UAE consumers losing 83 million hours a year to hold times and service failures, according to research published by ServiceNow. The findings arrive despite a period of sustained investment by organisations in artificial intelligence tools intended to transform how service is delivered.
The study, titled The CX Shift: Customer Expectations in the AI Era, and conducted with research consultancy ThoughtLab, surveyed 34,000 executives, service representatives and customers across the globe, including 1,335 respondents based in the UAE.
It found that poor customer service costs each UAE consumer the equivalent of 10.8 hours a year – more than a full working day – spent on tasks such as enduring hold times, repeating information to multiple agents, or navigating systems that are slow to respond.
Poor customer service costs UAE consumers over 10 hours a year, new study reveals
Across the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, the research found that customer issues take an average of three to four days to reach resolution – even in sectors such as banking and telecommunications, which are considered built for speed. In manufacturing, resolution times extend to nearly a full working week. Even within the technology sector, fewer than one in five customer service issues – 18 per cent – are resolved within an hour.
In the UAE, close to half of consumers – 41 per cent – rate current customer service as average, poor, or outright poor. Meanwhile, 45 per cent say they would move their business to a competitor following a single experience they consider slow or unsatisfactory.
“Consumers across EMEA are losing entire working days to service experiences that should take minutes. The root cause isn’t a lack of AI investment – it’s that most CRM systems were built to record interactions, not resolve them. That’s the shift we’re driving: CRM as a system of action, not a system of record,” Shakira Talbot, Group Vice President, CRM EMEA at ServiceNow said in a statement.
AI builds trust, but empathy remains the gap
The research does register a degree of progress. Almost two-thirds of UAE consumers – 62 per cent – say AI has improved customer service in some form. Half of those surveyed in the Emirates, 49 per cent, report gains in speed, efficiency and convenience, and 60 per cent say AI has made after-hours and round-the-clock support more accessible. However, speed alone is not enough to satisfy customers.
A lack of empathy remains the frustration cited most often, with 55 per cent of UAE consumers identifying it as a concern. Channel preferences reveal the scale of the tension: while 89 per cent of UAE consumers say they prefer telephone support, 80 per cent attempt self-service first – yet 47 per cent report that current chatbot tools fail to understand their questions or concerns.
“Customers want to feel heard and resolved, not just routed. But that can’t happen when AI and human agents operate in different systems with different views of the customer. The organisations getting this right are the ones connecting their entire operation – front office to back office – on a single platform. That’s when CRM stops being a digital filing cabinet and starts being a revenue engine,” added Talbot.
The research points to the working environment of service representatives as a factor deepening the problem. Agents in the UAE spend just 44 per cent of their working week on tasks directly related to addressing customer issues.
Only 19% of UAE firms have enterprise-wide AI strategies, ServiceNow research finds
The remainder is absorbed by administrative work, switching between systems, and tracking down information. In the UAE, 73 per cent of service representatives must log into between three and five separate systems to resolve a single customer issue, while more than half – 51 per cent – cite inconsistent customer data as a barrier.
One of the more striking findings concerns the gap between what customers say they want and where senior leaders say they are focused. While a lack of empathy is the top frustration for 55 per cent of UAE consumers, only 24 per cent of UAE executives say they regard it as a priority.
Half of UAE customers – 50 per cent – say they are frustrated by being transferred between departments, but only 36 per cent of UAE executives identify this as a problem that warrants attention.
The research attributes much of the service failure to technology infrastructure that has not kept pace with customer expectations. Fewer than half of organisations in the Emirates – 46 per cent – have integrated data across internal silos into a single source of truth. Fewer still, just 19 per cent, have enterprise-wide AI strategies in place that break down barriers between departments.
ServiceNow argues that closing this gap requires AI to unify data, workflows and teams before it can deliver the transformation organisations are seeking.
The research concludes that when organisations connect their service environments, they release frontline staff to focus on empathy, communication and building trust.
Without that shift, the report warns, AI investments are likely to underperform, frontline teams will remain constrained, and customers will continue to bear the cost of experiences that fall short of their expectations.
