(NAIROBI, KENYA) – African businesses face a widening gap between digitally active consumers and customer service systems that remain fragmented across separate platforms, a challenge that is pushing firms toward integrated communication technology.
DataReportal estimates Kenya had 23.4 million internet users at the end of 2025, while social media user identities rose to 18.4 million, equivalent to 31.8% of the population. Social media identities increased by 34.6% in one year. For businesses, this means customer conversations are increasingly happening across multiple digital platforms rather than through traditional call centres and physical outlets.
Patrick Muthui, chairman of Jasco Communications, said legacy infrastructure has created an operational challenge as customers migrate to digital channels. Customer service agents frequently operate on isolated platforms, meaning a message on one channel, an email, and a phone call from the same individual look like three different customers.
The problem is not unique to Kenya or Africa. A 2025 Genesys study of more than 5,000 consumers and 1,100 customer experience leaders found that 97% of consumers consider it important to move between channels without repeating information. Yet 84% of customer experience leaders said their organisations did not offer multiple channels with completely integrated technology and connected data. The same research found that 30% of consumers had stopped doing business with a company in the previous year because of a bad experience.
It is against this backdrop that Jasco Communications has partnered with Freshworks to expand access to integrated customer service technology across Africa. The partnership seeks to bring conversations from SMS, email, social media and other channels into one system, giving agents a consolidated view of a customer’s history.
Bonface Kiogora, Jasco’s head of business development, said the partnership is designed to remove some of the barriers that have traditionally placed sophisticated customer management systems beyond the reach of smaller firms. Instead of expensive, lengthy enterprise deployments, the cloud based approach allows businesses to scale their systems as they grow, with Jasco providing managed technical support.
The shift also reflects a broader change in customer service from simply responding to complaints to anticipating and resolving them. Freshworks’ AI capabilities can analyse incoming interactions for sentiment and urgency, route sensitive cases to specialised teams and trigger workflows when recurring problems emerge.
Zendesk’s 2025 customer experience trends report, based on more than 10,000 consumers and business respondents across 22 countries, found that 63% of consumers would switch to a competitor after just one bad experience. It also found that 61% expect AI driven interactions to be personalised.
For African businesses, the challenge is no longer simply getting online. It is ensuring that the customer experience remains coherent once the customer gets there. M-KOPA said it has used Freshworks for eight years as it expanded to 10 million customers across several markets. Purity Mwema, the company’s business and operations manager, said the system has enabled M-KOPA to integrate different systems as its operations have grown.
Qona Sacco has similarly used the platform to centralise communications and improve accountability, reporting and member experience, according to its member experience manager Ruth Atambo. She said digital customers do not see organisational boundaries. They see one company. Businesses that continue to make customers navigate those internal boundaries risk turning digital convenience into digital frustration. The next phase of Africa’s customer service revolution will depend less on adding more communication channels and more on making the existing ones work as one.