Natalie van der Merwe, Head of Division: Telephony at Vox, explains how consumer communication behaviour has shifted permanently to omnichannel and what SMEs can do to catch up and take advantage of this change.
The consumer expects to choose the channel and cadence of their engagement with a business. And they expect businesses to keep up with their choices across every touchpoint. When companies deliver on that expectation – connecting with their customers across every touchpoint – they benefit from up to 20% increased customer retention rates. That performance gap applies as much to the small to medium enterprise (SME) as it does to the large enterprise, which matters in a market where SMEs make up over 90% of formalised business and contribute roughly 34% of the gross domestic product.
The problem is that SMEs are sitting with two challenges, limited awareness and the inability to consolidate customer touchpoints across their ecosystems. They’re handling WhatsApp through personal numbers, managing email through individual inboxes, sending SMS’ through separate platforms and fielding calls through a system that wasn’t designed to connect any of these dots. The result is fragmented conversations across multiple channels, with no shared history or continuity. If an employee leaves, their WhatsApp history, for example is gone, there is no record or handover, no visibility into previous engagements and no continuity for the customer on the other side.
The 2026 State of Digital Customer Communication Survey found that only 11% of respondents had full integration across their messaging platforms and their customer relationship management (CRM) platform or other core business systems. This meant 89% of companies are operating with partial to no integration and many are struggling with fragmentation, battling to manage conversations across multiple platforms. This fragmentation isn’t specific to the SME, but its consequences land hardest on smaller businesses, which carry less capacity to absorb the revenue and reputational cost of a poor customer experience.
A medical practice, for example, has the receptionist work through the following day’s appointment list, calling each patient individually to confirm. Some calls are unanswered so some appointments are missed and productive hours are lost. The same outcome is achievable through an automated WhatsApp to each patient, personalised with their name and appointment time and a one-tap confirmation button. The practice then becomes more automated by default and processes are simplified, and the patient is reached through a channel they respond to. It also gives the receptionists more time to focus on other admin-related tasks that improve the professionalism of the practice.
The broader principle is applicable across all industries. Take a car dealership, a logistics operation or a financial services provider. The business needs to understand what channels its customers are actually using, what it is trying to achieve by enabling those channels, and whether the underlying data is in a position to support the experience it wants to deliver. Data needs to be in order and accessible as well as easily located and companies frequently underestimate this step. The ability to automate a customer interaction is only as good as the data feeding it. A virtual assistant pointing a customer to an unavailable appointment slot or an outdated product offering does more damage than no automation at all. Ultimately, the system has to work because if it frustrates the end customer, it’s going to do more harm than good.
This is where the conversation is now changing for the SME. While a full omnichannel transformation from day one will be overwhelming for the average small business, it is entirely possible to take an incremental approach with one slice of the omnichannel pie at a time. Most companies are already operating comfortably with email, the next step is SMS, then from there it’s WhatsApp, then video and then more sophisticated automation as the business matures into each of these capabilities. Every layer builds on the foundation beneath it and the platform beneath these layers needs to carry the weight of what comes next.
The timing is also important. Economic uncertainty is a genuine concern for the SME right now, and even though companies recognise that omnichannel communication will benefit them strategically, technology and tools are a line item they’re reluctant to spend. However, companies willing to close the gap and incrementally approach the omnichannel can manage both spend and strategic growth simultaneously. There are solutions in the market designed specifically for the SME, providing the right foundation that allows companies to consolidate communication across channels within their budgets and timeframes.
