Lunch with Pippa Hudson and now Consumer Talk featuring Wendy Nola. Wendy joining us via zoom from Johannesburg today, so she's up in Koteng for a conference, but glad that you were able to step out to join us for this hour.
Nice to have you with us, Wendy.
We're going to be picking up on two questions which we're posed by listeners during last week's show, and the second of them is going to lead us into a broader conversation about whether the migration to digital customer service platforms is actually perhaps having a negative impact on the customer service experience.
So more on that later.
We've got some very interesting listener WhatsApps spewing in on this subject, and I have to say most of them saying how frustrating they find the digital platforms, with one or two exceptions. So looking forward to sharing that feedback with everybody, and please keep on sharing your view on WhatsApp. Oh seven two five six seven one five sixty seven.
Do you find it convenient and easy to interact with a chatbot or an on online form or do you prefer talking to a human being or having an email where a person will respond to you, for example, what has been your experience? Is digital migration helping or hindering the customer service experience?
That is the big question of the afternoon.
But before we get to that, WHND are we going to start with an update on clothing labels, Because towards the end of last week's show, Stephanie sent us a message asking why isn't it obligatory for South African based stores to declare the country of origin on their clothing. She said it was an issue across both online stores and personal in store experiences, and her point was, I want to support local South African made quite clothing.
For example.
I want to be able to make an informed choice, but it's very hard to do that if they don't tell you where the product was made. And her question was, are South African retailers, manufacturers, wholesalers and creators not supposed to add country of origin to an item's packaging and labeling? At the time, you said straight away, I'm great with food labels, but I need to do some double checking on the subject of clothing labels. Tell us what you found out.
Yes, thanks Papa, So yeah, I was pretty sure it was the case, but I don't like to so emphatically if I'm not one hundred percent sure. So my first port of call was Michael Lawrence, who's the executive director of the National Clothing Retail Federation of South Africa. He said, yes, labeling is required for products online purchases. Enforcement is a problem, but technically an online product can be sent back by SARS if picked up that no labels are present at
the time of inspection. And I think the key there is at the time of inspections, because I am I'm pretty sure that it's not happening. You know that inspections are not happening across the board, so a lot can be slipping through. So he directed me to, of course, a friend of the show, Lee, Sobriti hused the Consumer Goods and Services on Bard, who said, yes, CPA Protection Act and its regulations provide very clear requirements for product
labeling and information to consumers. It's sections twenty two for those who are interested of the CPA that requires that all information must be presented in play in an unstable language so that consumers can make informed choices. That's the point of the disclosure, right Pepper. It's always so that we go into things knowing everything there is to knowes
that we can make the right choice for us. Section twenty four prohibits false and misleading or deceptive trade descriptions and trade description includes details such as country of origin, material composition, and mode of manufacture of goods. And then also in the regulations of the CPA, there is the regulation directs that such descriptions should be applied to goods in a conspicuous and legible manner. Understand, it's got to have a label on, it's got to have a descriptor.
And it's got to be in plain, understandable language and also quite easy to see in an easy to spot place. Wendy, I know you've told us so many times. When it comes to online purchases, we don't only look at the CPA, We also look at the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act.
Does that add anything on the subject.
Yes, so, mbud Lee says Section forty three of the ECTA ector as when you call it requires online suppliers to disclose the main characteristics of their goods, as well as full supplier details and pricing information, again allowing consumers
to make an informed decision. So, in short, the Umbud is clear that when the two ac are considered together as they must be, there's a very clear obligation on retailers and manufacturers to disclose country of origin clearly and prominently, and that the same level of detail and description would apply to both, you know, a physical store situation and
the online shopping environment. Bearing my and that when the Act came into being in all that was draught up as a two thousand and eight, it came into fourth and twenty eleven, online shopping wasn't what it is today, and so I think we woul have seen a lot more detail around that if the Act had to come out you know today or in the last I say, post COVID era.
Yeah.
So in summary, Stephanie's right to be looking forward and she has every right to expect to see that at this disclosure on the label. Final question before we leave this topic, Wendy, is if it's not there, what's the correct thing to do?
