Cell C’s 2025 turnaround shows how cloud-native platforms and digital-first CX set up AI-powered growth for South African e-commerce and digital services.
Cell C’s 2025 Turnaround: A Playbook for AI CX
Cell C’s 2025 story isn’t mainly about a JSE listing. It’s about something more useful to anyone running an online store, subscription app, or digital service in South Africa: you can rebuild trust and growth by treating connectivity, cloud, and customer experience as one system.
Cell C says it returned to sustainable profitability in 2025 and capped that year with a JSE Main Board listing (ticker: CCD). But the part that should catch a digital leader’s attention is the method: a capex-light, partnership-first network strategy, paired with cloud-native platforms and a digital-first customer journey. That same blueprint is showing up across e-commerce and digital services as AI becomes the default way to scale service, personalization, fraud controls, and operations.
This post sits inside our series on how AI is powering e-commerce and digital services in South Africa. I’m using Cell C’s year as a case study—not to talk telecom for telecom’s sake, but to pull out a practical model you can apply to checkout flows, customer support, and lifecycle marketing.
Why Cell C’s 2025 matters to e-commerce and digital services
Answer first: Cell C’s 2025 matters because it demonstrates a modern service business pattern: move core capabilities onto elastic cloud platforms, use partnerships to extend reach, and rebuild customer experience through digital self-service—the same ingredients behind AI-led growth in e-commerce.
South African e-commerce has a simple constraint that most strategy decks underplay: if the network is slow, voice quality is poor, or support is hard to reach, customers don’t “bounce”… they quit. A telecom improving network experience and simplifying digital service isn’t a side story. It’s infrastructure for the entire online economy.
Cell C’s CEO Jorge Mendes frames 2025 as the validation of its “capex-light, network strategy,” paired with targeted investment in technology and infrastructure to lift service quality and customer experience. The interesting implication is this: you don’t need to own every asset to deliver a premium experience. You need control over the experience layer.
For e-commerce and digital services, that translates to a stance I strongly agree with: own the customer journey end-to-end, even if you rent parts of the stack (payments, cloud, logistics, comms platforms). AI then becomes the coordination engine.
Cloud-native telecom is a preview of AI-enabled digital services
Answer first: Cell C’s move toward a cloud-native core (including live VoLTE testing on a virtualised, cloud-native IMS platform hosted on AWS) is a preview of how AI-enabled services get delivered: software-defined, measurable, and continuously optimised.
Cell C says it became the first operator in Africa to begin live VoLTE testing on a fully virtualised, cloud-native IMS platform hosted on AWS. You don’t need to be a telecom engineer to understand why this matters. Cloud-native platforms tend to deliver three business benefits that e-commerce teams recognize immediately:
- Elastic capacity (handle peaks without overbuilding)
- Faster change cycles (ship improvements weekly, not yearly)
- Better observability (you can measure what customers feel)
Where AI fits (even when it’s not named)
Telecoms don’t always say “we used AI” in every announcement, but cloud-native systems are built to support it. Once services run on modern cloud infrastructure, it becomes practical to add AI for:
- Quality prediction: anticipating call or session degradation before customers complain
- Anomaly detection: flagging unusual network or account behavior quickly
- Routing and prioritisation: directing support or service flows based on urgency and customer value
For online retailers and digital services, the analogy is direct:
- Predict when a customer is likely to abandon checkout based on device, latency, and steps completed
- Detect fraud patterns in real time rather than after chargebacks arrive
- Route customer queries to the right agent or bot path based on intent and sentiment
A useful one-liner here: Cloud makes AI affordable; AI makes cloud worthwhile.
Digital-first customer experience: the app is now the storefront
Answer first: Cell C’s relaunch of its app (plus “Try Before You Buy”) is a clear bet on the same thing e-commerce winners already know: self-service, transparency, and speed beat clever marketing.
Cell C says it redesigned and relaunched the Cell C App to make it easier for customers to manage usage, buy value, and access support “in just a few clicks.” It also introduced a “Try Before You Buy” option across app, online, and in-store touchpoints.
This is the telecom version of what top e-commerce operators do with:
- frictionless returns
- upfront delivery ETAs
- clear subscription cancellation flows
- instant order tracking
Most companies get this wrong because they treat the app as a brochure. The better approach: treat the app as the primary service channel, then automate what you can.
Practical AI plays for South African e-commerce CX
If you’re building AI into customer experience in 2026, focus on the moments that change trust, not vanity “personalisation” banners.
