The Customer Experience Revolution: Delivering Speed and Empathy

How often do you find yourself in this position?

You call a service provider, navigate a maze of menu options and finally reach someone. Then you’re transferred and have to explain your problem all over again. By the time it’s resolved, it feels less like service and more like persistence.

For many Australians, this is a familiar experience.

On paper, things are improving. Australians spent 113.5 million hours on hold in 2025, 10 million fewer than the year before, according to ServiceNow’s latest research. But customer frustration hasn’t disappeared, and expectations are rising faster than service is evolving.

ServiceNow’s research found that nearly one in two Australian and New Zealand customers would switch providers due to slow or inadequate service, while more than half cite lack of empathy as their top frustration. The challenge is no longer access or response time, but connection.

This is the new customer experience paradox: service is becoming faster, but not more intuitive or meaningful.

The root of the problem is structural.

In many enterprises, particularly across citizen services, councils and universities, service delivery is still shaped by disconnected systems and workflows. Agents move between platforms to piece together customer context, often relying on three to five tools to resolve a single issue. As a result, less than half their time is spent actually helping customers.

AI, when layered onto disjointed environments, cannot fully resolve the issue. It can accelerate individual steps, but it cannot fix the broken connections between them.

Some organizations are addressing the problem at its foundation.

At Griffith University, an enterprise service management approach built on a single data model has enabled more connected and consistent support for current students and staff. The university has reported over 80% of service requests being resolved at the first point of contact since going live two years ago, a 10–30% reduction in enquiry volume trends following the introduction of AI-assisted self‑service and Virtual Agent.

As Lori Burdon, Delivery Lead at Griffith University, explains: “Leveraging ServiceNow has done more than resolve responses more effectively, it's improved the experience for our staff and students. With an average customer satisfaction of 4.7 out of 5 across thousands of surveys.”

The next phase of customer experience will not be defined by speed alone, but by how effectively organizations combine speed with customer understanding.

This requires a shift in approach: better foundations, not more tools.

“Great service is not AI or human, but both,” says Pete Andrew, Group Vice President of ServiceNow Australia and New Zealand. “AI handles coordination and automation, and people provide judgement, empathy and reassurance. That balance only works when both sides operate within connected systems.”

ServiceNow enables this shift by embedding AI directly into customer experience workflows as a single control source of truth. The result is not just faster service, but more coherent service, where information is shared seamlessly across teams and outcomes become consistent.

That distinction matters. In an environment where customer friction is the fastest way to lose loyalty, closing those gaps will define the next standard of customer experience.

So while Australians may be spending less time on hold, the real test of customer experience is not only how quickly an issue is resolved, but how it makes them feel.