National Customer Service Week 2026: Let's make it easier to deliver great customer service
As National Customer Service Week draws to a close, it's a good opportunity to recognise the thousands of people working in customer service teams across the UK.
Having worked in and around contact centres for over 15 years, I know how demanding these jobs can be. Advisors deal with everything from straightforward enquiries to complex problems, often while juggling multiple systems, processes and performance targets.
So it's absolutely right that we take the time to recognise the work they do.
But there's something else I think we should be talking about this week.
Why do we still make it so difficult for people to deliver good customer service?
Because in my experience, some of the biggest problems with customer service have very little to do with the people delivering it.
They're caused by poor processes, disconnected systems, unclear communications and customer journeys that haven't been properly thought through.
And all too often, it's the contact centre team that ends up dealing with the consequences.
Technology is great, but let's get the basics right first
One of this year's National Customer Service Week themes is Tech Powered, Human Enhanced?
It's a good question, particularly with all the attention AI and automation are getting at the moment.
There's no doubt that technology can make a huge difference to customer service. We're already seeing some really useful applications of AI, automation and better system integration.
But I do wonder whether some organisations are getting a little ahead of themselves.
There's not much point investing in a sophisticated AI chatbot if your underlying processes are broken, the information you're giving customers is confusing or your systems don't talk to each other.
Likewise, automating a poor customer journey doesn't suddenly make it a good one.
Sometimes the biggest improvement you can make is something relatively simple.
Connecting your telephony platform to your CRM so you can recognise a customer when they call. Making sure they're routed to the right team first time. Removing the need for them to repeat information they've already given you.
None of this is particularly revolutionary technology, yet you'd be surprised how many organisations still aren't doing it.
For me, the priority should always be to understand the customer journey, identify what's causing problems and then work out where technology can help.
Not the other way around.
Are we actually making things easier for customers?
Another theme this week has been service with respect.
Quite rightly, there's been a focus on protecting customer service employees from abuse and unacceptable behaviour. Nobody should have to put up with that at work.
But I think there's another side to this conversation.
We also need to respect our customers' time.
How often do customers have to contact an organisation more than once to get something sorted?
How many calls are generated because a letter or email wasn't clear?
How many people end up phoning because they've tried to complete something online and couldn't?
And how often do customers get passed between departments because nobody has really thought about who should own their enquiry?
These things might seem relatively small in isolation, but across thousands of customers they create a huge amount of unnecessary work.
They also create frustration, both for the customer and the person dealing with them.
It's something we see regularly when reviewing customer journeys and contact centre operations.
Often, the organisation has become so used to working in a particular way that nobody stops to question whether there's a better way of doing it.
Stop measuring how quickly we deal with problems and start preventing them
Productivity has also been one of the themes this week, and it's an important one.
Contact centres are under constant pressure to improve efficiency, reduce costs and do more with the resources they have. But I'm not convinced we always focus on the right things. We spend a lot of time measuring how quickly calls are answered, how long they take and how many contacts an advisor handles.
These are useful measures, but they only tell part of the story.
What about the contacts that shouldn't have happened in the first place?
If 100 customers call because they don't understand a letter you've sent them, you could focus on getting those calls answered more quickly.
Or you could fix the letter.
If customers are regularly chasing updates, you could improve your call handling processes.
Or you could make sure they receive the update without having to ask.
This is why understanding avoidable contact and failure demand is so important.
The most efficient contact is often the one that never needs to happen.
And when you start removing unnecessary demand, you don't just reduce operating costs.
You give your teams more time to deal with the customers who genuinely need their help.
That's better for everyone.
Customer experience isn't just the contact centre's responsibility
Something I've seen throughout my career is how often responsibility for customer experience ends up sitting with the contact centre. Yet many of the things creating a poor customer experience happen elsewhere in the organisation.
A confusing policy. A poorly designed online form. A process that involves too many departments. A system that doesn't provide the right information.
The contact centre doesn't necessarily control any of these things, but it's often where the customer ends up when they go wrong. This is why improving customer experience needs to involve more than just the customer service team.
Operations, technology, digital, communications and senior leadership all have a part to play.
It's also why customer journey mapping can be so valuable. When you bring the right people together and work through what the customer actually experiences, you often uncover problems that aren't obvious when looking at each department in isolation.
And sometimes the solutions are surprisingly straightforward.
Celebrate the people, but give them the tools to do their jobs
The final theme of National Customer Service Week is about recognising the people delivering customer service. And I couldn't agree more with that. There are some fantastic people working in contact centres who genuinely care about helping customers.
I've worked with advisors and managers who go to extraordinary lengths to get things sorted, often despite the systems and processes they're expected to work with.
But wouldn't it be better if they didn't have to go to extraordinary lengths?
We shouldn't need people to constantly find workarounds, chase other departments or manually piece together information from five different systems just to resolve a customer enquiry.
Of course we should recognise great service.
But we should also be asking what we can do to make delivering that service easier.
So what happens next week?
National Customer Service Week is a great initiative, but I hope organisations take something practical away from it rather than simply returning to business as usual on Monday.
If I were running a customer service operation, there are five questions I'd be asking:
Why are customers contacting us? Not just what they're calling about, but what's actually driving that contact.
How much of that contact could be avoided? Are we creating unnecessary demand through poor processes, communications or digital journeys?
How easy are we to deal with? When was the last time we walked through our own customer journeys from start to finish?
Are our systems helping or hindering our people? Are we making good use of the technology we already have?
What could we fix right now? Not everything needs a big transformation programme. What are the simple changes that could make an immediate difference?
You don't necessarily need a new platform, a major investment or a six-month transformation project to start improving customer experience.
Sometimes you just need to understand what's going wrong and get the right people together to fix it.
Getting the fundamentals right
At NextGenCX, we spend a lot of our time helping organisations understand where their customer journeys and contact centre operations could work better.
That might involve reviewing why customers are contacting them, identifying opportunities to reduce avoidable demand, improving call routing or helping them make better use of their existing technology.
And while AI and automation are increasingly part of those conversations, they're rarely the starting point. We always come back to understanding the customer, the processes and the problems we're trying to solve. Because you can have the best technology in the world, but if the fundamentals aren't right, you're still going to deliver a frustrating customer experience.
So, to everyone working in customer service, thank you for everything you do.
And to the organisations employing them, perhaps the best way to recognise their efforts is to make their jobs a little easier.
That would be a pretty good outcome from National Customer Service Week.
About NextGenCX
NextGenCX is a UK customer experience and contact centre consultancy. We help organisations reduce avoidable contact, improve customer journeys and make better use of their people, processes and technology.
If you'd like to understand where your customer service operation could work better, get in touch at nextgencx.co.uk.
