Ask Africa has launched Elevate™, a first-of-its-kind decision-modelling capability designed to help organisations translate customer experience insight into confident, evidence-based action, enabling leaders to prioritise investments, evaluate opportunities, and drive sustainable customer and business value in an environment shaped by economic uncertainty, social transformation, and rapidly evolving customer expectations.
In an increasingly complex business environment, where customer expectations evolve faster than annual planning cycles, and competitive landscapes shift at unprecedented speed, organisations are facing a pressing challenge: knowing where to invest their resources to achieve the greatest customer and commercial impact.
Ask Africa has launched Elevate™, a first-of-its-kind decision-modelling capability developed to help organisations navigate this complexity with greater confidence and precision. Built on more than two decades of independently collected customer, consumer, and market intelligence, Elevate™ combines advanced statistical modelling, machine learning, behavioural science, and proprietary customer experience frameworks to help leaders evaluate future opportunities, test strategic interventions, and understand which investments are most likely to drive customer trust, loyalty, and business growth.
The launch of Elevate™ reflects a broader evolution within Ask Africa from a traditional market research organisation to a data intelligence and decision intelligence partner. Having built one of South Africa's most extensive longitudinal consumer and customer intelligence assets over more than two decades, Ask Africa is uniquely positioned to help organisations move beyond understanding what has happened towards anticipating what is likely to happen next and identifying the actions most likely to shape future outcomes.
While traditional dashboards and reporting tools effectively describe what has happened, Elevate™ is designed to answer a far more valuable question: what is likely to happen next, and what should organisations do about it? By modelling multiple scenarios and analysing the probability of different outcomes, the platform enables organisations to make strategic decisions with greater confidence and clarity before significant investments are made.
"Most organisations have no shortage of customer data. The challenge is determining which actions will create the greatest impact," says Dr Sarina Howie, chief data and analytics officer at Ask Africa. "Elevate™ bridges the gap between intelligence and action. It provides leaders with an evidence-based way to evaluate opportunities, prioritise investments, and understand the probability of achieving desired outcomes before resources are committed."
Elevate™ represents the next evolution of customer experience intelligence, moving organisations from understanding customer feedback towards understanding the likely consequences of strategic decisions. While customer experience programmes have traditionally relied on dashboards, scorecards, NPS metrics, complaints data, and operational reporting, these systems often leave leadership teams struggling to determine which initiatives deserve priority when resources, budgets, and organisational attention are limited.
According to Dr Howie, the differentiator lies in Elevate™'s ability to transform customer experience evidence into practical decision intelligence. "For many years, organisations have focused on identifying customer experience drivers, but knowing what matters is not the same as knowing what to do next. Elevate™ moves beyond descriptive analytics into predictive and prescriptive intelligence.
"By leveraging independently audited benchmark data, sophisticated modelling techniques, and behavioural science, the platform enables organisations to identify where the greatest headroom for improvement exists, which interventions are likely to yield meaningful results, and how those decisions ultimately influence trust, loyalty, and advocacy. It provides a far more rigorous foundation for customer experience strategy and investment planning."
The capability is underpinned by one of the largest and most comprehensive customer and consumer intelligence assets on the continent. Elevate™ is built on the independently audited Ask Africa Orange Index™, South Africa's longest-running customer experience benchmark. The platform draws on more than 170,000 customer interviews conducted over the past three years, incorporates 680 measured variables per respondent, tracks 219 brands across 27 industries, and is supported by a continuous benchmark trend line spanning 26 waves of research dating back to 2001. This depth of evidence provides the statistical stability required for sophisticated decision modelling and predictive analysis.
The robustness of the CX Elevation Blueprint™ and the statistical models underpinning Elevate™ has been independently reviewed and validated by Matogen, Ask Africa's independent data science partner. The validation assessed model validity, stability across benchmark waves, and out-of-sample predictive performance to ensure the reliability and robustness of the framework.
Conducted by a team of seven PhD-qualified specialists with a combined 400 years of experience in statistics, data science, modelling, and advanced analytics, the review provides organisations with confidence that the intelligence generated by Elevate™ is built on a scientifically rigorous foundation capable of supporting high-stakes strategic, operational, and investment decisions.
More importantly, the value of Elevate™ lies not only in its modelling capability, but in the depth, continuity, and quality of the intelligence that powers it. Over more than two decades, Ask Africa has tracked changing customer expectations, consumer attitudes, behavioural shifts, and brand performance across industries. This longitudinal intelligence foundation enables Elevate™ to identify patterns, relationships, and opportunities that extend beyond conventional reporting and support more confident decision making.
The methodology underpinning Elevate™ has evolved alongside changing customer expectations over more than two decades. The framework incorporates key dimensions such as Net Promoter Score, humanness, emotional drivers, authenticity, and the proprietary CX Elevation Blueprint™, all of which have been independently audited and tested across multiple waves and collection methodologies. This provides organisations with confidence that decisions are grounded not only in data, but in proven and validated customer experience science.
Ask Africa positions Elevate™ as the decision layer within a broader customer intelligence ecosystem. Together with the Ask Africa Orange Index™, organisations gain independent competitive benchmarking; through TGI™ by Ask Africa, they gain a rich understanding of consumer behaviour, motivations, and media habits; through internal customer experience trackers and operational dashboards, they gain visibility into ongoing performance. Elevate™ sits above these systems, connecting evidence to action and enabling leaders to evaluate strategic priorities within a single integrated framework.
For Maria Petousis, commercial executive at Ask Africa, the launch addresses one of the most significant challenges facing organisations today: translating intelligence into measurable business outcomes. "The challenge facing most organisations today is not a lack of data, but understanding how to convert that data into meaningful action. Elevate™ enables leaders to move from insight to execution by providing an evidence-based view of where investment will have the greatest impact and what outcomes are realistically within reach. In a highly competitive environment, that level of intelligence becomes a strategic advantage."
Designed for leaders responsible for customer growth, loyalty, brand experience, and transformation, Elevate™ empowers organisations to identify the opportunities with the greatest potential impact, optimise investment decisions, understand where additional effort is likely to deliver diminishing returns, and navigate the evolving influence of economic, market, and customer dynamics.
As expectations continue to rise and business environments become increasingly complex, Elevate™ represents the next evolution of intelligence-led decision-making. It reflects Ask Africa's continued evolution from measuring customer and consumer behaviour to helping organisations anticipate change, predict outcomes, and act with greater confidence, precision, and strategic foresight. In doing so, Elevate™ enables organisations not only to understand their customers, but to shape the outcomes that matter most.
