A Decade in the Making: CX Africa News Marks 10 Years of The Customer Magazine with Bold Rebrand at CICM's Sandton Conference

Ten years is long enough to watch an entire industry grow up. When The Customer Magazine first launched in 2016, customer experience was still, for many African organisations, an afterthought tucked inside the marketing department. A decade on, it has become the subject of national policy debates, boardroom strategy sessions and now, a magazine with a new name to match its new stature: CX Africa News.

The rebrand was unveiled in style this August, at the 9th Annual African Customer Experience Conference and Awards, hosted by the Chartered Institute of Customer Management (CICM) at the Protea Hotel Johannesburg Balalaika in Sandton. Delegates attending the three-day gathering, themed "Connect and Thrive: The Digital Experience Revolution," were among the first to hold a copy of the freshly reimagined publication a fitting stage for a title marking ten years of continuous coverage.

In her editorial, Chief Editor Nakisa Dzimwasha frames the anniversary not as a moment of nostalgia but of overdue recalibration. Her argument is straightforward: for a decade, customer experience was treated as a department to be resourced rather than a discipline to be measured. This edition, she writes, is built around the conviction that it is now time to treat it as the strategy itself, backed by country-level data rather than continent-wide assumptions.

That sharper, evidence-led approach is evident from the cover inward. Under the striking cover line "The Patient Is the Customer Now," the lead story turns to Ghana's rollout of free primary healthcare, examining the initiative through a distinctly CX-shaped lens proof that ten years on, the title's remit has expanded well beyond call centres and shopfronts into the institutions that shape everyday lives.

The anniversary edition is generous with continental scope, too. Readers will find a look at Tanzania's rising profile as an East African CX hub, alongside confirmation that Dar es Salaam with Zanzibar as a closing encore will host the 10th anniversary edition of the Annual African Customer Experience Conference itself in 2027, a neat echo of the magazine's own decade-long journey. Zambia's economic pressures, Malawi's new national service scorecard, and a sharp feature on how artificial intelligence is reshaping the "informed customer" round out an issue that also tackles customer abuse as a frontline issue rather than an HR footnote.

Institutional news to match the milestone. CICM confirmed the appointment of Thabo Victorious as its new Managing Director, tasked with driving Africa-wide growth from the Institute's South African head office, alongside newly appointed board members set to steer its next chapter.

Reflecting on the decade in his CEO's note, Ricky Harris describes the original title as a solid foundation built on good intentions rather than hard evidence and positions this rebrands as the natural next step for a publication that has outgrown its own back office. The new approach leans harder on data, with country desks stretching from Cairo to Cape Town reporting on how experience decisions genuinely play out on the ground, from Rwanda's citizen-scoring platform to Zimbabwe's new ID system.

Ten years after its first issue, CX Africa News is choosing to mark the occasion not with a retrospective, but with a relaunch a statement that a title built to serve Africa's customer experience community still has plenty of runway left, in print and increasingly online.

Copies of the anniversary edition are available on request. Readers keen to get their hands on one are encouraged to reach out via CX Africa News' official channels to reserve theirs.