Do you report the retailer to the ombit? What do you do?
Yes? Absolutely, And I mean if you're very sure about your facts as well, you could put it on social media because I think we need to, you know, we need this to be top of mind for consumers to know to look for it and go, well, it should be here. I don't know where this garment is made up, preferred to, you know, locally made or I don't mind important, but I don't want from X company. We have the right to know things when we're putting our money stuff.
So I think it's a good conversation to be had. Yes, go to the umbut, go to the supply as well, and then put it out on social media and remembering, of course you've if it's not a hundred percent truon in the public interest, it's opening yourself up for a defamation claim, so make sure it's always.
Such a fast Okay, thanks for that, and thanks Stephanie for raising an important topic. Now, the second subject, the question that came through last week, is one that's going to sort of lead us nudge us in the direction of the main talking point around customer service and digital channels. Last week we read out Zuki's query on air. Zuki Makuzeni writing in to say, I am registered on the
clicks website for online shopping. Recently, when trying to log onto my account, the site has required verification of one's mobile phone number, which Zuki says is a perfectly understandable security measure. She's quite happy to go along with it, So get your one time pin and enter that to continue, But she says her difficulty is been I can't receive
the one time pin on my registered number. When I looked into why this was happening, Clicks told me that the OTP can't be received if one is registered on the Wasper do not Contact list and just reminded to listeners that is the place where you go and register that you do not want to be contacted with unwanted marketing and unsolicited marketing, etc. So Zuki says, I'm on that list because I don't want to receive unsolicited marketing.
But the only way for me to keep purchasing through my online account was either to take myself off that list or to provide an alternative cell phone number, which wasn't on the list. Now, in Zuki's case, thankfully there was a second phone available she could give them the alternative number. But her point is it doesn't seem right for a retailer to force one to de register from Wasper in order to have an account on their site. We have very good reason to register with WASPA. After all,
were you aware of this? I think clicks should found find a better solution, was her comment. Zuki also a very significant question, thank you, and when do you reach start to Clicks?
What did they tell you?
I Dare said, I'll put it to them that there has to be a way to avoid this unfortunate situation, or many of us would not receive the one time pins that our banks send us via SMEs fourth centification wouldn't be able to make any purchases. So I said there has to be a technical solution, and their response was yes. Clicks is implemented a solution to ensure that customers can receive their OTP via SMS even if they
are registered on the Wasper do not contact list. This update was implemented on the seventeenth of October, ensuring that all customers can complete their verification processes without issue. You know, we'll provide any additional information if needed. So it sounds to me as if they this was an unintended consequence obviously that.
Oh yeah, we see it, and we seem to be having some difficulties. Okay, Wendy, thanks for that.
Sorry, we just lost your signal for a second there, but just to recap again, the issue has been sorted out, so Zuki, thanks for bringing it to our attention and to their attention. I don't know if it was your complaint or probably many other people with the same issue flagging the fact that it was a problem. Whatever it was, they have found a work around and it shouldn't be an issue going forward, So thank you for that.
Okay.
So that segues neatly wendy into the other digital service issue we want to talk about today, and this is the question of whether migrating onto digital and AI platforms is actually making it harder for customers to engage with businesses and particularly to receive help when something has gone wrong. As a matter of interest, is that something customers complain to you about often or not?
Yes, it is a common theme. They won't complain to me directly about that, it'd be about an issue they had, and then it becomes a catalog of the annoyances the frustrations they experienced in trying to raise with the company, which is often why are they write to me in the first place, Because they couldn't get anywhere in engaging with the company that they do business with and via the channels that that company has chosen to put in place for them. So that's why they come to me.
So it's actually a very significant consumer issue. And it occurs to me that if companies did a better job of making them selves accessible to their customers, that you know, I would have a much smaller inbox. Yeah.
