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.
Revisiting Your Service Level Objectives
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...
Building a Culture of Engaged Employees
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...
Motivation and Engagement: Your Leadership Matters
5 Secrets to Better Scheduling Results
The very forces that are making scheduling difficult — more complex products and services, additional contact channels, faster pace of change, and the need for diverse agent skills — are creating an environment in which accurate scheduling is absolutely essential....
7 Rules of the Road for Recruiting and Hiring
The Importance of Customer Advocacy
Customer advocacy refers to both how a company advocates for customers (doing what's best for customers) and how customers advocate for companies (spreading the word about its products, services and brand). Both are vital to success today. Here’s a video from my just...
Perspective on First-Contact Resolution
First-contact resolution (FCR) is a popular performance measure in customer contact centers. And that's a good thing: Unresolved contacts are a common source of customer dissatisfaction, and the organization tends to incur many additional expenses (repeat contacts,...