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Every business is looking for a way to get an edge on the competition.

Some South African companies have gone on to achieve great things due to their customer service, whereas others are regularly torn apart for their shortcomings.

I won’t name names, but social media is an unforgiving place.

With the surge in South African online retail sales, due in part to COVID-19, the importance of direct contact with customers becomes paramount.

Sadly, many online retailers still offer inadequate customer interaction and subpar service in the form of email, chatbots, support tickets, or FAQs.

While these services go some way towards answering a customer’s queries, they are a far cry from the personalised support that can be provided via a live chat.

In this day and age of busy schedules and quick service, customers are no longer willing to accept slow response times to emails or worse still, call service agents that put you on hold indefinitely.

I don’t care how catchy your waiting music is, you’ve lost me.

Something has to change, and this is where Cape Town-based Mermaid Agency sets itself apart, offering a new Live Chat service that provides a full suite of community engagement tools.

Digital Marketing guru Neil Patel recently spoke about the benefits of Live Chat in a blog post entitled ‘How to Boost Your Conversion Rate by 45% with Live Chat‘.

Consider these stats detailing how well humans react to Live Chat, via Invesp:

Live Chat was introduced to provide a solution to slow response times, but this technology still has several hurdles to overcome and many users find a wide disparity in the quality of service delivered by different providers. 

Mermaid Agency addresses this lack of standardisation by providing only high-quality Live Chat services, using thorough research and development based on extensive customer feedback to create a world-leading service. 

Founder Max Guedy has worked with most of South Africa’s top fintechs, including Yoco, iKhokha, Prodigy Finance, and Paygenius.

African Travel Desk has even referred to Mermaid as “their secret weapon”, although the cat’s out the bag now.

In addition to the Live Chat service, Mermaid provides a comprehensive marketing package that includes social media, reputation, and a content retainer.

This involves social media postings each week, online ads and banners, brand monitoring, bi-monthly newsletters, and community management, amongst other services.

The agency will also manage your Facebook ads and provide monthly SEO reports and a content platform with weekly articles.

South African customers have caught up with the rest of the world in terms of the service we expect, at least from private businesses, because we can write off the likes of Telkom or the SA Post Office.

We’re nearing a time when emails and support tickets just won’t cut it, and that’s a good thing for all of us.