Digital business strategies are being aggressively pursued in mature markets. Although South African organisations are behind in building new digital services and products, financial services firms and others are investing heavily in digital channels, mobile technology, more open core systems, and other components of a digital business platform. This is both to engage the new digital consumer and to optimise operating model costs, not only for the South African market, but globally. The underlying impact is a transformational change, through technology, in the interaction between organisations and customers.

Why is this such a challenge for organisations?

Companies know who their consumers are, but do not understand their needs, drivers and blockers. The cosmopolitan South African culture impacts how consumers use technology, and this is not easily understood by traditional demographic variables alone. The rest of Africa is similarly diverse, and technology solutions that target cross-country markets often ignore this diversity.

This inevitably leads to the need to understand consumer behaviour and environment when designing technology solutions, and to build these solutions iteratively with continuous feedback from the users. Techniques and skills employed to understand consumer mental models found in the fields of Customer and User Experience Design (CX / UX), have become essential for understanding consumer behaviour, while the iterative nature of Agile project approaches is better suited to building solutions with uncertain requirements. These practices are growing in use, but are they being used together effectively?