Yeah, So I had a recent experience that was a good example of this, and we're going to share it with today. And I don't want to emphasize this. The problem at the crux of this matter has been resolved and is not an issue. What it is interesting to me is how it demonstrates this question of making yourself accessible to the customer. And when I mentioned it to Wendy, she said, thank you, please send me a summary. I want to take this up with Discovery Healthy, where the
service provider in question. Kind of long story short I recently had I received this claim statement for Discovery, opened it up to find a very large pharmacy order that Discovery had paid straight to the pharmacy and I went, well, hang on a second, I never received that order. So you've paid close to one in half thousand rand for drugs that were never dispensed to me, and I wasn't sure if this was a fraudulent claim or if it
was an error. But my first thought, Wendy, was I need to let Discovery know straight away that there's a problem with this claim because they have paid it out of their chronic illness benefit.
It's their immediate loss. Let me flag it straight away.
And that is where my run around began, because I first tried calling the customer helpline. After being on hold for more than ten minutes, I eventually gave up and then went to the website trying to find an email where I could send a query. Everything on the website, everything on the website was pushing me to the online Complaints and Compliments for so I tried to use that,
but I couldn't get that form to load. It just got stuck in an endless loop of please click here to populate the form, please click here, and it just kept on going back to the same place without ever offering me the form. So I then tried the chatbot and asked the chatbot can you.
Please give me an email address?
The chatbot wanted to push me back to the online form instead, so I thenually found please let me speak to an agent option within the sort of chatbot WhatsApp line function, and eventually got to a human agent on the other side and asked it the same question, Can you please give me an email address where I.
Can send you send this statement and flag the fact that it's a problem.
So yeah, and she gave me an address, which I then duly used. It immediately bounced back saying this email is undeliverable. So I went back into the chat thankfully she was still online, said can you please give me an alternative email address? And it was at that point that this took an interesting turn. She says, we've gone digital. We don't do email anymore, and you guessed it. She directed me to use the online form, and when I explained to her, look, that form is not working for me.
Plus I would like to do email rather because I would like to be able to keep a record of what I have sent on which date to hurry, etc. Got a very indifferent response. So anyway, long story short, I did eventually get that form to load, I filled it out, I hit send, and the screen went blank. The form contents disappeared, There was no record of it being delivered. There was no reference number or anything like that.
So in the end, I went back into my inbox and searched for every Discovery email address I'd ever used over the years, and eventually, after trying and getting this undeliverable response from about fifteen different attempts, Forensics A Discovery got through and Wendy, I have to say that the
query was resolved quickly. They sent an auto response saying we've received your query, and within two or three days I received a response saying we've looked into it, the issue has been resolved, the claim has been reversed.
Thanks very much. The final yeap, Sorry, go for it.
Yes, I was gonna say, I think you should repeat that for the benefit of our listeners who might be in the same situation. There is one email that works if we have a similar complaint.
Okay, so the one.
Still working email is Forensics at Discovery dot co dot ZDA.
But I mean, I mean, it really was a nine.
I spent about an hour and a half Wendy trying to flag what one would think would be a quite easy to.
Do things, so nineteen minutes.
And then the cherry on top was when yesterday I received an email from Discovery saying you recently interacted with our agent who sent you a follow up please will you rate our service? And I hit the star rating to give the rating and it went, sorry, something went wrong, we can't receive you're rating, And that kind of summed up for me where we're at that.
I didn't even share that with Discovery.
No, that was just that.
I mean, that was after the fact, but it was quite a demonstration of where things are going wrong that you get stuck in this endless loop trying to channel you to a non human platform and after nineteen minutes what should have been a fairly simple thing to resolve to say, hey, I need to stick up a red flag. Somebody needs to look at this claim because something is wrong. Couldn't be done. And I'm looking at the clock and
seeing that we're marching towards hop us too. So we will obviously feedback to you what Discovery has said when engaging with Wendy on this. But it's not the Discovery service issue I want to talk about today. It's this question of whether digital migration of the customer service function is actually doing companies a disservice and in the end, eroding the level of customer service I see lots of WhatsApps coming in responding, so we'll share those and we'll share Discovery's response.
Join the conversation. Join the conversation you're with Kate Talk.
