Why 2026 is the Year to Audit Your Customer Experience
2026 is the year to ask if your customer service experience is working as hard as it should be.
Great customer experiences don’t just happen, they are made. They are crafted, considered and intentional. They are built. Defining your service experience is the foundation that enables your customer experience to excel and in today’s competitive consumer environment, brands can’t afford to ignore this.
The 2026 Landscape: Consumer Confidence and the Fight for Loyalty
Every dollar matters - both for returning customers and to entice first-time purchasers, their spending power is precious. Overwhelmingly 2025 was not the year of great consumer confidence, belts were tightened, spending in the US shifted towards services over goods, and caution was in the air. 2026 looks likely to shape up as more of the same.
In this challenging landscape lies opportunity, a more discerning market creates the conditions to focus on brand loyalty and differentiating brand offers through experience. With 73% of customers placing experience as the top factor that influences their purchasing decisions, relying on product alone isn’t enough. Consumers are looking for exceptional experiences, and these are delivered by building an authentic, distinctive and considered service experience.
Two Key Reasons Why Customer Experience Drives Business Growth
1. Meeting Heightened Consumer Expectations
First, as spending power has dipped consumer expectations have soared. Customers expect every aspect of brand interactions to be enabled and optimised. Anything less than smooth, seamless and one step ahead - is a negative experience. A defined and embedded service experience helps brands deliver against these heightened expectations through consistent and outstanding service. It also helps mitigate the risk of losing customers, when data has shown that 70% of customers will abandon a brand after just two bad experiences.
2. Creating a Differentiating Brand Feature
Secondly, in a consumer market of endless choice, mass production and competing products, service experiences are a differentiating and ownable brand feature. Building something unique and memorable that ensures teams deliver every time, is a fundamental way to both attract and build a customer base, and drive loyalty with existing customers.
The ‘What’ and ‘How-to’ of Your Service Philosophy
Now more than ever, there’s no space for a service experience that’s reactive. Customers don’t simply want their needs responded to; they want them anticipated and facilitated, they want to be wowed, and for it to feel personalised is the cherry on top. It’s up to brands to craft a seamless experience that makes each customer feel catered to and valued. There is ample reward for brands who prioritise their customer experience - companies who focus on this see 80% faster revenue growth and 60% higher profits.
Mapping the Journey: From Service Principles to Employee DNA
An effective service experience is the exact opposite of ‘one size fits all’. It is bespoke, carefully formulated and mapped against a brands’ customer journey, analysing every point along the way where opportunity exists to impact the customer experience and linking this directly to what’s needed from employees in order to deliver. From service experience mapping, comes the development of a service philosophy and service principles. These principles will be defined and then robustly embedded into the DNA of the organisation, ensuring that everybody is aligned on the why, the what and the how to show up and deliver the ideal customer experience.
Closing the Gap: Bringing the Customer Experience to Life Through People
Customer experience and service experience are two sides of the same coin. In most cases, brands already have the critical component needed to drive success, and that is their people. They are the ones responsible for ensuring the service experience is brought to life and as a result the best customer experience is delivered, each and every day. Equipping teams with the knowledge and the tools they need is absolutely essential, and this is done through effective service training and ongoing activation and embedding.
In the ever-demanding landscape of consumer expectations, service experience is what drives and enables successful customer experiences. With the knowledge that 56% of consumers say they wouldn’t complain about a negative customer experience, they would just quietly switch to a competitor instead - it’s clear that brands will flourish or fail on the effectiveness of their customer experience.
Get in touch with [email protected]
This article was written by Alice Ellis, Senior Strategy Consultant.