South Africa’s mobile network customers’ most pressing need is to be heard and have their problems solved personally, transparently and quickly – with social media as their key contact point with their service providers.
That’s just one of the major takeaways from DataEQ’s 2026 SA Telecoms Customer Experience Index report, which analysed over 653 000 social media mentions across X, Facebook, and HelloPeter between October 2025 and March 2026. The results showed that three of the five major mobile network operators recorded a net negative operational sentiment, after scores across customer service, account administration, network quality and responsiveness on social media platforms were aggregated. The lowest scores – across network quality and customer service – dragged the entire industry’s operational net sentiment to -8%, revealing a major gap between what providers promise to deliver and the experience customers actually have.
A rain spokesperson says the company can be proud to lead the pack with an operational net sentiment of +16%, but acknowledges that the results and insights demonstrate that the entire industry has plenty of room to improve its offering to better serve its customers. “We’re constantly working to improve our network quality, product & service offering and the way we engage with our customers – and it’s telling that the report shows that these focus areas are the three which customers hold as most important in selecting a mobile network operator. The report gives us insight into the fact that we’re on the right track when it comes to providing a reliable data service for our customers and having our agents able to resolve many problems quickly – and following up to make sure the customer’s issue has been resolved to their satisfaction”.
DataEQ Analyst Tebogo Maluleke says of the results: “What separates the leaders from the rest is not just product quality. It is whether consumers felt the brand was on their side when things went wrong. rain and Cell C generated genuine, organic praise for service resolution and data reliability. The brands in negative territory were not facing isolated complaints; consumers described the same failures repeating, across the same channels, without resolution.”
The rain team acknowledges that customer service levels can always be improved, but that also requires closer collaboration between the team receiving the query and the technical teams which address it. “There are so many complex steps to solving an issue between either recognising it internally or receiving a customer query – and correcting it and informing our customers that it’s been resolved. The complexity of operating a countrywide mobile network isn’t going anywhere, so we focus on improving internal communication, improving AI resolution capability and empowering our teams to address challenges directly so that when issues do arrive, they are resolved more quickly and our customers are kept updated on the outcome. It’s clear that trust and transparency are becoming competitive advantages as customers’ experience of how their challenges are acknowledged and resolved becomes an increasingly important differentiator for operators in a competitive market”.
More detailed information from the Sentiment Index is available on the DataEQ website.
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Rodion Kutsaiev/ Unsplash