How to Improve Your Customer Service: 14 Tips for 2026

Improving customer service so you can consistently deliver exceptional experiences involves checking in at every stage of the customer journey.

As customers reach out for service across more channels, service teams have many pathways to cover. It can be tough because the best approach to service differs for each one. But there’s also more opportunity than ever to collect data, analyze what works, and use technology to improve service delivery.

The best customer service strategies empower reps to solve problems more efficiently and foster deeper customer loyalty. Successful reps and service leaders learn to balance staying on top of providing efficient solutions now and thinking about how to evolve best practices for the future, including how advancements in customer service AI and automation can help.

Good customer service means helping customers wherever they are with high quality and high efficiency. This can take many shapes, but often includes:

• Consistency in the caliber of support across all channels, whether they appear in-person, call, text, email, send a message on social media, or live chat.
• Personalization based on previous encounters, purchase history, and other data using a unified customer relationship management (CRM) system.
• Seamlessness across contact center interactions so that customers don't have to repeat information if their issue is escalated.
• Options to find answers and solve problems on their own with knowledge bases, self-service, and AI agents.

Most importantly, good customer service is provided with empathy and friendliness, aiming to recognize what customers are feeling or thinking when they reach out for help.

The importance of customer service is in showing customers they can count on support even before they make a purchase. Buyers often have questions and concerns when they’re researching products and services, and may encounter challenges when placing an order.

Our research shows 43% of consumers say a poor customer service experience will keep them from making another purchase from the company. The impact spreads when dissatisfied customers share a negative service experience with their family, friends, and peers, or leave a bad review or comment on social media.

Businesses compete as much on the quality of their customer service experience as they do on the quality of the products and services they sell. Companies that can promise top-notch customer support are in a good position to steal market share.

Prioritizing smart, efficient customer service can also strengthen a business internally by increasing employee satisfaction. When you have the right processes and tools in place, reps can optimize their talents and spend time on high-value service delivery.

When customers seek help, they often want it to be straightforward, quick, consistent, and compassionate. Those areas are where you should look first for opportunities to improve. Customer service analytics tend to zero in on these aspects, too, and can help you pinpoint where your team needs to adjust their approach or efforts.

Here's a look at the top areas to target when you're aiming to improve customer service:

• Ease of access: Every customer touchpoint — in-person, on your website, on social media, on a bill or receipt — should clearly indicate how a customer can get in touch with questions or issues. It can be frustrating when contact information is hard to find or when outreach options are hard to use. Review your contact center experience from the customer's point of view to consider how to make service simpler and more direct.
• Timely response: Customers often reach out with urgency. Their situation may require an immediate fix, or they may have only a small window of free time to ask about support. Many service teams set first contact resolution or average handle time goals to know when processes are working well.
• Knowledge-sharing: It's confusing for customers if they get conflicting information or instructions. Service teams need to be able to consult a single source of truth for policies and processes. Unified customer service software helps keep information organized and accessible.

Empathy: Customers want to feel that their issues are understood and that the company values their purchasing power and loyalty. Improvements in this area can often be achieved by tracking service metrics like customer satisfaction scores (CSATs) and offering incident management training.

Customer service is a field that’s always evolving but relies on a consistent key skill: paying attention. There's always room to raise your customer service standards by listening to what customers want, reviewing performance data, checking out tech developments, and looking for opportunities to streamline and simplify processes.

Here are several ways you can work to improve customer service delivery:

Customers themselves are often the best source for telling you what’s working and what’s not.

If you’re not already doing so, set up a customer experience survey on a regular cadence — whether monthly or immediately following key interactions. Use a mix of scaled ratings and open-ended questions to manage customer feedback on accessibility, speed, consistency, and other criteria that matter most to your team.

Be sure to track the changes you make based on this feedback and measure their effectiveness. For example, if you deploy AI agents in response to complaints about slow resolution times, monitor how those agents impact call volume, resolution speed, and customer satisfaction scores.

Customers' opinions are important, but it's also crucial to quantify how your service operation is performing and set goals with key performance indicators (KPIs).

Service KPIs typically include average handle time, first contact resolution, customer satisfaction score (CSAT), and customer effort score (CES). These can help you gauge reps' speed, efficiency, and quality.

It helps to survey your reps, too, so you can better understand how much time they spend looking up product or policy information and where their biggest bottlenecks are.

You can also measure the volume of interactions by channel to get a sense of where demand is highest and where resources should be allocated.

Review the applications, platforms, and tools you have in place. You may first need to evaluate if your customer service tech stack integrates well across other enterprise systems and whether it's time for changes.

Next, take a look at all the offerings of your customer service platform. You may have service automation features that could take over routine tasks or workflow rules that would help reps triage incoming requests. Or you may discover that your CRM and Slack can be used together to manage incidents more seamlessly.

Then, consider the updates and upgrades to customer service software available now. Systems with agentic AI features offer conversational problem-solving and can generate summaries and action plans for reps.

You can often improve service by uncovering the root cause of a problem within the purchase or service processes. Collect data on repeated issues, and investigate whether it's traceable to a specific point that you could adjust. Maybe there are misperceptions about how a product should work or unclear information about the warranty. Or you could find that an escalation protocol needs a more satisfactory solution.

As you make changes, it’s worth periodically stepping back and gauging how well you’re guiding customers away from discovered pitfalls and what new ones may be emerging.

Identify the areas in your customer service operation that need the biggest improvement, and create achievable objectives. For example, you may want to raise first contact resolution rates by 10% by the end of the second quarter. Customer service improvement strategies could center on a variety of KPIs, like average response time, customer satisfaction, or Net Promoter Score. Some companies also look at customer lifetime value and customer health scores to set the most appropriate goals.

