Every week, I speak with business leaders across EMEA who have invested heavily in AI and CRM – and are still watching their customers sit on hold, repeat themselves across channels, and walk away frustrated. Our latest research puts a number on it – UK customers alone spend 445 million hours a year navigating broken service experiences. The AI exists to fix this. But AI layered onto fragmented systems just accelerates broken experiences. The real shift is re-thinking the system behind the service – not just the intelligence on top of it.
Customer service agents on the front line lack the tools and information they need to truly deliver, with just a third of organizations saying their agents are truly empowered, according to ServiceNow’s annual CX Shift report. Despite making investments in technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), businesses are undermining this by failing to unite their whole organization within customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
Dealing with this requires a fundamental shift in how CRM is used, towards a more ‘connected enterprise’ where different departments share information more effectively, with CRM working as a system of action across the business. This means a welcome move away from siloed approaches which can leave customers dangling, frustrated and explaining themselves repeatedly. Whether in proactive or reactive interactions, each customer engagement can build loyalty or ultimately lose it.
The cost of disconnection
The research surveyed 2,465 executives, service representatives and consumers in the UK and found the inability to harness the power of their own data could cost businesses dearly. With every UK consumer spending an average of 9.7 hours per year trying to resolve issues, 43% of surveyed UK customers said they would switch brands after one poor or slow service experience. The research found that even in sectors where speedy resolution is vital, such as banking and telecoms, issues can take three to four days to resolve.
There is a critical execution gap at play, between insight and action, and businesses are still failing to translate their AI investments into better customer relationships. Organizations too often layer AI onto fragmented CRM systems, hoping for a transformation that never comes. If workflows are siloed in one app and data is disparate, all this does is accelerate broken experiences. What we can see is that the research found that only half of UK consumers (56%) say AI has improved customer experience when it comes to delivering faster responses.
Only 49% of UK executives say their organization has deployed an end-to-end CRM platform that provides support across the entire customer lifecycle. What’s needed is AI-driven service that’s empowered with CRM data, that can escalate customers in a simple and frictionless fashion.
Connected enterprise is the foundation and not just a goal
It’s telling that 74% of UK organizations now expect progress in the next three years to come through a ‘connected enterprise’ approach, compared to just 48% through AI adoption alone. Truly connected CRM is increasingly seen as an operational foundation for the next level of customer experience.
When we look at traditional CRM, which all organizations have relied on at some point, it was built primarily for the front office. It captures customer requests but often stops at the moment of engagement, leaving fulfillment, resolution and back-office action to separate systems. That is why customers so often have to repeat themselves. No single system holds the full picture.
Today’s expectations call for a different approach. Sellers, service agents, field technicians and back-office teams need to operate on the same AI-powered platform, sharing a single customer record in real time. When a customer raises an issue through chat, it should be tracked, escalated, fulfilled and resolved without them ever being asked to start over.
When CRM is used this way, businesses genuinely see stronger customer loyalty, more productive agents and greater cost efficiency at the same time.
The agent experience is part of the customer experience
It’s also vital that human agents have the right tools and the right data at their fingertips, and this requires a fundamental re-think of how information is shared across the organization. At most EMEA organizations, agents remain hampered by fragmented systems and multiple disconnected tools. The research found that 75% of UK service agents have to log into between three and five separate systems to resolve customer queries, and inconsistent customer data across these systems remains a top challenge.
Service agents do not want to spend their time trying to ‘paper over the cracks’ between fragmented systems, and can actually focus on the thorniest customer issues where human assistance is so vital. By opting for a more integrated system, agents are freed from system-hopping, administrative work, summarizing notes and chasing information between different siloed departments. Rather than unthinkingly spending on automation, it’s vital to re-imagine CRM as a connected engine which brings teams, data and processes together, supercharging the service agents can deliver.
When organizations get CRM right, the impact extends far beyond smoother service interactions. A connected, service-led CRM strategy returns time to both customers and employees, turning fragmented touch-points into cohesive journeys that build trust and long-term loyalty. Instead of switching brands after a single poor experience, customers are more likely to deepen their relationships when they feel known and understood at every stage. Internally, teams gain shared visibility of data, enabling faster decisions, smarter use of AI and more meaningful human engagement where it matters most.
AI delivers when the plumbing is right
So far, though too few organizations have integrated customer data across touch-points to create a unified view. Less than half of UK organizations surveyed have done so (46%) and less than a quarter (23%) have broken down silos to enable seamless AI strategies connecting departments across the business.
All of this points to the need for a different approach that connects data across cloud environments, departmental tools and legacy systems, giving AI a complete picture of the customer before it acts. In this model, AI agents do not wait for a human trigger. They can execute tasks autonomously, coordinate across departments and operate continuously.
That’s the difference between AI that resolves a billing dispute at 2am without human intervention, and AI that generates a faster version of the same broken experience customers are already enduring.
Service as a growth engine
The organizations getting connected CRM right are discovering something the cost center framing misses entirely – when service has full visibility of the customer relationship, it becomes a revenue driver.
In practice, this means service agents can identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities in the moment. They can create quotes, manage renewals, and escalate commercial moments on the same platform they use to resolve service requests. Service and selling stop being separate motions. The agent who resolves a problem can also be the one who deepens the relationship.
A connected, service-led CRM strategy does more than reduce the nine hours EMEA consumers lose each year to resolution friction. It gives that time back as trust and turns customers who might have switched brands into customers who deepen their relationship instead.
Curbing repetition, for good
Where repetition is the problem, the answer can be simple. By creating a ‘connected enterprise’, where customer information is shared across every channel and app, agents can be empowered to deliver. One interface, with all the information, doing all the work. In this model, service becomes a driver of growth rather than a cost center, by unlocking productivity, insight and, in turn, competitive advantage across the enterprise.
Investing in AI to accelerate broken processes will not in itself deliver. Instead, business leaders must focus on re-imagining CRM as a system of action across every channel, ensuring agents can deliver, and customers are no longer wasting potential hours each time they call.
