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.

Shaping Your Customer Access Strategy for Social Media

(Note, a full version of this post recently appeared in ICMI's Global Report on Call Center Practices.  To subscribe, see link at bottom.) While social media projects often begin as marketing initiatives or as the responsibility of newly established cross-functional...

Perspective on First Call Resolution

First-call resolution (FCR) is an increasingly popular performance measure in customer contact environments. And that’s a good thing: Unresolved contacts are a common source of customer dissatisfaction, and the organization tends to incur many additional expenses...

Leading organizations are restructuring for better service

Many organizations are restructuring so that all channels of contact with customers are under the same management umbrella.  This is causing enormous internal structural change that involves IT, HR, marketing, operational areas – and virtually every other department. ...

History’s Most Powerful Consumer Movement?

Some believe we are seeing the emergence of the greatest consumer movement in history. I agree. Studies suggest that the vast majority of consumers now use search engines and sites such as the http://www.consumerist.com/ to review the comments of other customers...

The Tough Economy is Forcing Critical Thinking

Making the right decisions requires both intuition and discipline. Although you can’t boil leadership – that’s of course what we’re really talking about – down to a simple checklist, there is something powerful about focusing on the things that matter most. So… what...

The Power of Good Questions

Are we headed in the right direction? Do our priorities make sense? What would you do if you were in our shoes? At ICMI, we are often asked these and related questions (they usually come up in the context of working on specific projects or issues with clients). They...

Consistent Performance

If your organization is seeing call center workload patterns that are somewhat different than in similar historical months and years, you’re not alone. And the reasons – the economy, changes in customer behavior, etc. – are certainly no mystery. Unfortunately, many...

Is Your Strategy Working?

Given the current economic challenges, it's an important time to revisit your customer access strategy, and ensure that it is finely tuned to support your organization’s brand and your customers’ needs. All nine components should be up for discussion: Customers: How...

And Now for Some… ahem… Breaking News…

A few month back, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece that concludes that “companies are trying harder to please customers amid the recession – and it appears to be working.” The authors rightly point out that the American Customer Satisfaction Index is at a record...