Customer service leaders have entered 2026 with a familiar mandate: improve the customer service experience. This year feels different, though. After several whirlwind cycles of artificial intelligence experimentation, personalization initiatives, and pressure to create more value beyond issue resolution, many organizations are finding that the basics of customer service have eroded. Customers feel it, and leaders need to fix it.
The path forward isn't about choosing between innovation and operational excellence. It's about balancing transformational technology with disciplined execution of foundational service practices. The organizations that strike this balance will directly contribute to customer loyalty and growth while also reducing overall costs.
Below are nine tactics that customer service executives should prioritize throughout the year to understand and improve customer experience:
1. Reinvent voice of the customer surveys as tools for action.
Traditional VoC surveys have become stale, dominated by generic customer satisfaction or resolution questions that yield little insight. Leaders should modernize surveys into dynamic, rotating question sets that dig into customers' real behaviors and expectations, looking, for example, into why they sought assisted service or which tools they used before reaching out. Leaders should treat surveys as living instruments that evolve with customer behavior.
But while refreshed surveys can provide richer context, they represent only one piece of the customer-experience puzzle. To understand customers fully, leaders must go beyond what customers say and tap into what they do across every interaction.
2. Expand insight through inferred and indirect VoC.
Call recordings, chat transcripts, journey analytics, and quality assurance evaluations can reveal much richer insights at scale. These complementary data sources can reduce the need to ask customers for obvious insight and can often collect this insight with much-improved sample sizes and greater accuracy.
3. Turn customer data into enterprise-level insight.
Collecting better VoC data through reinvigorated surveys and the addition of indirect or inferred VoC is only half the battle. Service leaders must design effective insight engines to turn this customer data into insights that drive action, both within service and support and on the enterprise stage through product, policy, and process decisions. Doing so requires a two-loop feedback process: One loop automates analysis for speed and consistency and the other deepens cross-functional collaboration to address root causes.
4. Solve avoidable issues at the source.
Fifty-five percent of customers say their last service issue was avoidable. That means more than half of support volume and the associated negative experience could be eliminated. This is the single biggest opportunity in customer service today. Leaders must identify root causes and fix issues before they reach the customer, reducing cost while significantly improving CX.
5. Deliver the brilliant basics every time.
When issues do arise, customers expect first-contact resolution, easy access to a human when needed, and proactive outreach. Most organizations fall short, not because they don't value these basics but because of differences in how leaders and customers assess these experiences. Closing this gap is essential.
6. Reduce customer effort.
Effort is a key predictor of churn: Only 14 percent of customers who experience a high-effort interaction say they’ll remain with a company. But today, customers report that more than a third of interactions remain high-effort. Leaders must streamline every step of the journey, from clear proactive communications to better self-service content to seamless context handoffs between digital and human channels.
7. Eliminate doom loops.
One in three customers recently experienced a doom loop, meaning they were being bounced between channels or trapped in automation without progress. Doom loops are most common in multichannel journeys and chatbot interactions. Leaders should use VoC insights and first-hand usability testing to identify these failure points and fix routing, escalation, and intent-recognition gaps.
8. Set transparent expectations for resolution times.
Customers don't demand instant responses, but they do want clarity. A third of customers say they have no idea when they can expect a reply. Improving forecasting, staffing models, and communication around response times can dramatically improve perceived satisfaction, even before the issue is resolved.
9. Use service to enhance customer value.
Service interactions are not just about solving problems; they're moments to help customers get more value from their product or service. Whether through digital guidance or human-assisted conversations, leaders should empower teams to educate customers on how to achieve their desired outcomes. Done well, value enhancement directly strengthens loyalty and long-term revenue.
While AI remains a top priority, its role should be framed correctly: AI is an enabler, not the objective. It should serve to enhance the nine tactics above by analyzing VoC data, improving triage, elevating agent performance, and identifying avoidable issues, not distract from them.
In 2026, the organizations that win will resist the temptation to chase transformation for transformation's sake. By re-grounding their strategies in customer expectations and coupling that foundation with smart, targeted AI enablement, customer service leaders can deliver experiences that set a new standard for the industry.
Christopher Sladdin is a director analyst within Gartner's Customer Service & Support Practice; Lauren Villaneuve is a senior director of advisory in Gartner's Customer Service & Support Practice.