We're back with Wendy Nola joining us by a zoom this afternoon, and before we share Discoveries feedback, I just want to share some of the listener questions that have come in, rather WhatsApps that have come in. Wendy, I've been asking since the beginning of the show, do you prefer do you find the digital platforms helpful? Do you prefer interacting with those or do you prefer speaking to
a human being? And a couple of running themes and Jenny, I completely agree with you, she says, I found that digital platforms are useful when you just need statements or tax.
Certificates, etc.
But if it's a more complicated query, you need to speak to a person. Sometimes when talking to the bot, they don't understand you. You waste a lot of time trying to rephrase your question until you just give up. Similar comment from Andy saying customer service via digital is nonexistent in my experience. I have yet to have a re query resolved via WhatsApp. I feel it's just a way to avoid interacting with customers, very frustrating, and it
doesn't work. Karen saying, I definitely prefer speaking to a human. I find the chatbot or digital process more time consuming and definitely more frustrating. And then a very interesting perspective from Alice saying I'm located in the EU. Online chat customer service here is mostly staffed by real people. As soon as I see a brand that is only using AI bots for customer service, I will ditch that brand and never buy from them again, even if I have
to pay more to switch. So Alice very firmly saying I will not support your brand if all you offer me is an AI bot and Wendy. One of the things I said to you when I summarized all of this in my email was I'm not quite fifty years old. I consider myself relatively tech savvy. I'm used to engageing with online platforms. I do so all the time. I
produce content for online platforms. If I found it that difficult to get through to some sort of resolution, imagine what it is like for an elderly customer who is not all fair with these platforms, and especially when you're dealing with something like a medical aid, elderly customers are going to make up a lot of their complainants by default.
Surely we should be doing better to offer them something. Really, I love the email that's just come in from someone who's asked to remain anonymous, and that's absolutely fine, but listen to this. I work as a financial advisor.
They're right.
Our business has been moving quite swiftly towards digital channels. Although I embrace the digital age, it is very sad how companies ignore our elderly, many of whom are not as tech savvy. When I have to issue a policy or update an existing one, I prefer to jump into my car to see the client face to face, rather than tell them that I'm going to send them a
document to sign via electronic signature, for example. There needs to be a better way to service all customers by various means, and for the client to select the option they prefer to do their business.
And I mean, I wish there were more people like you prepared to go the extra mile like that. But thank you. I think that says so much of importance, Wendy.
And also I mean I look at the case is the complaints that the phase onward that regulates, yeah, considers complaints around brokers, and and the is very tough on brokers that you know, are just forwarding stuff by email or whatever. If there's a key change on the policy, like you didn't need a tracking device, now you need one, and they're not making the call or putting at the top of the email. Please note this is not just the normal, normal increase in your fees. You must you
now need a tracking device or whatever. And if they if they don't fulfilled mandate in terms of the you know, what they're required to do as as financial advisors, then the decisions go against them, and that the you know, in the one case it was exactly this tracking thing, the broke to pay half the loss and the customer pay the other because you should have read the email. But what I'm saying is they're in that I love
that email. But she will know that, you know, there will be many of her colleagues who are not doing enough to make sure there was a meeting of the mind, who are not servicing their customers in the way that works for them. So in this country, in particular, I think we've got the elderly, and then we've got people who just haven't got onto the digital train, and I mean or you know, totally alienated. So yeah, I love this topic. As you can probably tell, I did engage
with Discovery. I sent the missity of your case and I asked a number of questions such as, what is the company's position on emails a means of members being able to engage with the scheme, When did that policy change? And how were members informed? Why the long wait on the phone option, you know, is ten minutes plus considered an acceptable wait time? What's the issue with the online form not loading and submitting? And then I said, you know of particular interest to me, was your comment, Pippa
that because it's something I feel very strongly about. Those online forms. Routinely take photos before I sent, but a lot of people won't think to do it, and then you're left without your own record of what you said and when and who you sent it to, as you would in the case of a normal email. So I just think that that's quite disadvantage.
That's quite.
