Cape Town, August 8, 2018:  Africa’s customer experience leaders gathered in Cape Town last week for the 2 day Customer experience Management Africa Summit. The delegation of over 600 customer experience professionals discussed pressing issues such as generating a return on investment in cx, practical application of data and driving emotion to create exceptional experiences.  

South Africa’s customer experience professionals are slowly emerging as some of the best in the world, and the data is there to back this up.  

Sarina de Beer, Managing Director of Ask Afrika stated in her keynote “As mentioned right up-front it is a celebration year. Service levels are at its best ever…with satisfaction ratings of 91%, delight ratings of 54% and very low dissatisfaction scores of 5%. This is largely driven by technological advances and progress, with systems, and technological solutions, self help channels and chat bots in place to deliver bigger, better, faster.”  

Looking into how these results have been achieved, much of it can be contributed to the work customer experience professionals are doing in designing deliberate customer journeys. Diane Magers, CEO of the world’s largest and foremost association for CX professionals, the CXPA, elaborated; “Designing these deliberate customer experience is like building a bridge. Just like any team sport, it takes coordination and a clear understanding of the goals and it requires collaboration and contribution by all team members to ensure the bridge across the support structures is solid and consistent.  Building in silos or vacuums creates an inconsistent experience for our customers. Inconsistent experiences are one of the key factors commonly identified as a factor of dissatisfaction by many other organizations, particularly B2B, as a key opportunity to improve CX.” 

“The results presented by Ask Afrika were for me a great reward and justification for what we do, but great customer experience is a double-edged sword. The better you get, the higher the customers’ expectation and that baseline sets a new bar. You have to keep improving, keep evolving and stay moving when it comes to delivering exceptional customer experience. Finding and nurturing talent in the CX profession will be the next great challenge businesses face within in this industry” Juan Mouton, Portfolio Director for the Customer Experience Management Africa Summit.  

Grace Sikapokoo, the Chief Customer Office for AIG, South Africa spoke on this topic in both her keynote and as part of a panel discussion on customer centricity. The AIG CCO shared five steps to remain relevant and continually skilled; understand your organisation, understand you customers, understand customer experience management, understand technology and most importantly understand your purpose.  

The future for Customer Experience in South Africa is bright and there is much to be positive about, but the challenge will continue to grow harder, and the search for CX talent will be a driving competitive advantage for businesses serious about customer experience through 2018 and beyond.  

Follow @CEMAfricaSummit on Twitter and join the conversation using the #CEMSummit18 hash tag.

ABOUT CEM AFRICA CEM Africa is a meeting place for CX professionals and innovative CX solution providers. The show took place on the 1-2 August 2018 at the CTICC in Cape Town, where like-minded customer experience experts and the top CX solution providers gathered for an informative and educational summit with the common goal of improving customer experience across Africa. The event provides a platform for like-minded CX professionals to showcase their industry knowledge as well as solutions to better the customer’s perception of the brand.

ABOUT KINETIC Kinetic is an international business-to-business conference and exhibitions producer based in Cape Town. Our mission is to equip senior management executives with knowledge, market intelligence and viable commercial opportunities. Kinetic are leaders in providing business facilitation platforms throughout Africa.

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Released by:  KINETIC SA
Juan Mouton:  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

The 2018 edition of CEM Africa will focus on return on investment as the African CX market matures and investment increases.

Kinetic, the organizers of Customer Experience Management Africa, the largest gathering of CX professionals on the African continent, has announced that the primary focus for the 2018 event will be Return on Investment. The summit, held in Cape Town on the 1st and 2nd of August at the Cape Town International Convention Centre will once again see top level delegates in the marketing and CX profession meet to showcase and discuss best practice as well the latest in innovative technology. The event purpose is geared towards the objective of supplying their African customers with a world class customer experience.

Juan Mouton, Portfolio Director for the summit noted the following “The African retail, tourism and financial markets have taken huge leaps forward in customer experience over the last 6 years and as the market matures and investment in CX continues to grow, being able to show a quantifiable return on investment that is linked to business metrics is becoming a critical requirement.” He goes on to mention “Technology plays a huge role in being able to leverage actionable insights on the enormous amounts of data that is collected along the customer journey. The major stumbling point for most organizations is understanding how to extract value from that data, and redeploy those insights to inspire an emotional connection with the consumer that leads to real business results that reflect on the bottom line.” “That is what this year’s summit will aim to tackle and together with industry leaders and our partners we are sure that everyone attending the summit will leave with the ability to create a business led customer experience strategy.”

The 2018 CEM Africa Summit will once again partner with the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), the global professional body overseeing the CX profession. CXPA CEO, Diane Magers will open this years’ conference and host a series of workshops at the event. Commenting on the theme of the conference and the importance of being able to extract value from data Diane said “It is definitely a challenging competency for organizations in general. But, CX professionals are in the unique position to bring together the data and understand the right problem to solve using design thinking and insight generation techniques.  It is teaching the organization what the data means and, not only what they can do with it (with a CX professionals guidance) but also why it is important to leverage the information. It’s incumbent on CX practitioners, analysts and business units to work closely to discover the right opportunities from across the enterprise based on the customer’s journey and present a credible and cohesive picture of insights, the holistic solution approach and the results.”

The CEM Africa Summit, which is regarded as a world class CX event that competes on a global scale will feature industry leaders from organizations such as AIG Insurance, Old Mutual, ABSA, Travel Start, Uber, Multichoice, Oracle and many more. The platform for sharing best practice in key note presentations and the open debate on key challenges in the panel discussions provide a diverse and rich source of information.

Where the summit truly sets itself apart is in the workshop sessions. With more than 40 workshops that are graded from beginner to advanced, CX practitioners across all levels of maturity are able to gain detailed insight and practical advice around technology, research and case study material from organizations that are leading the way within the customer experience industry.

The graded workshop structure and the focus on business led customer experience has seen registrations for the event explode with almost 70% of the seats already reserved. The final round of allocations will go on sale on this week and organizations are encouraged to book quickly to avoid the disappointment of missing out.

For sponsorship information please contact Juan Mouton, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

For delegate information please contact Marcia Rossouw, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

ABOUT CEM AFRICACEM Africa is a meeting place for CX professionals and innovative CX solution providers. The show takes place on the 1-2 August 2018 at the CTICC in Cape Town, where like-minded customer experience experts and the top CX solution providers gather for an informative and educational summit with the common goal of improving customer experience across Africa. The event will provide a platform for like-minded CX professionals to showcase their industry knowledge as well as solutions to better the customer’s perception of the brand.ABOUT KINETIC Kinetic is an international business-to-business conference and exhibitions producer based in Cape Town. Our mission is to equip senior management executives with knowledge, market intelligence and viable commercial opportunities. Kinetic are leaders in providing business facilitation platforms throughout Africa. 

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Released by:  KINETIC SA
Juan Mouton:  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.