Doing Nothing Is Expensive: Why AI Is No Longer Optional in African Call Centres

Missed opportunities are costing more than you think. Every missed call, every frustrated customer, every agent stretched to the limit – it all adds up. For African contact centres, the cost of doing nothing is rising fast

High staff turnover, language mismatches, long queues, and inconsistent quality are bleeding time and money from customer support teams. Just ask Sarah Mkhize, a contact centre manager in Durban, who spends her days trying to keep up rather than getting ahead. Her team is capable, but their tools weren’t built for a modern, multilingual market.

These challenges may feel impossible to fix, but they’re not. With the right AI, even the most overwhelming issues can be addressed with speed, clarity, and care.

Why Traditional Call Centres Are Losing the Race

• 40–50% of customer calls are not in English, and most centres have no way to analyse them.
• 70% of customers feel frustrated when transferred multiple times. (Zendesk)
• Only 1–3% of calls are reviewed for quality due to time constraints. (Qualtrics)
• Staffing and training can consume 50–75% of contact centre costs. (CX Today)

Enter Vulavula: AI Built for African Customer Service

Many contact centres are still operating on systems that weren’t designed for today’s realities. And while it’s difficult to admit, these limitations are quietly eroding customer loyalty and performance metrics.
Enter Vulavula: AI Built for African Customer Service

Vulavula is a multilingual AI platform designed to help contact centres, like the one Sarah Mkhize manages, break free from outdated constraints and deliver the kind of support their customers deserve.

Here’s how it helps:

Together, these tools ensure no conversation is left behind. Now, even the 40–50% of calls that happen in African languages can be analysed and improved, driving up Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and agent performance.

Cost-Efficient, Human-Centric CX

With Vulavula, contact centres can:

• Reduce the need to hire large multilingual teams.
• Potentially improve QA coverage from a current average of 3% to 100%, across all supported languages.
• Analyse insights from multilingual calls for deeper CX intelligence.
• Let customers speak their own language, without delays or dropped calls.
• Free agents from manual transcription tasks and focus on resolving real issues.

You don’t have to choose between saving costs and serving better, with Vulavula, you can do both.

See Vulavula in Action

Want proof that Vulavula can actually enhance your customer support?

🎥 Watch our customer service video to see how Vulavula helps reduce language confusion, speed up QA, and deliver consistently great service, across all languages

Let’s Build the Call Centre That Your Customers Love

African businesses shouldn’t settle for one-size-fits-all AI. Vulavula is built for African languages, real-world constraints, and the vision of inclusive, efficient customer service.

Know your market. Grow your market. Foster loyal connections.

👉 Try Vulavula on our Playground: You can explore Vulavula’s real-time transcription and translation features by logging into our platform. Once signed in, head over to the Playground to test it out – quick, hands-on, and no heavy setup required.
👉 Let’s talk! Interested in seeing how Vulavula can fit into your contact centre? Fill out this quick form or drop us an email at [email protected]  with the subject line “Vulavula Demo Call” and we’ll set up a time to chat.

*Note: Sarah Mkhize is a fictional persona created to represent the everyday realities faced by African contact centre leaders.