But judicial is the word I looking to consumers them anyways, And yeah, as you put it, And then she said and then you also said, and as for the chat box, you went back onto the chato and that correspondence with the agent is gone, that history is gone. You said, I'd hope to quote her directly so that you could see what I mean about the indifferent attitude. But now
there's no record of that conversation ever happening. And I'm not going to be convinced that is that isn't part of the intended outcome with both email and chat boxes, and I think that's, as I say, I have a very dim view of that. So, yeah, we're told that they weren't going to be able to get us a response in time, but happily, just in the nick of time, we've got quite a comprehensive response to some of those issues.
Do you want me to read one of them?
Yeah, So, I mean, okay, I'm going to leave out the stuff of that relates to the actual dispute itself, which, as I said, has been resolved. So I'm not questioning that it has been sorted out. But a couple of the things and we are receiving here input from Karen Sanderson, chief operating Officer of Discovery Health. Okay, firstly, the feedback
on the call center. Accessibility is important to US. Discovery Health meets its service target of answering sixty percent of calls within sety seconds, ensuring most members connect promptly with consultants. While wait times can extend during peak periods, our data confirms that the majority of calls are answered within agreed time frames. That said, we are continually working to improve accessibility across all our channels.
I want to just insert there.
I wonder how they monitor that answering of the call, because the call is answered immediately, but you then put into a holding pattern and in Discovery case, exactly doesn't give you a your seventeenth in the queue expect a wait of eight minutes. It just says please continue to hold. So if they're tracking it by the answering of the call, they're doing brilliantly. But if they're tracking it by the actual moment of connection with the consultant, that that's a different metric.
So that's that's not really clear there.
But Okay, so they do track the issue of how quickly those call centers calls are answered. Okay, they've gone back and looked at the they could find. Okay, so they did receive my online submission. The one that went blank obviously did make it to them, so they.
Had a look at that.
They've also, on their side, been able to access the chat interaction with that agent and the comment is Discovery Health review of the interaction between miss Hudson and our agent has revealed that our chat agent should have resolved the query for her right there during the engagement. Our team is currently addressing this matter with the agent directly. We hope that interactions such as these keep our teams continuously learning and gaining the necessary skills to achieve better
client servicing outcomes in future. Unfortunately, she encountered issues with the online form. We are currently investigating these technical challenges by reviewing systems logs to understand what went wrong, and we'll give further feedback once that's been done.
Here's the nub of it.
Okay, So, Discovery Health has been gradually transitioning away from email as a primary service channel over the past two years. This decision is based on data showing that email yields slower resolution times and lower satisfaction scores. To support this transition, proactive auto responses were implemented on selected email channels. So that's what I was getting saying, YESUS channels no longer
in service. The get Help page was redesigned for improved usability, and members who frequently used email did receive direct communication from US guiding them to alternative digital channels during this transition phase. We also understand that email remains necessary in certain situations and will continue to support supported where it makes practical sense. Some key email addresses are provided on our website in the Complaints and Complements section.
I'm assuming that's meant.
To say, Okay, well, I wasn't able to find them very easily, I'll say that, but okay. We have also provided an alternate, an alternate to email in this section of the GETTHLP inquiry, which is similar to an email type experiencing prompting on the page guides which guide members on what information to include to ensure that all necessary information is available. This is just available via the app
and the website as well. Don't even get me started on the app, okay, So just read one more line, Wendy, and then we can then revert to you.
They say.
All member conversations are saved and accessible via the interaction timeline on this discovery app. We have received screenshots of the chat transcript and are prioritizing a review of her profile with system support. So I mean it's fairly obvious. It's they're unequivocal. They are digitally transitioning away from email as a primary service, and have in fact been doing
so for quite some time already. My response to that is, don't transition away from it until you've set up properly the alternative, because the alternative just wasn't working in my case.
No. And in terms of the chat box history, are they saying that they have a.
Record of it, a record of it? Yeah, that's the point.
