Customer Experience Blog
Expert insights on customer experience, employee engagement, and service leadership. Stay ahead with Brad Cleveland’s blog—featuring CX trends, actionable strategies, and real-world solutions to help you improve customer satisfaction, streamline operations, and drive business success.
Prioritizing Service Improvements
As a leader, you face many choices when deciding where and how to improve service. And the possibilities multiply when analyzing customer data from sources that range from social posts to surveys to operational metrics. So, which issues do you tackle first? To learn...
10 Causes of Inaccurate Forecasts (and How to Avoid Them)
Accurate workload forecasting is critical to contact center success. Recruiting, hiring, staffing and scheduling—virtually everything that goes into optimizing resources depends on having a good estimate of the work that will come your way. Recently, I was reminded of...
Building a Culture of Engaged Employees
Service Level: Realistic Targets, Taken Seriously
If your operation is chronically missing your service level target, it may be an indication of a fundamental misconception about the importance of service level. You'll need to focus on a service level objective that your center can realistically achieve. Once you...
The Power of One: Every Agent Matters
The power of one is among the most important principles for any agent to understand. This video shows the impact each person makes on service level, occupancy and average speed of answer. Using actual data, the video makes it clear that every agent matters to both...
Agent Performance Standards: Keep It Simple
In recent years, I have seen a trend to streamline and simplify agent performance standards. In many cases, they had become too complex — weighted averages, percent time in this and that mode, formulas that would take a mathematician to figure out. Yes, if I'm...
Improving ROI on Quality Monitoring
Cultivating Effective Communication, Part 2
This discussion of communication continues with four more principles common to successful contact centers. You can read the first part of this discussion here. Develop Formal and Informal Channels of Communication. Effective leaders cultivate both formal and...
Cultivating Effective Communication, Part 1
Communication creates meaning and direction for people. When good communication is lacking, the symptoms are predictable: conflicting objectives, unclear values, misunderstandings, lack of coordination, confusion, low morale and people doing the bare minimum required....