Delivering great customer service is really, really hard.

Everyone knows it’s important — among today’s hyperconnected, hyperinformed consumers, customer service has surpassed both price and product as the key differentiator among brands. And everyone knows the basic principles of great customer service: know your customer, resolve issues quickly, and be courteous. Easy, right?

Nope.

Here’s the challenge: As any business leader knows, the more successful your company becomes, the more difficult it is to get customer service right. With a broader, more diverse customer base, your agents need the right technology to know every customer — and to surface the right information at the right time to effectively solve problems the first time. Customer service must be omni-channel, so that you’re delivering a consistent experience to the customer who, during her 5-minute lunch break, is on the phone with an agent while live-chatting with another agent and composing a tweet about her experience. (This was me last week.)

In sum, businesses must deliver fast, smart, personalized service on every channel, so that it all adds up to a connected customer experience that extends beyond service and into sales, marketing, and beyond.

So where do you start?

Your service team isn’t the problem.

Frontline service agents are deeply attuned to customer issues and needs — so if your customer service operation needs a reboot, don’t start there. Your agents already know the process is broken: they’re the ones who have to hear it directly from angry customers.

According to a recent Harvard Business Review article highlighting findings of Jochen Wirtz and Ron Kaufman, researchers and consultants with 25 years work with customer service operations, the real problem often lies with back-end functions like logistics or I.T. — departments that aren’t customer-facing, and thus may not feel the pain of a frustrated customer. Train your entire organization to think about customers as real people, and about customer service as a crucial piece of the business, and you’ll improve faster.

Ask yourself: Where are the weak points in our service process? How can we instill a customer focus in every team?

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The best script is no match for an empathetic agent.

We’ve all had the maddening experience of being on the phone with an agent who simply won’t deviate from a script — even when something as simple as a $25 food voucher or free bag delivery would be enough to placate the owner of a temporarily lost suitcase.

According to HBR, “A better approach is to persuade employees to commit to a holistic definition of service: creating value for others, outside and within the organization.” Instill the right values in your agents, then trust them to be real, unscripted people — and your customers will feel more like people, too.

Ask yourself: Are our scripts too detailed? Where can we empower agents with more wiggle room?

Forget net promoter scores (at least for now).

While many of the traditional customer-service performance indicators are valuable, temporarily ignoring them can be helpful. In one example, Nokia Siemens Networks was administering a 150-question customer survey that “produced far more data than the firm could understand or use,” according to HBR. By switching to an open-ended survey about a customer’s last month of service interactions, Nokia saw renewed efforts from agents, who reoriented their efforts toward the new type of survey and came up with new ways to surprise and delight customers.

Ask yourself: Which data-gathering and feedback efforts are actually driving improvement, and which aren’t? What types of customer feedback will most effectively motivate our service teams?