It's like when you take out a contractor in a policy over the phone. They've got the care recording and you've got a big and plead for it. It's ridiculous. And my other comment is on the main policy change about gradually transitioning away from email as a primary service based data showing that email yields slower resolution times and lower satisfaction scores. I'd love to see that data by contrast with data on how these new things that set
up are working for their customers. Bearing in mind that the elderly suppit the most claims and have most reason to want to interact with the medical scheme.
Yeah.
Absolutely, that's just actuarial fact. So I'm seeing a big disconnect here, and it's not just discovery.
Let's be clear, it's not as well, which is to my point.
I don't want this to be about my particular I mean, this is an example of a much.
Bigger issue that's there.
Let me just share a few more of the responses coming in here, Tony saying chatbots are the bane of my life. I have yet to interact successfully with these awful things. Unless your query is on their pre programmed menu, you are wasting your time.
This is another interesting example of where it goes wrong.
Tony says, if you ever interact with the Telcom chatbot, be prepared to tear your hair art it's called TUSO, and eventually Twoso leads you to ask if you want to speak to a human, You answer yes, will get You're then told you will get an SMS that you sorry, You get an SMS that a Talcom consultant will call you, and Tony says, they never do. I have about eight to ten SMSs. I've never received a call. So there's
another example. The system gives you the option of speaking to a human, but then doesn't connect you to the human.
What else have we got here?
Karen saying the Discovery site is the worst to try and navigate endless loops. Richard's saying to Discoveries Reply regarding a move away from email, faster resolution times doesn't take into account the customer's time chasing all of these channels and waiting, And that's point made. This is why I meant to Wendy Richard, because it took me nineteen minutes to finally, you know, find a way to flag the issue I was trying to flag. Lisa is saying it's
indifference and lack of accountability. Zoos's commented digital customer service channels are really not great because they give specific prompts and sometimes one is not even sure what.
The issue is to begin with. So I take your point.
It makes it difficult to get yourself into the correct stream if you don't know what the nature of the problem is, and that's often a you know, a press one for this, press two for that, press three for that, and you get to the end of the menu're saying, well, you never gave me an option to press X for what my problem actually is. Yeah, a couple of ye, a couple of voice notes. When didoul we listen to a voice note or two before you respond any further?
Hi, Shop and Wendy, that clicks problem with the sms. I had the same issue twenty around and around for about seven or eight weeks until I threatened them to take them to the Consumer Consume Commission and they somehow managed to have men not complete that last section of the verification of your credent of your clicks account. It's useless. But yeah, same exact, same problem, And I kept telling except I never ever got an answer as to why
my SMS we're never coming through. So they never told me. Now it's interesting that because I'm also on the do not contact What's what's a list database, and so it's interesting that Zuki got an answer from them as to why it wasn't coming through. Mind, they just kept saying, we've escalated to the IT department, et cetera, et cetera, and went on for nearly six or seven weeks.
Yeah, okay, I'm glad it was resolved in the end, Tony, but thanks for that. There is Before we go to the next voice note, I want to take a call Wendy, because we have a business owner on the line who's taken a very very different approach wants to share it with us, Ian and US good afternoon. Hi.
Yeah, so we made the decision. Yeah, And I think I share everybody's frustration, so I won't repeat all of that that. You know, the impersonal nature of chatbots and corresponding by email just drives me absolutely insane. And I one thread up quote by well I think it was Warren Buffett who said, in a world, in the modern world, it's not enough to satisfy your customer, you have to delight them. Because everybody is satisfying their customer, you have
to delight them. And then, certainly in our market, which is in the technology space, interestingly enough, is we're finding that our customers are actually craving human interaction. They want a phone call, they want to speak to somebody, they want to know a name, they want to have somebody
that can call when things aren't going right. And the reaction that you get is actually remarkable because they go out of their way to say, you know, how refreshing is to actually have somebody call us, and to be
proactive about building a relationship. So I think, for as much as we're all getting frustrated by this migration to chatbots and AI driven responses, etc. And I get you know, if you're a large organization and you're dealing with millions and millions of queries, there probably are benefits to going that route. But for a smaller business, take the time to actually or use this opportunity to say, how do you differentiate yourself in a market where everybody else is
going in the other direction? The age old quote when everybody is getting on the bus, it's time to get off, and you'll differentiate yourself in the market and offer a better personal service and your business will benefit from it.
