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.

Agent Performance Standards: Keep It Simple

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...

Transform Knowledge into Intelligence and Support

Transform Knowledge into Intelligence and Support

As a primary customer touchpoint, the contact center has enormous potential to provide other business units with valuable intelligence and support. This can include input on customers, products, services and processes — information that, when captured, identified,...

Don’t Forget the Oboes

Don’t Forget the Oboes

A popular trend in process improvement is the effort to correlate specific contact center activities to overall customer satisfaction. For example, some consulting organizations have been convincing clients to lower service level objectives because their scatter...

Focus on What Really Matters

Focus on What Really Matters

In recent years, there has been a lot of attention on contact center "optimization." To many, optimization is synonymous with driving costs out of the business — moving contacts to lower-cost channels (self- service, etc.), reducing human contact with the customer,...

Perspective on First-Contact Resolution

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,...