Customer experience, or CX, is how a customer feels when interacting with your business.
It can be shaped by one defining moment or develop over time, from first discovering your brand to placing an order, making a payment or asking for help. Each interaction can influence whether a customer chooses to return.
A positive experience builds confidence, loyalty, and advocacy. A poor one can do the opposite. Experiences also travel. Before choosing a business, people look to friends, online reviews and influencers for validation.
Negative feedback can potentially discourage new customers before a business has an opportunity to win them over.
This is why CX cannot belong to one department. It is shaped by an organisation’s technology, processes, and decisions about how customers are served. It needs to sit at the heart of the business.
The question every business should ask is: How can we make it easier for our customers?
Customers are busy. They do not want to wait on hold, search through a website, or download another app, or log into an app for a simple task. Consider someone who receives a delivery notification about an order but realises nobody will be home.
They should be able to respond immediately:
“My delivery is due today, but I won’t be home. Can I reschedule it for later or tomorrow?”
It is a simple request, yet it may still require a phone call, an app login, a reference number or a lengthy wait.
A well-designed customer experience removes those obstacles and helps the customer complete the task in the moment, using a familiar channel.
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In South Africa and many other markets, WhatsApp is already part of customers’ daily lives.
Customers do not need to learn a new interface or remember another password. They can ask a question, respond to an update, or complete a task, while the conversation history allows customers and service teams to continue without starting again.
WhatsApp can support delivery updates, booking changes, customer service, loyalty benefits, and payments.
Routine enquiries can also be handled automatically, reducing pressure on contact centres and allowing employees to focus on conversations requiring empathy or specialist knowledge.
But the value does not come from simply adding WhatsApp as another channel. It comes from designing journeys that help customers accomplish something useful.
This is where conversational AI can make a real difference. Its most valuable role in customer service is simple: helping customers receive relevant answers and completing routine tasks more quickly.
Conversational AI can recognise what someone is trying to do, collect the necessary information, and help them track an order, request a statement, or change an appointment.
When a query becomes more complex, or the customer needs to speak to a person, the conversation can be handed to a human agent with its context intact. Automation should not create another barrier. It should remove effort and make human support easier to reach.
The next stage of CX is enabling customers to act in chat, from a question to service, payment and confirmation. This can reduce calls and service costs while giving customers greater convenience and control.
For more than 25 years, South African-founded Clickatell has helped businesses connect with customers through secure mobile messaging technology built for high-volume enterprise engagement.
As a Meta Business Partner, Clickatell helps enterprises create WhatsApp journeys spanning notifications, two-way conversations, automated service, human-agent support and payments.
Clickatell helps organisations identify where customers wait, abandon tasks or switch unnecessarily between channels, then design conversational journeys at scale. Businesses can build work flows without extensive coding, automate routine interactions, transfer
customers to human agents when needed, and enable payments in the same conversation.
The result is a connected way for customers to communicate, receive service, and get things done.
Exceptional CX begins with understanding what the customer wants to achieve and removing the friction standing in the way.
WhatsApp, conversational AI and payments can help, but success depends on applying them to genuine customer needs and designing interactions around clarity, convenience and trust.
The businesses that lead customer experience will not necessarily offer the most channels. They will be the ones that make it easiest for customers to achieve what they came to do.
If your organisation wants to reduce customer effort, improve service efficiency and enable customers to get things done in chat, visit the Clickatell stand at CEM Africa or speak to our team about creating a more connected WhatsApp customer journey.
Nadia Lawrence – Clickatell Marketing Manager
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