This week, I chaired our annual webinar on our Customer Service Trends and Predictions for the year ahead. Thank you to our exceptional panellists, each of whom brought their unique perspectives and experience to bear in a fascinating discussion on the future of service and how we can best prepare for next year and beyond.
For me, one theme that stood out was resilience. As service leaders, I know we’ve all had to show plenty of that in navigating the diverse challenges this year has thrown at us. However, all the signs suggest that this will be the fundamental quality we and our organisations will need going forward.
Building service resilience across multiple fronts
The first area where resilience will be crucial is in response to economic shifts. We’ve all seen the UK economy stumble along this year: consumer and business confidence have been low, and while we can hope to see signs of recovery, such hopes have been dashed before.
Service leaders will need to keep morale up among their people and do their bit to improve the mood of the nation. After all, as one in three of us will spend more for better service, it’s in their own best interest to do so.
Another form of economic resilience required will be in response to the global uncertainty around supply chains. Key to customer satisfaction is consistency of delivery and product quality, for which a strong relationship with your suppliers is essential. Service-led organisations should also remember that the businesses they supply will also be up against it and make every effort to fulfil commitments.
Just as importantly, organisations will need to develop their cyber resilience in 2026. Cyberattacks on businesses are increasing, and we have seen in some of this year’s high-profile cases just how damaging they can be, both to reputation and to the bottom line.
While having the right protections in place from a cyber and data security perspective has become a non-negotiable, cyber resilience runs deeper than this. Ultimately, no matter how up to date your systems are, a data breach or crippling hack may still take place. What really helps organisations in times like this is a bank of customer goodwill, built up over years of consistently excellent service – as has been the case with M&S this year.
Finally, we also need to consider skills resilience and building a workforce of multi-skilled people equipped for the changing world of work. As AI changes service roles and makes them more data-led, service workers will need enhanced data analysis and interpretation skills to put the insights they gather to use.
Within this, skills such as empathy, forging a personal connection, and flexibility to deal with complex cases, while already important, will become even more significant elements of the service toolkit, as agents have greater capacity to engage with customers while AI works behind the scenes.
Building dynamic capacity
As a final thought, resilience in service is about planning for a variety of futures. With so much unknown to us, including the future of the UK economy, whether trade and supply chain pressures will ease or intensify, and the extent to which AI will impact each of our organisations, we need to stay agile and build the capacity to test, analyse, learn, and adapt.
We will all need to think about how this applies to our own organisations, but those service leaders who do so will surely reap the benefits.
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