter Score and Customer Satisfaction measures toward behavioural indicators: retention rates, repeat purchases, cart abandonment, complaints, reviews, and actual churn. Reekie called for a composite approach. "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 said. What changed, the report argues, is when the customer experience actually begins. AI has moved the critical moment earlier, into the research and comparison phase, where brand promises are tested before a transaction ever takes place. For businesses still optimizing the post-purchase journey while their AI footprint goes unmanaged and behavioural data goes untracked, the open question is how much silent attrition is already underway and whether they would even know it if it were.