In Australia, customers now expect businesses to answer calls much faster, but many businesses are still struggling to keep up. Australians spent 123 million hours on hold in 2024, even though fewer people were calling businesses, while 82% of consumers expect phone support to answer within 2–3 minutes. At the same time, AI phone agents are becoming more common, with Salesforce reporting that more than one-third of ANZ contact centres are already using AI voice agents. For small businesses that can’t afford a traditional call centre, this is changing what good customer service looks like.
Here’s what the current data actually shows, and what it means if you’re running a small business trying to keep up.
📌 Key Takeaways
- Australians spent 123 million hours on hold in 2024–25 — an increase of almost 2 million hours year over year, despite call volumes to businesses falling by 5% over the same period, according to ServiceNow’s 2025 Australian Customer Experience Report.
- 82% of Australians expect phone support to respond in under 2–3 minutes, and 75% believe service response times generally take too long, according to PwC Australia’s Customer Sentiment Survey.
- 79% of Australians say they’ll take their business elsewhere after a poor or slow service experience (ServiceNow).
- AI in customer service has moved past the experimental stage. Salesforce’s Seventh State of Service report found 37% of ANZ contact centers already use AI Voice agents, with the majority expected to adopt predictive or generative AI within two years.
- Small business AI adoption is real, but uneven. Estimates range from roughly 29% to 68% depending on the survey and methodology, which says as much about how “adoption” is measured as it does about actual usage.
Trend 1: Australians Are Running Out of Patience and Hold Times Are Getting Worse, Not Better
This is the standout finding in the data, and it’s worth sitting with for a moment.
According to ServiceNow’s 2025 Australian Customer Experience Report, Australians collectively spent 123 million hours on hold in 2024 – 25, working out to roughly 11.1 hours per person. That figure has risen for four straight years, up 20% since 2021.
What makes this genuinely striking is that it happened while the number of people actually contacting customer service fell by 5% year on year. Fewer calls, longer waits for a sign that many customer service teams are increasingly stretched, not just busier.
The consumer response to this has been sharp:
- 79% of Australians say they’ll take their business elsewhere after a poor or slow service experience.
- 80% expect a refund or some form of compensation when service is slow.
- 93% say Cost to living pressure has changed their spending behavior, meaning patience for poor service is running lower precisely when switching to a competitor costs a customer nothing extra.
For any business relying on the phone as a primary channel for trades, clinics, hospitality, and professional services, this is the headline number to pay attention to. We’ve written separately about exactly what happens on the customer’s end when a call goes unanswered, and this data confirms the pattern: patience is genuinely thinner than it used to be.
Trend 2: Phone Remains the Highest Expectation Channel
It’s tempting to assume email and chat are where response time pressure is highest, since they’re newer channels. The data says otherwise.
PwC Australia’s Customer Sentiment Survey found that while 58% of consumers expect an online messaging reply within 35 minutes, 82% expect phone support to respond within 2-3 minutes, a notably higher bar, and most small businesses without a dedicated receptionist simply can’t hit consistently during busy periods.
This matters because phone calls tend to represent higher-intent customers than a website enquiry. Someone dialing a number has usually already decided they want to talk to someone, not browse. A slow or unanswered call doesn’t just risk a delayed response; for many callers, it’s the moment they decide to try somewhere else entirely.
Trend 3: AI in Customer Service Has Moved from Pilot Project to Standard Practice
The “should we try ai receptionist for customer service” conversation has largely already happened in Australia the data shows most organizations have moved on to “how much of this do we adopt.”
Salesforce’s Seventh State of Service report found that 37% of ANZ contact centers are already using AI Voice agents, with only 7% saying they don’t expect to adopt one within the next five years. The same report found that 90% of service leaders say AI has improved customer satisfaction and experience, and 94% of organizations are actively prioritizing technology integration to support AI initiatives.
This lines up with what Australia’s National AI Centre is tracking at a broader level. Its ongoing monthly survey of small and medium businesses found that among businesses currently using or planning to use AI, content generation and data analytics are the most common applications so far (54% each), suggesting most businesses are still starting with lower-risk, internal-facing use cases before moving to customer-facing tools like voice agents that actually understand and respond to callers.
Trend 4: Small Business AI Adoption Is Real, But the Numbers Depend Heavily on Who’s Measuring It
If you’ve seen wildly different headlines about how many Australian small businesses use AI, you’re not imagining it; the numbers genuinely don’t agree with each other.
- The National AI Centre’s tracker (a monthly survey of 400+ SMEs) puts adoption at around 37%.
- CSIRO’s figure sits closer to 68%.
- MYOB’s Business Monitor survey, covering businesses under 200 employees, reports 29%.