Outline what steps you’ll take to get there, with an open mind for any contact center automation or AI tools you could use.

Every customer you can empower to take control of resolving their issues will save your team time.

As you map your customer journey pitfalls and go over your reps’ workload, ask where self-service might be the more viable option. Remember that “self-service” is a broad category that can encompass highly sophisticated tools but also simple communications assets. A well-pasted FAQ list or knowledge base article, for instance, could help many customers avoid common challenges.

Build the business case for greater self-service by examining the potential impact on the volume of customers reaching out, staffing costs, and the impact on your KPIs.

A service tree lays out everyone who may be connected to issues involving your company’s products and services. Certain reps may handle product returns and exchanges, for example, but troubleshooting may need to be routed to a different set of reps.

Across any service team, you're bound to find that some reps have particular expertise that you can factor into your plan.

Clarifying these roles, relationships, and responsibilities makes it easier to automate customer service processes and know where to route customers efficiently.

Your customer service improvement strategy may lead to new policies. Existing processes and workflows will change to promote better outcomes. Technology will transform the nature of a rep’s job. All this calls for professional development that lets reps feel they are part of the change rather than having change forced upon them.

This doesn’t mean developing all the necessary training materials from scratch. Free resources like Trailhead offer many courses that can help reps get up to speed on topics like customer service strategies or AI for customer service. You can complement virtual training with in-person discussions where team members share what they learn.

Taking a good look at your customer service operation may have been one of your first steps, but it’s never a one-and-done activity. In fact, it’s even more important to stay vigilant about how reps are using new tools and applying policies and processes after you’ve begun making changes.

Monitoring can happen in real time, where managers sit in on sessions with a rep as well as by reviewing call logs and chat sessions using customer service analytics afterward. These are opportunities to provide reps with valuable coaching on skills like active listening and building greater empathy into their conversations with customers.

As more businesses boost their operations with technology, there are increasing opportunities to gather data across the enterprise to deepen the one-to-one service approach.

Personalization begins with recognizing customers by their name, purchase history, and preferences like which communications channels they use. It also comes to life when reps show they’re aware of previous service interactions. The more you can use data to customize advice based on the products they’ve bought, their specific needs or aspirations, the more they’ll feel appreciated for their business.

Sometimes, the best customer service is when you provide assistance they didn’t realize they needed. Finding opportunities for proactive service can save customers time and avoid frustration.

Using data, satisfaction surveys, customer feedback, and product knowledge, you can anticipate customers' needs and expectations.

For instance, if a customer brings in an item for a repair, a rep could scan it for any other reported issues the customer should know about. Or if a field service tech spots a common issue with customer self-installations, they might reach out with a video explainer or one-pager.

By resolving issues before they become problems, you not only reduce the number of customer issues, but you also build a better relationship that can contribute to loyalty.

Improvements in customer service aren't only for the benefit of buyers. Optimizing your customer service operations also shows care for the team. The changes you make can boost the employee experience and help reps feel more engaged and less stressed.

Regular surveys can work well, but many companies also host town hall discussions and schedule check-ins with managers. Solving customer problems is a demanding, sometimes difficult job. The better you can boost team morale, the better they’ll be able to bring their best selves to the job.

Never let success happen in silence. When a rep moves the needle on their first call resolution rate, make sure they’re recognized. When the entire team manages to achieve one of your KPI targets, it’s worth calling everyone in and rewarding them with your appreciation (and maybe a pizza lunch).

Other opportunities for celebration can include transitioning from one platform or toolset to something better, or when customers share particularly positive feedback through surveys, social media comments, and online reviews.

Even once you meet all the goals in your original plan, your work isn’t really done. Customer service strategies should be refreshed on an ongoing basis. Factor in changes in technology, shifts in customer expectations, and what you learn from third-party sources.

Remember that we all act like customers at some point. The next time you need to reach out to a business for support, pay attention to how they handle the situation. Listen for principles you could apply in your training, or tools that could provide similar benefits to your own customers.

Advancements in AI are making it possible for businesses of every size to improve customer service.

Agentic AI allows service reps to hand off many routine tasks to an agent who can carry them out on their behalf. Agents can also work on the frontlines with customers to deal with everyday issues and escalate them to a rep as necessary.

With Agentforce, for example, a motorsports entertainment powerhouse accelerated their service response by 80%. Fans can tap into a portal where AI can help fix streaming problems, and reps use Agentforce for Service to generate high-quality replies to fans in the appropriate brand voice.

Our research shows 80% of service leaders say AI improves the customer experience, while those who use AI agents expect service costs and case resolution times to decrease by an average of 20%. Many teams are rethinking how humans and AI can provide service together.

To truly transform your customer service, you need a platform that bridges the gap between data and action. Salesforce Agentforce for Service does exactly this by creating a 360-degree view of every customer. Your reps aren't just reacting to tickets — they're informed by the customer's entire history, from past purchases to marketing interactions.

By using Agentforce, you can deploy autonomous AI agents that handle routine inquiries like order tracking or basic troubleshooting. This speeds up resolution times and shifts your human workforce into the role of "high-value problem solvers" — letting them focus on complex, emotionally sensitive cases that require a human touch.

Salesforce’s strength lies in its scalability and connectivity. Whether you’re a small business or a global enterprise, the platform integrates seamlessly with communication tools like Slack and your existing CRM data to eliminate departmental silos. With built-in analytics and real-time dashboards, service leaders gain immediate visibility into team performance and customer sentiment.