Digital Customer Service Adoption Barriers in Telecommunications: Evidence from a 2019 Arab Gulf Empirical Study

This applied research paper develops an unpublished MSc Business and Management research project completed in 2019 into a sector-level study of digital customer service adoption barriers in telecommunications. The paper is based on aggregated survey findings from 271 valid customer responses and examines a major telecommunications operator in the Arab Gulf, which remains anonymized for confidentiality reasons. The findings show that digital channel adoption was still developing, with 41.0% of respondents using digital channels frequently, 43.5% using them sometimes, and 15.5% having never used them. Key barriers included limited awareness of digital channel benefits, incomplete availability of required functions, slow request completion, complexity of use, trust concerns, preference for human interaction, and incomplete digital service resolution. The paper positions the 2019 study as an empirical baseline for understanding digital customer service adoption barriers during an important period of telecommunications digitalization in the Arab Gulf, with contextual relevance to Saudi Arabia’s digital transformation direction following the launch of Vision 2030.