The missing human touch in Singapore’s customer service costs more than we think

MOST companies think they have a customer service problem. They don’t. They have a data problem that looks like a people problem. Until leaders can see the difference, they’ll keep investing in the wrong fix.

I’ve lived both sides of it. Last month, I called a company to sort out a billing issue. The chatbot couldn’t parse what I was asking. I got transferred. The human agent was patient, but put me on hold three times just to pull up my account history.

I spent 40 minutes resolving something that could have taken five. What struck me was watching a capable, well-intentioned person be defeated by the firm’s own systems in real time.

Many Singaporeans would recognise this experience, and it points to something deeper than a service failure.

What customers experience as poor service is often the downstream effect of how work is structured internally. This empathy gap is the visible outcome of organisational fragmentation.

Trust is built not only through major moments, but also through repeated daily interactions. For nearly half of all customers surveyed in a ServiceNow study, a lack of empathy ranks among top frustrations. Yet it remains a major business blind spot, with only 28 per cent of executives believing it causes serious challenges for customers.

The consequences are tangible and compounding. When customers feel unheard, they react with their wallets. In a market where switching costs are low and alternatives are plentiful, no business can afford to have a significant share of its customers quietly walk away over problems that are, at their core, entirely solvable.

Yet the issue rarely lies with the people on the front line. Most service representatives are genuinely trying their best. The challenge is the environment they work within: siloed systems, fragmented processes and customer information scattered across disparate platforms.

The question worth asking is why so many organisations are still operating this way. The honest answer is that fragmentation is an accumulation of digitisation, rather than a decision.

Different departments adopted technology at different times to solve specific operational problems. Customer service, finance, operations and sales each built or bought systems optimised for their distinct functions, not for the customer’s end-to-end journey.

Mergers, regulatory requirements and successive waves of digital transformation layered further complexity on top. The result is decades of disconnected investment that was never designed to add up to a coherent whole.

Corporate culture often compounds this. In many organisations, data is treated as a departmental asset rather than a shared resource.

Teams guard it, sometimes for legitimate compliance reasons, sometimes simply because that’s how the incentives were structured. Nobody decided to make the customer experience fragmented. They just optimised locally, at every level, for years.

Ironically, artificial intelligence has, in some cases, accelerated the problem.

On Jun 4, Minister for Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo said that Singapore’s approach to AI should not be just about getting humans to make AI work, but also about getting AI to work in support of humans.

That distinction is particularly relevant because in the everyday service interactions that most Singaporeans have with businesses, we are not yet living up to it.

When businesses layer new AI tools onto existing architecture – adding a chatbot here, a recommendation engine there – without first connecting the underlying systems, they end up redistributing friction instead of reducing it. The customer now hits the same wall faster, and with less patience.

Seeing the empathy gap to close it

Leaders, meanwhile, see dashboards and metrics, but not the underlying journey those numbers represent. They see resolution times and satisfaction scores, not the six-step obstacle course a customer navigated to get their issue resolved. Without visibility into this journey, it is difficult to see where trust is breaking down.

Closing the empathy gap takes more than layering new tech on old processes. The chatbot in my opening story was not frustrating because it was AI but because it lacked the context needed to help. When AI is properly connected to data and workflows, the experience changes.

Organisations using AI-powered service operations on a unified platform consistently see faster issue resolution and higher first-contact resolution rates. Instead of asking a customer to repeat their history, an agent receives an instant AI-generated summary with recommended next steps. This is what Teo’s point looks like in practice: AI working in support of humans, not the other way around.

When AI handles routine data gathering, human customer service personnel can focus on what matters most: solving complex problems and supporting customers. They are no longer simply information handlers moving between systems. They become problem solvers who rely on empathy, judgment and critical thinking.

This shift requires a different kind of upskilling – one less focused on navigating systems and more on honing human skills such as listening, understanding and decision-making.

Digital customer experiences increasingly shape how people experience everyday life in Singapore, from banking and insurance to healthcare and telecommunications.

The country’s reputation as a premier business hub rests partly on the quality of its service culture. When daily interactions with our leading companies become increasingly transactional and impersonal, that reputation erodes quietly, in the accumulated experience of millions of small frustrations.

When organisations connect data, processes and teams around a shared view of the customer, employees are finally equipped to deliver the kind of service people value most: fast, effective and human. Technology becomes an enabler rather than an obstacle.

Singapore’s AI ambition is real, and the policy foundations are being laid. However, ambition at the national level has to translate into architecture at the organisational level. The goal should be to use AI to remove friction, connect information and empower employees to serve customers better.

Making work more human and making service more human are ultimately the same challenge. For Singapore’s businesses, meeting it is not just a commercial imperative, but also about living up to the standard we have long set ourselves, and that the world still expects of us.

The writer is Asia-Pacific and Japan innovation officer, Singapore at ServiceNow