Customer experience is the #1 priority for many of ASEAN’s service leaders, yet keeping up with changing customer expectations remains their toughest challenge. How exactly do you meet increasing demands for 24/7 support and tailored interactions while also contending with limited resources and high costs?
These challenges and how to solve them are explored in our latest State of Service report, based on learnings from 6,500 service professionals, including respondents from Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand.
Our findings reveal AI as a transformative force in service, helping businesses improve customer interactions, streamline operations, and drive growth as they evolve into agentic enterprises.
Read on as we dive into the report and share critical insights into how service leaders are:
- Unifying data for successful AI adoption
- Elevating employee and customer experiences through human and AI collaboration
- Future-proofing the call centre with conversational AI
- Empowering mobile workers and increasing field service efficiency
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Insight #1: ASEAN businesses prioritise AI, but silos slow adoption
Service teams are under immense pressure with increased customer expectations, limited resources, and ongoing talent shortages. So, it’s no surprise that AI has vaulted up the priority list for ASEAN service leaders, ranking amongst the top three priorities for respondents in Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand.
There’s also strong confidence in AI with more than 80% of our survey respondents in ASEAN agreeing that it helps companies better serve customers. However, many are struggling with adoption due to silos across teams and data.
The good news is that integration offers a fix for this friction. Our State of Service report shows that organisations with connected systems are seeing greater success with AI. More specifically, those who have integrated their service channel data into one unified platform are 1.4x more likely to call their AI implementation “very successful” compared to those with siloed systems.
Insight #2: Humans and AI agents achieve more together, elevating service
Companies across ASEAN are already incorporating predictive, generative, and agentic AI into their customer service operations to deliver faster, more accurate, and more personalised interactions.
From our State of Service Report, we found that the top AI agent use cases in ASEAN include:
- Responding to customers’ frequently asked questions
- Generating conversation summaries
- Personalising product recommendations
- Retrieving knowledge for reps and technicians
From providing proactive customer recommendations to helping service leaders with real-time insights, agents are transforming the nature of service work and the expected impact is huge.
Once fully implemented, service professionals in ASEAN expect agents to:
- Reduce service costs by 20%
- Reduce customer wait time by 20%
- Increase customer satisfaction by 20%
- Improve case deflection by 20%
- Increase upsell revenue by 15%
More than 80% of respondents from Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand also agree that complex cases are best resolved by humans and AI together.
Customer service in the AI era
Explore how service leaders worldwide are using data and AI to deliver faster, more personalised service in our 7th State of Service report.
Insight #3: AI to transform the future of call centres in Southeast Asia
Conversational AI has vast potential to transform the call centre industry, with AI-powered voice assistants meeting customers where they are and providing natural, immediate, and cost-effective customer support.
It’s already changing how customers connect with businesses, making every interaction faster, smarter, and easier. And service professionals using conversational AI are impressed with its performance, especially when human intervention is required. In fact, 87% say transitions from voice AI to human reps are seamless for customers.
The smooth transition from voice AI to humans maintains customer satisfaction while empowering reps to immediately focus on solving the problem rather than gathering background details.
Overall, AI isn’t just improving the customer experience; our report findings show it is actively transforming the experience of call centre teams:
- 71% service reps using AI say it’s creating growth opportunities
- 86% say they have developed new skills
- 81% say their role has gotten more specialised as a result of working with AI tools
These opportunities for career enhancement are especially relevant to contact centres in the Philippines, where service leaders cited the difficulty in hiring and retaining employees as a top service challenge.
Insight #4: AI increases field service efficiency, and technicians are ready for change
Service challenges aren’t limited to the call centre; field service organisations also battle significant inefficiencies. Mobile workers report spending over seven hours per week on admin duties like filling out forms or hunting for information. That’s time that should be spent fixing problems.
AI-driven automation is the next leap forward for field service leaders, and 85% believe their AI investments will increase over the next year.
Current and future use cases for AI in field service globally include:
- Knowledge retrieval
- Scheduling, routing and dispatching
- Parts inventory management
- Predictive maintenance and equipment monitoring
- Visual diagnosis and AR-guided repairs
Embedding AI agents into the flow of work will further elevate field service efficiency, and technicians are overwhelmingly ready for this shift. 94% believe that AI makes them more productive, 93% believe that AI helps their company serve customers better, and 88% agree that AI frees them to focus on more complex cases.
Navigating the path forward for ASEAN businesses
Our State of Service report confirms customer service is entering a new era — one in which humans and AI agents work together to create unprecedented success.
This shift is accelerating rapidly, with the estimated share of service cases resolved by AI currently at 25%-40% across ASEAN. This is expected to rise even further to 40%-55% by 2027.
Agentic AI is set to be critical in transforming service operations, and its role is only going to get bigger. Businesses that embrace this change will be best positioned to meet the increased expectations of customers, stay competitive, and attract top talent. Above all, the human touch remains essential, which is why adopting AI agents should start with empathy, trust, and a people-first approach.
Uncover more insights in our State of Service report, and find out how you can use the best of both AI agents and service representatives to achieve more for your business.
Inside the State of Service: AI, Insights, and What’s Next
Join our webinar to explore trends shaping the future of service in ASEAN, and hear directly from our experts on how you can build the next-gen service organisation with Salesforce.
