Australians are fed up with broken customer experiences in every aspect of their lives – but better service is within our grasp if we’re willing to reach for it. That was the clarion call for some of the nation’s top industry leaders who recently gathered with ServiceNow to experience the F1® Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne up close.
According to ServiceNow’s 2025 Customer Experience Report, customer service has reached breaking point. The average Australian spends a gargantuan 123 hours on hold per year – yet the employees tasked with serving them only spend 1 day per workweek solving customer problems, with the other 4 days consumed largely by admin and red tape. Yet early-adopters of AI like Optus and Orica show it’s easier than ever before to deliver superior service, and 79% of Australians are ready to switch to brands that can provide it.
Victor Dominello, Co-Founder of ServiceGen and former NSW Minister for Customer Service, has clear ideas and a uniquely successful track record for achieving customer experience breakthroughs in government and industry alike. Dominello and ServiceNow Australia’s Managing Director, Barry Dietrich, delved into ways to engineer those breakthroughs during an invite-only discussion ahead of F1® Melbourne – the top five of which we’ve reproduced here:
Organisations often fail at customer experience because they hate customer feedback – and they hate that feedback because they fear being forced to change. When the voice of customers isn’t well-represented, service quality corrodes and so does the long-term stability of the organisation.
For Dominello, real-time insights into customers’ feelings and pain proved pivotal to his early wins as the first-ever Minister for Customer Service in NSW. Those insights not only showed Dominello what was and wasn’t working, but also helped his team galvanise various government agencies to ditch their “all is well” assumptions and take more urgent action.
Gathering feedback or installing new technologies like AI can make organisational leaders feel like they’re making progress on customer experience. But real improvements can only come if the organisation’s culture is truly customer-centric: caring enough about customers to embrace new and disruptive approaches to strategy, process, and technology. Often, that requires leaders to hire from industries that live or die on customer satisfaction, as Dominello did when bringing in experienced hands from banking, retail, and even broadcast to join the nascent ServiceNSW agency.
“Changing technology is like changing a golf ball, relatively quick and easy to do,” Dominello says. “But changing culture is like changing the swing: it can take years of hard work, dedication, and correction.”
Bridging the gap between customer expectations and actual service demands 3As of agility.
- Agile data allows leaders and employees to understand the hyperdynamic world of the customer and align ideas for improvement with changing demands.
- Agile decision-making eliminates unhelpful suggestions and dispels organisational myths about what can or can’t be done, leaving teams to focus on the ideas that best address customers’ reality.
- Agile funding ensures teams can turn those ideas into real solutions while they’re still relevant to customers. The alternative is glacial development and systems that are already legacy by the time they reach the market.
Leaders can use the AAA framework to assess their organisation’s readiness for customer experience transformation: ideally, weaknesses in any one area should be resolved before embarking on new solutions.
During the discussion, Dietrich stressed the importance of offering a single “front door” through which customers can access whatever solutions they need. “People typically don’t know or care where in the organisation to go for help – they just want to get their issues resolved as simply and quickly as possible,” Dietrich says. “If they have to navigate through numerous apps, points of contact, or prompts in a phone or AI conversation – they’ll vote with their feet.”
Dietrich observes that ServiceNSW’s app recognised this truth early on: “what you delivered wasn’t an app for every department, it was a single icon that you could click to get whatever you needed.” The same ethos also underpins ServiceNow’s approach to platform delivery, giving customers an AI-powered portal where they can get issues resolved through the most convenient means. “All the complexity of issue resolution – whether it’s being automated or facilitated by employees supported by AI – happens underneath the hood,” Dietrich says.
If trust is the currency of customer experience, how can organisations build up their reserves? According to Dominello, trust is made up of five dimensions: security, privacy, resilience, inclusion, and transparency. Organisations that can build the infrastructure to support those five dimensions will not only strengthen their customer experiences, but also enjoy greater long-term stability in an increasingly volatile world. That infrastructure could involve:
- Using AI to democratise service inclusivity for under-served customers. As one example, Dominello highlights AI’s potential for closing gaps in education, giving marginalised students access to guidance and instruction that were once only available through human tutors.
- Employing ethics frameworks that cover all stages of decision-making, giving customers and stakeholders transparency into how complex issues (like those around privacy or security) are managed.
- Building systems of resilience to recover customers’ security and privacy when things go wrong, like NSW’s ID Support hub that’s allowed customers to reissue their identity credentials after third-party data breaches in seconds instead of months.
Both Dominello and Dietrich note that trust infrastructure can be spun up faster and more seamlessly than ever before, thanks in part to data and AI platforms like those of ServiceNow. That suggests many of Australia’s customer experience shortfalls are all in the mind – and the faster organisations change their thinking, the faster the nation can unbreak customer service for everyone’s good.
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