The gap comes down to methodology: what counts as “using AI” varies a lot between a business that’s trialed a chatbot once and one that’s built AI into daily operations. What’s consistent across all these surveys, though, is the direction: adoption is rising, and larger businesses are ahead of smaller ones, mainly because small businesses have less spare time and budget to experiment with new tools.
This is a genuinely important point for solo operators and small teams: the businesses catching up fastest tend to be the ones choosing simple, no-code tools that don’t require a dedicated IT resource to set up which is a large part of why an easy-to-set-up AI receptionist has become a realistic option for small businesses in a way that complex custom AI systems aren’t.
Trend 5: “Business Hours” Are Losing Their Meaning to Customers
None of the data above breaks down neatly into 9 to 5. Customers calling about a burst pipe, a dental emergency, or a Saturday booking don’t pause their need to match your roster.
Combined with the hold time and response speed data above, this points to a direct conclusion: businesses that can only respond during standard hours are, by definition, unavailable during a growing share of the moment customers try to reach them.
What This Actually Means for Australian Small Businesses
Put together, the current data tells a consistent story:
- Customers expect faster phone responses than most businesses are staffed to deliver, especially outside standard hours.
- The cost of not meeting that expectation is real; most Australians say they’ll simply switch businesses after a slow experience.
- AI-assisted service has already become mainstream at the contact Centre level and is filtering down to small business tools that don’t require enterprise budgets.
- The businesses adapting fastest tend to be the ones adopting simple, accessible tools, not complex custom builds.
For a small business, this isn’t really a “should we adopt AI” question anymore larger organizations have largely settled that. The more practical question is which parts of customer service, phone answering, are worth automating first, and which still need a human.
Where Hello22 AI Fits into This Picture
Given the data above, a few specific things stand out about how Hello22 AI is built:
- It directly targets the hold time problem by answering every call immediately, 24/7, rather than adding a caller to a queue.
- It’s built for the “phone matters most” reality; the PwC data shows treating phone response speed as the priority, not an afterthought behind email or chat.
- It reflects the broader AI in service trend of pairing automation with human oversight. Salesforce’s own research found AI performs best in customer service when it works alongside people, not instead of them, which is why Hello22 AI includes configurable human handoff rather than trying to resolve every call end-to-end.
- It’s built for small business adoption, specifically with no-code setup, live in minutes, addressing exactly the resourcing gap that’s slowing AI adoption at the smaller end of the market.
As with any tool, the way to know if it closes this gap for your specific business is to test it against your own real call patterns, not just the industry data.
What to Watch Next
A few things worth keeping an eye on through the rest of 2026-27:
- Whether time keeps climbing. Four straight years of increases suggest this isn’t a temporary blip, and the pressure on businesses to respond faster is likely to keep building.
- Whether small business AI adoption catches up to large enterprise adoption, or whether the gap identified in current tracking data persists.
- Whether voice-based AI specifically becomes mainstream, as chat-based AI already has. Text-based AI tools have led adoption so far; voice is the next frontier, and the phone’s specific expectation data above suggests there’s real demand for it to catch up.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
Are hold times in Australia getting worse?
Yes. ServiceNow’s 2025 Australian Customer Experience Report found Australians spent 123 million hours on hold in 2024, a rise of almost 2 million hours on the previous year and the fourth consecutive year of increases.
How fast do Australian customers expect a business to answer the phone?
PwC Australia’s Customer Sentiment Survey found 82% of consumers expect phone support to respond within 2–3 minutes, a noticeably tighter expectation than for online messaging.
Are Australian small businesses really adopting AI for customer service, or is that overstated?
It’s real, but the exact scale depends on who’s measuring it. Estimates range from around 29% to 68% depending on the survey’s methodology and definition of “adoption.” What’s consistent across sources is that adoption is trending upward.
Is AI replacing human customer service reps in Australia?
Current data doesn’t support that. Salesforce’s research found the strongest results come from AI and human staff working together, with AI handling volume and routine queries while people handle complex or sensitive interactions.
Why do fewer people call businesses but still wait longer on hold?
ServiceNow’s data shows call volumes fell 5% year on year while hold times still increased, suggesting many customer service teams are under resourced relative to demand rather than simply facing more calls.
Does slow phone response cost businesses customers?
Yes, according to the data. ServiceNow found 79% of Australians say they’ll take their business elsewhere after a poor or slow service experience, and 80% expect compensation when service is slow.
What’s the difference between customer service trends for big companies vs small businesses in Australia?
Large enterprises are adopting AI in customer service faster, largely due to bigger budgets and dedicated technology teams. Smaller businesses are adopting more slowly on average, but the gap is narrowing as no-code, low-cost tools become available that don’t require in-house technical expertise.
