Why businesses need to rethink technology adoption, particularly in the country’s General Trade sector
Picture a Saturday morning at month-end in a busy wholesaler. The queue is out the door, the trader is counting stock, and a customer is waiting for their change. Now imagine a company representative leaning over the counter to ask, “Have you downloaded our app yet?”
The trader will smile. The app will remain undownloaded.
That isn’t stubbornness; it’s a sensible assessment of priorities. The trader has a business to run, customers to serve and stock to manage. Their phone already does what they need it to do, and much of their day-to-day communication happens on WhatsApp.
Yet businesses continue to invest in technology that requires people to change established habits before they can benefit from it.
This raises a question worth asking: Are we building technology that solves people’s problems, or are we creating new tasks for them to complete?
Too often, the people building technology have never experienced the environments they are designing it for. We design from air-conditioned offices in Sandton, only to discover that we have built for the wrong room.
The adoption problem businesses aren’t talking about
For years, business technology has been designed around people sitting at desks: portals, intranets, dashboards and logins. But much of South Africa’s commercial activity happens elsewhere, in spaza shops, independent retailers, store aisles, warehouses and on the road.
These environments have their own demands. A trader serving customers cannot always stop to navigate a new platform. A field representative moving between stores needs to capture information without interrupting the work they have been sent to do. And for businesses operating across urban centres, townships, rural communities and smaller trading areas, access to reliable connectivity cannot simply be taken for granted.
These are not marginal considerations. They are fundamental to whether a technology solution works in practice.
The usual response to poor adoption is to push harder: more training, more reminders, more incentives to register and more follow-ups with people who have not logged in.
But what if the problem is not the people refusing to adopt the technology? What if the technology is asking too much of them in the first place?
We believe businesses need to change the question. Instead of asking how to persuade people to use another platform, they should ask how technology can fit into the tools and routines people already use.
In many cases, that means meeting them where they are.
WhatsApp is the front door. The real value is what happens behind it.
Conversations about WhatsApp in business often begin and end with marketing: broadcasts, chatbots and automated replies. These have their place, but they represent only a fraction of what is possible.
We see WhatsApp as an accessible front end for a much more sophisticated business process.
Because the platform is already familiar to so many people, they can interact with a business without having to learn an unfamiliar interface or remember another set of login details. That familiarity lowers the barrier to participation.
Behind that simple experience, however, can sit an integrated system of data, workflows, permissions, reporting and analytics. A message can initiate a process, capture information, connect systems and generate insights that support business decisions.
The user experiences a straightforward interaction. The business gains a structured, measurable process.
Consider a General Trade campaign designed to reward traders for purchasing more of a particular product.
To participate, a trader sends a WhatsApp message and scans the barcode on the product pack. Within seconds, they can see where they stand on a leaderboard. A little friendly competition with the trader down the road provides an additional reason to participate.
There is no complicated registration process to navigate and no separate application to learn before the trader can get involved.
Yet behind that exchange, a great deal is happening.
Each interaction is linked to a specific outlet, and purchases are recorded at individual-product level. Each trader has an individual target, measured across trading weeks rather than at a single point in the campaign. The platform identifies who has earned a reward, issues it and tracks whether it has been redeemed. Brand teams can monitor activity and performance in real time.
The trader experiences a chat. The business gains verified, outlet-level purchasing data that would be difficult to collect through conventional forms or a portal that traders might never open.
This is where the real value of technology lies: not in how impressive the interface looks, but in how effectively it turns an everyday interaction into useful business intelligence.
Good technology should absorb complexity, not transfer it to the customer.
What this means for South African business
The implications extend well beyond promotional campaigns.
For businesses selling through General Trade, reaching independent traders consistently and understanding what is happening at outlet level can be challenging. Traditional processes may depend on paper forms, manual reporting, in-person visits or digital tools that require considerable effort from the people expected to use them.
When participation is difficult, the information businesses receive can be incomplete, delayed or difficult to verify. That affects their ability to measure performance, understand purchasing behaviour and make informed decisions about where to direct resources.
A familiar messaging platform, connected to the right underlying systems, can help address some of these challenges by making participation easier and information capture more immediate.
The same thinking applies to field execution.
Managing field teams at scale requires businesses to know who arrived for a shift, what work was completed, what a store looked like and what shoppers had to say. Collecting that information consistently requires a process that works in the conditions field teams actually face.
On our activation platforms, WhatsApp provides a familiar way for field teams to check in and out of shifts and submit photographs as evidence of execution.
For the person in the store, it is simply a message thread. For the client, it provides evidence of work completed and a more immediate view of what is happening in the market.
The information can then feed into reporting and analysis, helping businesses assess execution and identify where further attention may be needed.
The principle is the same in both cases: make the interaction simple, while ensuring the infrastructure behind it delivers the information and control the business requires.
Why another app may not be the answer
We are not arguing that apps do not work or that businesses should abandon them. Dedicated applications can be effective, particularly where users need specialised functionality, complex interfaces or tools they use regularly as part of their jobs.
The issue is assuming that the same solution will work equally well for every audience, environment and business objective.
In South Africa’s General Trade sector, for example, an incentive needs to be easy to access and worth the trader’s time. The process must make sense during a busy Saturday rush, work as reliably as possible under variable connectivity conditions and fit into the realities of running a small business.
A beautifully designed platform that people rarely use will not deliver the same value as a well-designed process that fits naturally into their day.
This is also why technology adoption should not be measured by registrations or downloads alone. Businesses need to consider whether people actually use the solution, whether the information captured is reliable and whether the resulting data improves decision-making.
The objective is not simply to get people onto a platform. It is to make the technology useful enough that participation becomes a natural part of getting things done.
Technology works better when it understands the field
This thinking shapes how we approach our work at ConnectGroup.
ConnectGroup builds the technology platforms, while our parent company, MegaVision, brings deep experience in activations and field execution. That relationship connects the development of the technology with the practical realities of putting it to work in the market.
The people building the platforms understand the environments in which they will be used. The teams responsible for execution understand how the platforms support the work and what information clients need to make better decisions.
We are neither a technology vendor that hands over a licence and disappears nor an agency that simply provides merchandising services or brand representatives. We build the technology, put it to work in the market and translate the results into insight.
That connection matters because technology does not deliver value in isolation. Its value depends on how effectively it supports people, improves processes and helps businesses achieve measurable outcomes.
For South African businesses operating across diverse markets, that means looking beyond the technology itself and paying closer attention to the people expected to use it.
The next big technology decision may be about what not to build
The future of business technology will not necessarily be defined by another app, portal or intranet. In a country as diverse and geographically spread out as South Africa, expecting everyone to adopt yet another platform can create unnecessary barriers to participation.
The more useful question is whether businesses can deliver the functionality they need through experiences that already feel familiar to their customers, employees and partners.
That requires careful thinking about security, data management, integration, permissions and reporting. A familiar interface alone is not enough; the infrastructure behind it must be robust, reliable and appropriate for the task.
But when those elements come together, technology can become less of an obstacle and more of an enabler.
The principle is simple: keep the front door familiar and put the intelligence in the infrastructure.
Ultimately, businesses should not have to choose between a simple user experience and sophisticated technology. They should expect both.
So, the next time your business considers investing in a new platform, ask a different question before deciding what to build: Where are the people we need to reach already, and how can we make the technology work for them?
By Jane Eriksen and Warren Canning, Co-Founders, ConnectGroup