I absolutely love that approach, and all I can say is I hope it gets you lots of happy customers you stay with you and on loyal because of that. So thank you so much for calling in to raise that. What a fantastic alternative view.
Wendy.
Absolutely, and yes, I mean when I ad to customer care trading, I say, if you're dealing with, particularly someone who's over fifty to fifty five, if you've messed up and you want to make it right, pick up the phone and phone. The millennials hate that they want to talk to you on the phone. It's the worst. But for an older person it's going to fix the problem and they will forgive you and it will all be good.
And they all look at me, because it's usually millennials in the audience, they look at me wired out like they try it. It'll work. I mean, we we and I think also even the millennials as they get old. I don't know if this will change, but you do, especially if your problem is not solvable. It's not Pridge and a hoolable that you you know, query one, two, three,
four five. You just want to have that human interaction where he said, this is the problem, please help me, without spending ninety minutes going round and round and trying to do it the digital way and ending up really frustrated and not feeling very warm and fuzzy towards that company at all. Yeah.
Yeah.
The result is you get a customer like Lisa raising digital customer service with the Woolworth's My Difference app saying trying to deal with one person who knows all the des is impossible. You end up getting multiple responses from various people trying to follow up on different platforms, and all that happens is the customer gets more irritated at the end of it instead of just having their issue resolved.
So thanks for that, Lisa.
I think we've got time to squeeze in one more voice note as well before we must wrap up.
Let's take a listen, Andre, I just find Discoveries apps utterly user unfriendly, and I'm surprised that our user on friendly is seeing that it's one of the best technological companies in the country. Yeah, so I don't know if they know it, but it's really bad and unfriendly bye bye.
Yeah.
If they don't know it by the end of the savord read here, there'll be something wrong now, I must they did acknowledge they are having because one of the other issues we didn't even get to was when I then went onto the app to try and find an alternative supplier to move away from the one I'd had problems with the sort of geographical settings we're not working.
So you go in to find a pharmacy near me, and it offered me the runts By Pharmacy, which was at the time about one hundred and sixty five kilometers away, So there clearly are some issues that still need to be resolved on the app, and they've acknowledged that in their email correspondence. See we are aware of a recent issue affecting the Finder Provider feature on the Discovery app and WhatsApp where the results have been inaccurate. We apologize
we're working on a resolution for that. So at Lease they're acknowledging awareness of the fact that there is a problem there. Wendy, I mean, it's a topic today for which we have no fix, no answers, other than to hope that customers are listening, and the people listening to this interview who are involved in customer service are going to feedback to the companies they work for that there
is a need to balance both. And I don't dispute that for some cases moving to digital is brilliant and that you can take a large sort of workload off your desk and digitize simple functions like issuing the tax certificate, the membership confirmation or whatever it is. But I hope you know customer service people are paying attention to the kind of complaints we've heard today about how that experience of forcing people into the digital environment is making them
feel and Wendy what I'm hearing. It's making people feel unheard, unimportant to the company, and ultimately not listened to, and it's leaving them more frustrated at the end of the experience than they were when the problem first occurred.
Yeah, I think Alice put it very well as Alice when she said it seems like customer invoidance rather than a willingness to engage with customers. And that's really I mean, I can't even the synicon me doesn't want to believe that that's the intention. But that's for many people, the reality, the lived experience. So I think we should all keep
talking about this. They might be people who think it's just them I'm old, and no, it is a general experience, and we should keep it in the public discourse, use social media, talk about it and shows like this, and hold the service providers to account because sometimes they just don't have enough of a read on what it's like
on their receiving end. As a customer, you know, it's great technology and it's the latest, greatest, and the end misted a lot, but is it actually working for the customer and the way they think it is.
Wendy, thanks so much for a really interesting segment today. We look forward to chatting to you again next week Wednesday. And reminder to listeners if you want to flag a case with Wendy, she does respond to her online form at Wendynona dot co dotz chat next week, Wendy