The 2026 Guide to Service Experience: How to Build a Brand from the Inside Out
In 2026, the brands that win won’t be defined by marketing campaigns or product innovation alone. They’ll be defined by their service experience — the behaviours, mindsets and practices that shape how employees treat customers, partners and each other.
Why? Because service experience is what drives customer loyalty, employee engagement, and sustainable growth. Products and services can be copied. Pricing can be matched. But a service experience rooted in your brand and lived daily across your organisation is unique, and impossible to replicate.
Here are five key steps to identify, develop and activate your service experience.
1. Start with insight
Don’t rely on assumptions or a handful of leadership opinions. To understand your service experience, immerse yourself in the lived experience of employees and customers.
- —Use data, dialogue and observation to build a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not.
- —Map customer journeys to identify the “peaks and pits” of the experience.
- —Undertake field research like ride-alongs, mystery shops and immersion days to surface behaviour and capability gaps.
What does this look like in practice?
Working with a Premier League football club, we combined matchday field research and customer data to pinpoint where fan experiences broke down, and where they could be elevated.
2.Define a compelling, unifying service proposition
Employees need clarity on the service proposition they’re aiming to create, one that speaks to both head and heart. Create a guiding idea that:
- —Captures your brand aspiration and the customer experience you want to create.
- —Resonates across roles, markets and cultures.
- —Can be translated into specific service behaviours and practical hallmarks.
What does this look like in practice?
We created a service proposition around inspiration and awe for a global hotel group, aligning guest with employee experiences across 70,000 colleagues, articulating the service style for guest moments, as well as positioning the business as an attractive place for talent to grow.
3. Equip and inspire people to adopt the right behaviours and actions
Having developed a set of service principles or actions, you need to help everyone to deliver the desired experience in their daily roles.
- —Design practical tools, frameworks and playbooks that are memorable and applicable to specific roles.
- —Ensure guidance is accessible and easy to digest, with bitesize content such as pocketbooks or quickfire team exercises.
- —Tailor training and manager guidance to make it easy to integrate into busy schedules and minimise disruption to service.
- —Align recruitment and performance systems to reinforce behaviours.
What does this look like in practice?
Working with a high-end retailer, we created a simple user-guide for employees that set out practical actions they could take - from a personal follow-up call after buying luxury goods to weaving storytelling into the shopping experience for customers.
4. Sustain change for the long term
Behavioural change isn’t a one-off project; it’s a movement that needs embedding and activating over time to bring people along the journey and ensure the service experience sticks.
- —Build induction programmes that begin embedding service experience from day one.
- —Create onboarding programmes for managers to equip new joiners to continue embedding change with their teams.
- —Integrate service content into induction programmes to begin embedding service experience from day one.
- —Schedule refresher sessions with existing employees to keep the conversation going.
- —Design a recognition programme that rewards delivery of the service behaviours to positively reinforce the change you want to see.
What does this look like in practice?
Having partnered with a leading retailer to define their service experience, we designed and led a train- the-trainer programme to equip managers to launch and embed the service experience with their teams. Our methods combined training sessions, toolkits and delivery of a suite of training materials, with a 12-month rollout plan.
5. Continuously listen, adapt and improve
Service experience must be agile and adaptive to keep pace with changing customer preferences, needs and opportunities.
- —Analyse real-time customer feedback loops and employee listening tools.
- —Track engagement metrics, NPS and service KPIs together.
- —Create rapid cycles for testing and refining behaviours.
What does this look like in practice?
We designed and led a project for a retail brand to integrate new service metrics into their NPS systems enabling them to measure and adapt service behaviours at pace.
Developing an effective service experience takes clarity, consistency and courage. Clarity of the behavioural levers that elevate the customer experience, consistency in everyday behaviours and actions, and courage to embed and sustain change across the organisation. When achieved, experience becomes a growth engine: unlocking talent, deepening customer loyalty and building the resilience that will define tomorrow’s most successful brands.
Would you like to know more about how we can help shape your employee experience, or service culture? Do get in touch at [email protected]