NativeTalk, a business communication technology company, has launched a platform that uses artificial intelligence to help African small and medium-sized businesses manage customer conversations. The platform combines customer messaging, business hotlines, conversation history, AI-generated summaries, and AI-assisted responses in a single workspace. This aims to address the challenge of keeping track of customer conversations across multiple communication channels.
The platform is designed to help SMEs that often manage customer relationships through WhatsApp, social media, phone calls, and other disconnected channels. Fisayo Tokede, product manager at NativeTalk, stated that accessibility is a bigger challenge for African businesses than visibility. If customers can see a business but can't reach it quickly, consistently, and professionally, visibility creates little value.
The launch extends NativeTalk's enterprise communication business, which has operated for over a decade and supports over 10,000 agents across organisations like MultiChoice, OPay, Cybervilla, and Pizza Hut. The company has powered over one billion minutes of customer conversations. The new platform brings tools traditionally associated with larger customer-service operations to smaller businesses.
The platform's AI-powered conversation summaries allow team members to quickly understand previous interactions with customers without manually scrolling through long chat histories. AI-assisted responses help teams respond more quickly and consistently during periods of high customer traffic. The platform maintains a complete conversation history that authorised team members can access.
NativeTalk said the system provides role-based access and permissions, allowing businesses to control which team members can access particular information. The technology is aimed at SMEs that have traditionally relied on personal phone numbers and separate applications to communicate with customers. Fikayo Babatunde, commercial business manager at NativeTalk, stated that every delayed response, missed message, and fragmented conversation is a missed opportunity and often a lost customer.
NativeTalk's move into the SME market represents an expansion of a business that has spent over 10 years serving large organisations. The company currently supports over 10,000 agents on its enterprise platform and has processed over one billion minutes of customer conversations. The SME version has already attracted over 1,200 business users and processed over 30,000 customer conversations since its launch.
The platform has expanded into seven African countries, including Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, and South Africa. NativeTalk expects adoption to increase as SMEs seek to replace manual and fragmented communication processes with centralised digital tools. The company believes its platform can help businesses improve response times while presenting a more organised customer-facing operation.
Key points
- NativeTalk's platform uses AI to help African SMEs manage customer conversations across multiple channels.
- The platform combines customer messaging, business hotlines, conversation history, AI-generated summaries, and AI-assisted responses in a single workspace.
- The SME version has already attracted over 1,200 business users and processed over 30,000 customer conversations since its launch.
