DStv South Africa launches T.U.M.I the chatbot

I am telling you every time you blink some company somewhere launches a chatbot. These past few months alone we have seen BancABC’s Ally, Nyaradzo’s Sahwi, FBC’s Noku and TelOne’s Chommie. These are just a few of the prominent ones from local Zimbabwean entities. DStv South Africa has now waded in with their own chatbot T.U.M.I.

According to MultiChoice T.U.M.I stands for The Ultimate Master of Information and refers to the underlying machine learning engine that powers the chatbot. T.U.M.I also sounds a lot like Tumi which is short for Itumeleng a Tswana name that means joy.

T.U.M.I is an evolutionary leap in our service capability.This is not innovation for its own sake; the focus is to continue to grow our capacity to give our customers an excellent service experience.

MultiChoice South Africa CEO, Nyiko Shiburi.

T.U.M.I is not very different from the chatbots we have seen from other companies. The bot is meant to proffer routine assistance to customers. It offers the following services;

• Changing your package. For example, if you are thinking of temporarily switching to premium during the Euros.
• Managing your holiday homes-do we have people with holiday homes in Zimbabwe? This feature is useful if you have DStv at your holiday/rural home. Instead of carrying your decoder with you, you just add an additional decoder and switch to this decoder when you go to your holiday/rural home. Your main decoder will no longer be working during that period.
• Reconnect after you have made a payment
• Clear error codes
• Check your account balance

If you have a DStv South Africa account or even a Zimbabwean account you already know that DStv has this functionality within their website. So why bother with the chatbot? Well, it makes things easier especially for tech-shy people who tend to form the bulk of any population. It’s easier to carry out such operations using the bot in such cases as it’s like you are telling someone what to do.

Currently T.U.M.I is only available on DStv’s website and only if you choose South Africa in the dropdown. It would be nice if Zimbabweans get this too. It doesn’t seem like it will be available on WhatsApp. We sound like a broken record but WhatsApp is the internet for a lot of people and it makes it accessible instead of asking people to navigate the website just have them send a message like Hi to a given number instead.

It seems like T.U.M.I. will offer more than just support. It will also be available across MultiChoice’s services including Showmax and DStv Now. It will also be used to onboard customers to DStv Streaming. DStv Streaming is that awfully priced service that allows you to watch DStv on the internet only without a decoder and dish. It’s priced the same as normal DStv which doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

So let’s put our hands together and say hi to T.U.M.I. The bots are truly taking over. But it’s for the best. It means fewer human hours are wasted on routine stuff like clearing errors.