UAE customers lose 83 million hours yearly as service delays persist

Dubai: Customers across the UAE are losing more than 83 million hours each year dealing with slow and inefficient service, highlighting the gap between rising expectations and how support is delivered on the ground.

New research from ServiceNow shows that the average consumer in the UAE spends 10.8 hours a year resolving issues, whether through long wait times, repeated interactions or navigating disconnected systems. At a national level, that equates to more than 10 million working days lost annually.

The findings come at a time when companies are investing heavily in AI, yet many are struggling to translate that into faster and more effective service.

Service delays are adding up across sectors, with issues taking an average of three to four days to resolve across EMEA. In manufacturing, resolution times extend to nearly a full working week, while even in technology, fewer than 20% of issues are resolved within an hour.

Customer sentiment reflects that strain. Around 41% of consumers in the UAE rate current service levels as average, poor or worse. At the same time, 45% say they would switch providers after a single bad experience, raising the stakes for companies that fail to respond effectively.

“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,” said Shakira Talbot, Group Vice President, CRM EMEA at ServiceNow.

Adoption of AI is beginning to make a difference in certain areas. Around 62% of consumers in the UAE say AI has improved customer service, with 49% pointing to gains in speed and efficiency and 60% citing better round-the-clock support.

That improvement has not addressed deeper frustrations. More than half of consumers, or 55%, say lack of empathy remains a key issue, while 47% report that chatbots fail to understand their queries.

Customer behaviour also reflects a gap between preference and reality. While 80% attempt self-service first, 89% still prefer phone support when seeking resolution, suggesting that automated channels are not yet meeting expectations.

“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,” Talbot said.

Behind the scenes, service teams face their own constraints. Agents in the UAE spend just 44% of their working week handling customer issues, with the rest taken up by administrative tasks and system navigation.

Fragmentation remains a major barrier. Around 73% of service representatives need to access three to five systems to resolve a single issue, while 51% cite inconsistent customer data as a core challenge.

This disconnect extends to leadership priorities. While 55% of customers highlight empathy as a key concern, only 24% of executives see it as a priority. Similarly, half of customers are frustrated by being transferred between departments, yet only 36% of executives identify it as a major issue.

Despite growing investment in AI, many organisations are still working with systems that were not designed for integrated service delivery. Fewer than half of UAE organisations have unified data across systems, and only 19% have enterprise-wide AI strategies that connect departments.

That gap is limiting the impact of AI on customer experience. Without integration across data, workflows and teams, service remains slow and fragmented, leaving consumers to bear the cost in time and effort.