South Africa’s telecommunications industry has ranked last for consumer sentiment, for the third consecutive year.

The latest PWC South African Telecommunications Sentiment Index for 2022, conducted in collaboration with DataEQ, has revealed that the telecommunications industry lags behind the banking, insurance and food retail industries when it comes to customer sentiment.

The report shows that 90% of telecommunications consumers are unhappy with the service they received during 2022.

With an overall score of -14%, the country’s network providers underperformed other sectors in a cross-industry net sentiment comparison, suggesting that South Africans had a generally worse experience with telecommunications than their retailer, insurers or banks.

The insurance industry’s net sentiment improved 8.9 percentage points to 1.4%, while retail improved 1.9 percentage points to 3.3% and banking improved 5.3 percentage points to 9.4%.

However, the telecommunications industry did achieve the largest yearly improvement in net sentiment, up 17.1 percentage points year-on-year.

The index includes data and analysis for MTN South Africa, Vodacom South Africa, Telkom, rain and Cell C.

While all five telecommunications companies included in the index scored negatively overall, MTN obtained the highest net sentiment of -5.2%, mostly owing to positivity driven by brand campaigns. Despite a small improvement of 1.5 percentage points from last year, MTN’s net sentiment lead narrowed.

The index noted that, after two years of steady progress, MTN’s year-on-year net sentiment progress plateaued in 2022, allowing some competitors to close the gaps on the overall public ranking.

While loadshedding continued to hamper signal reliability, Vodacom received the lowest proportion of complaints and some praise around their uninterrupted coverage, indicating that Vodacom’s investment in backup batteries was yielding positive outcomes for customers.

“Poor connection quality is behind the bulk of network complaints. Telecommunications companies that invested heavily in network quality and network resilience during loadshedding saw positive sentiment.”

Customer service, meanwhile, accounted for 43.7% of the telecommunications’ industry conversations, 95.1% of which was negative.

“In analysing these conversations, staff behaviour came through as a strong theme in customer service complaints, along with issues around unresponsiveness and a lack of feedback,” the report pointed out.

A large percentage, at 65.4%, of these complaints originate from engagements that customers have with the call centres, which suggests that, despite the growing availability of digital channels, telecommunications customers continue to rely heavily on telephonic support, often with disappointing results.

This emphasised the importance of having competent and well-resourced support teams.

The data shows that reaching out to telecommunications companies on social media is likely to only compound consumers’ frustrations, with response rates to priority conversations sitting at 48.9%.

According to the report, priority conversations refer to customer interactions or queries that relate to: reputational or operational risk (risk); acquisition opportunities (purchase); retention improvement or churn risk reduction (cancel); and customer service feedback and requests (service).

“The fact that telecommunications companies are letting half of this actionable conversation go unanswered is a clear sign that there needs to be greater integration between social customer service teams and broader support teams within the businesses,” says DataEQ telecoms lead Liska Kloppers.

“In order to compete with banks and successfully make the shift from telco to tech-co, South African operators need to make customer-centricity a priority, employing service solutions that are human-led and tech-powered to create seamless experiences,” adds PwC South Africa experience consulting lead Riaan Singh, urging the companies to take the necessary steps to address customer service inefficiencies.

To effectively compete with local financial services companies, such as banks and insurers, telecommunications companies need to put immediate measures in place to improve their customer service and support capabilities.

“Financial services like insurance, lending and payments are already contributing to the telecommunications’ revenues, and with possible regulatory changes on the horizon, there is a significant opportunity for telecommunications companies to grow in this area,” says PwC Africa telecommunications, media and technology leader Elmo Hildebrand.

This is as South African telecommunications providers transform their business models, looking to use their scale and customer relationships to diversify into a range of digital lifestyle services.

“As these companies look to continue expanding into financial services, they recognise the need to become a more digital and technology-focused company that offers a wider range of value-added services beyond just traditional communication services. While telecommunications business models are changing rapidly, customers still expect the basics to be done consistently and to a high standard, and the data shows us that telecommunications companies are falling short in this respect compared with banks and insurers.”

The South African Telecommunications Sentiment Index is compiled from social media data and reflects the net sentiment of local consumers toward their telecommunications service providers.