Here’s what works:
- AI-assisted support triage (day one): classify inbound queries (delivery, payment, refunds, stock) and route them to the fastest resolution path.
- Knowledge base that answers in plain language: use retrieval-based AI so customers get answers grounded in your policies, not generic chatbot waffle.
- Proactive messaging: notify customers when something goes wrong before they ask (“Your delivery is delayed by 24 hours; here are your options”).
- Churn prevention triggers: detect patterns like repeated failed payments, repeated delivery issues, or repeated “where is my order” contacts.
Cell C’s “few clicks” framing is the bar. If your help journey feels like a maze, AI won’t save you—AI will just make the maze faster.
Partnerships and distribution: scale reach without losing control
Answer first: Cell C’s partnership-led model shows how to scale distribution while keeping the customer experience consistent—exactly the challenge for omnichannel e-commerce in South Africa.
Cell C highlights expanded distribution partnerships to increase access to SIM cards, devices, and offers in high-traffic retail locations nationwide. It also points to its partnership with iStore to strengthen its premium device portfolio and ensure iPhone availability through a trusted retail footprint.
There’s a bigger lesson here for digital commerce: distribution is still physical in South Africa, even when the purchase starts online. Customers discover products on social media, compare prices on mobile data, and still often want a nearby pickup point, service desk, or partner store for reassurance.
What to copy: “partner, but standardise the experience”
Partnerships fail when every channel has different rules, prices, or service levels. If you’re expanding via resellers, marketplaces, or retail partners, standardise these building blocks:
- A single customer profile (so support and marketing see the same truth)
- Consistent entitlements (warranties, returns, upgrades)
- Shared service metrics (resolution time, refund cycle time, delivery SLA)
- Unified messaging (so your WhatsApp, email, app, and in-store scripts match)
AI helps by enforcing consistency at scale—auto-generating partner-ready product content, spotting policy violations, and monitoring service quality.
The hidden lead-gen lesson: trust is built in public
Answer first: Cell C’s JSE listing and brand activity underline a lead-gen truth: people buy from brands they believe will still be there in 12 months.
Cell C positions its listing as “the start of our next chapter as a transparent, investible force” and highlights brand refresh work, store refurbishments (more than 72), and big visibility moments like a simultaneous nine-station radio broadcast. It also leaned on national events like the Comrades Marathon for broad engagement.
For e-commerce, “trust signals” aren’t only about badges on a checkout page. They’re operational and visible:
- fast refunds that actually land
- real support that answers
- stock accuracy that matches what’s on the site
- delivery performance you communicate clearly
If your brand is promising premium but your operations feel unpredictable, customers won’t become leads—they’ll become complaints.
A 2026 checklist: applying the Cell C model to AI in e-commerce
Answer first: If you want AI to drive leads (not demos), build it around infrastructure, journey design, and measurable service outcomes.
Here’s a practical checklist you can run in January while everyone else is still writing “2026 strategy” slides:
- Map your top 10 customer intents (delivery status, refunds, change address, payment failed, upgrade, etc.). Build AI triage around those first.
- Instrument the journey: track time-to-resolution, refund cycle time, first contact resolution, and repeat contacts per order.
- Fix the “thin ice” moments: payment retries, address validation, delivery ETA accuracy, and stock sync.
- Adopt cloud-native where it reduces cycle time: if releases take a month, your competitors will outrun you on CX.
- Use AI for operations, not only marketing: anomaly detection, fraud scoring, support routing, and demand forecasting create better experiences than “recommended for you” widgets.
- Choose partnerships that expand reach, then standardise: your brand is only as good as the weakest channel.
If you want one metric to rule them all: customer effort score. Make it easier, faster, clearer—then automate.
What Cell C’s 2025 signals for South Africa’s AI economy
Cell C argues that connectivity will play an even more central role in South Africa’s digital economy in 2026, with a focus on digital inclusion and support for SMEs and enterprises. I buy that. But inclusion doesn’t happen through speeches; it happens through pricing clarity, reliable service, and support that works on the first try.
For e-commerce and digital services, the direction is obvious: AI will be judged less by how “smart” it sounds and more by whether it reduces friction. Better onboarding. Fewer failed payments. Faster resolutions. More predictable deliveries. Those are the outcomes that create leads and keep customers.
If you’re building your 2026 roadmap, steal the principle behind Cell C’s year: modernise the platform, simplify the customer journey, and use partnerships to scale access—then let AI optimise the parts humans shouldn’t be doing manually.
Where do you see the most friction in your customer journey right now—support, payments, delivery, or onboarding—and what would it be worth to remove it before your competitors do?