Business

Andrew Baker, Capitec (Photograph: Julian Goldswain)

The thought of calling a customer support line, particularly for a big bank or telco, gives many of us anxiety – or it ought to. If you’re successful in escaping the mostly unhelpful maze of AI agents and end up speaking to an actual staff member, you’re then going to spend, or waste, at least five, maybe 10, minutes explaining your problem to them in a way they can hopefully understand.

This may now be a thing of the past, at least for Capitec Bank account holders. The bank, now the country’s largest by number of customers, has built a unique tool called Pulse, which uses AI, as well as signals from its various systems, to provide context to its contact centre agents before they answer the call.