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.

Common Pitfalls in Service Metrics

"Not everything that counts can be counted," and "not everything that can be counted counts." This quotation is sometimes attributed to Albert Einstein and though the source is not entirely clear, the message is. And it's fair warning. We've got to be mindful about...

Traits of Engaged Employees

The National Business Research Institute (NRBI) identifies six traits engaged employees have in common, including: They believe in their organization. They have the desire to work to make things better. They understand the business context and big picture. They are...

Putting Abandonment in Perspective

In many contact centers, abandonment rate is viewed as a key measure of how adequately the center is staffed. I often get questions like, what is an acceptable rate of abandonment? What is abandonment in such and such an industry? Are there any studies on how long...

Bring Quality Standards to Life with Calibration and Coaching

Quality standards come to life when they guide behavior and enable us to deliver consistent high-quality service. Calibration is an important tool for ensuring consistency in interpreting performance. It also makes coaching far easier. It allows the coaching process...

Strengthen Ties Across the Organization

Effective communication across an organization is essential to sharing and using voice of the customer. And there are plenty of additional reasons to strengthen ties. Opportunities for ongoing product and service improvements and innovations almost always involve...

Cultivating Customer Advocates

Consider these numbers: Word of mouth drives 20–50% of all purchase decisions. (McKinsey) Advocate customers spend 2 times more than regular customers, and because they stay longer, have a customer lifetime value 5 times greater than...

Customer Advocacy: Creating the Means to Act

The foundation of customer advocacy is knowing your customers. What they need, expect and experience. But that knowledge won't get you far without the means to act. I explore what that requires in the video below, part of the Lynda.com course Customer Advocacy....