A Kaspersky-commissioned survey highlights the role of relatives and friends in helping older people use digital services—and raises practical questions about accessibility, account control and customer support.
Family tech support can sit behind a banking transaction that appears entirely digital. A relative may explain a screen, help locate a setting or work out why an application has stopped responding. For the service provider, the transaction is complete. For the customer, it may have required assistance that the provider never sees.
That distinction deserves attention in South Africa. In an online survey commissioned by Kaspersky, 86% of South African respondents said they had helped an older relative or friend with technology: 51% regularly and 35% occasionally. Kaspersky subsequently confirmed these figures to AfricaBusiness.com and defined older people as those aged 60 and above. [1][2]
The business question is how banks, telecommunications companies and public-service platforms should accommodate assistance while making their services easier to use independently. Family tech support can be valuable, but customers should also have a workable route when no trusted helper is available.
What the family tech support figures actually measure
The research involved 5,000 respondents across South Africa, Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye, with 1,000 participants in each country. According to information supplied by Kaspersky’s representative, fieldwork took place in January 2026 and interviews were conducted online. [2]
The South African result does not mean that 86% of older South Africans need digital assistance. It describes the experiences of survey participants who reported helping someone aged 60 or over. Respondents aged 60 and above were themselves included and could have been supporting people in their own age group.
Among South African respondents who provided such help, 59% assisted with installing applications, 48% with online transactions and banking software, 46% with social media accounts, 41% with privacy settings and 29% with government services. Kaspersky confirmed that these task-specific percentages use the helper group as their base. [1][2]
The survey does not establish why each person sought assistance, whether the help was essential or how successfully a task was completed. Those are questions service providers would need to investigate with their own customers.
A completed transaction can conceal a difficult journey
Consider a hypothetical customer who completes a payment only after a family member explains the process. A dashboard showing transaction completion would record success. It would not necessarily reveal confusion, the time spent seeking help or whether the customer could repeat the process alone.
For product teams, this suggests a useful addition to usability testing: observe both independent and assisted journeys. Ask where help was needed, what the helper did and whether the customer understood the final action. A successful payment and a confident customer are related outcomes, but they are not interchangeable.
Testing should cover ordinary problems as well as first-time registration. Changing a phone, recovering access, correcting a form and understanding a failed payment may reveal different difficulties from downloading an app.
Providers should also examine what happens when assistance is unavailable. Can a customer reach a trained person, use an appropriate alternative channel or pause a process without losing their progress? These are practical service questions that can be tested rather than assumed.
Make family tech support compatible with customer control
Helping someone understand an account screen is different from having authority to operate the account. A relative may be welcome to explain instructions while the account holder still wants balances, messages or personal documents to remain private.
A useful design objective is to let customers obtain guidance while retaining control of sensitive actions. Providers should consider whether instructions make clear who is authorising a transaction and whether support can be delivered without asking another person to take over the customer’s credentials.
Where a service offers formal delegated access, its scope should be understandable: what the helper can see or do, how the customer grants permission and how that permission can be withdrawn. Availability and requirements will differ between providers; a family relationship alone should not be treated as proof of account authority.
Staff training matters too. A support agent may encounter a customer accompanied by an adult child, friend or carer. The process should allow appropriate assistance while ensuring that the customer’s own wishes remain central. Faster completion should not come at the expense of informed participation.
Accessibility begins with the ordinary interface
When all South African survey participants were asked what could improve older people’s cybersecurity and digital confidence, 37% selected simpler, more intuitive tools, 29% pointed to cyber-risk education and 21% emphasised more active family support. These are respondents’ views about possible improvements, not measurements of their effectiveness. [1][2]
The World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative explains that older users’ needs often overlap with those addressed by established accessibility standards. Changes in vision, dexterity, hearing or memory can affect how people interact with digital interfaces, although individual needs vary considerably. [3]
Readable text, adequate contrast, clear labels, usable controls and understandable feedback provide a practical starting point. Product teams should test these features with older users rather than assume that a simplified appearance alone makes a service accessible.
Age should not become a substitute for understanding the customer. Some older people are experienced digital users; others may be unfamiliar with a particular service rather than technology generally. Testing should include different levels of confidence, languages, devices and accessibility needs.
Measure whether the redesign helps
A service provider could begin with one frequently used journey, such as account recovery or submitting an application. Observe where customers stop, request help or misunderstand the next step, then test a revised version against the existing process.
Useful measures could include completion without unwanted assistance, repeated errors, time spent recovering access and subsequent support contacts. Customer understanding also matters: can the person explain what they have authorised and what will happen next?
The survey does not quantify potential savings from redesign. Reduced support costs, fewer abandoned transactions or stronger retention should therefore be treated as outcomes to test, not benefits already demonstrated by these findings.
Family tech support will remain a legitimate choice for many customers. The opportunity for South African digital-service providers is to support that choice while giving older users a clearer, more accessible route to acting independently.
About the research
Kaspersky commissioned the survey. Its representatives supplied clarifications to AfricaBusiness.com on the online method, sample sizes, age definition and percentage bases. The research agency’s name and detailed recruitment, quota and weighting procedures were not supplied in the correspondence reviewed. The results are therefore presented as findings from the surveyed participants, without a claim of national representativeness. An online survey also cannot directly capture the experiences of people who are entirely offline. The design proposals in this article are editorial analysis, not interventions tested by the survey.
Illustration supplied by Kaspersky.
Sources
- Kaspersky.
Family IT support becomes essential for older generations in South Africa, Kaspersky survey highlights,
15 September 2026. - Written clarifications supplied to AfricaBusiness.com by Kaspersky through INK&Co., 16 and 30 September and 1 October 2026. Unpublished correspondence.
- W3C Web Accessibility Initiative.
Older Users and Web Accessibility: Meeting the Needs of Ageing Web Users.
