Leading the Customer Experience by Brad Cleveland
Brad Cleveland is a legend in the customer service and customer experience space. Not merely a thought leader, but an action leader, who has helped shape how customer service and customer experience leaders think, practice, and evolve to do incredible work in the spirit of humanity and business.
This latest book from Cleveland is a terrific jump into how to build and execute a solid customer experience vision. Not just a high-level overview, Leading the Customer Experience lays out a comprehensive view of how to go from just caring about your customers to building a super focused customer experience strategy.
Naturally, Cleveland writes about how employee experience is such an important piece to customer experience and wonderfully describes what energized and engaged employees looks like.
I was honored that the author included my thoughts on the importance of story telling and genuinely enjoyed his methods of using stories to get to journey maps.
Early in the book, Cleveland drops what our late friend and customer service expert, Bill Gessert might aptly call a “truth bomb”:
“Your customer experience is probably worse than you know.”
Here are some of my favorite parts of Leading the Customer Experience. In the book, Cleveland lays out his five themes which serve as a superb foundation for building a solid customer experience strategy:
Establish your approach
Listen and respond
Educate and Design
Inspire and Innovate
Build on the momentum
“CX Strategy is a plan of action designed to support your customer experience vision and achieve your long-term goals.”
Cleveland, like every other author writing about customer experience, makes the case that focusing on employees as your first customer is required if you are to succeed in creating positive customer experiences.
“When you peel back the layers of any customer centric organization, you’ll find a robust culture of honoring employees, encouraging their insight and ideas, and engaging them every step of the way.”
And another one of my favorites:
“Complex rules give rise to simple and stupid behavior.”
He eloquently describes the levels of customer service value: efficiency, customer satisfaction and loyalty, and finally, strategic value.
Cleveland reminds readers of the blocking and tackling of customer service:
Don’t make me wait
Make it easy to find help
Provide knowledgeable and friendly staff
Create customer friendly policies and processes
Know who I am
With so many resources online to help new CX leaders get started with building a customer journey map, it can be quite intimidating. In this book, the author offers a perfect place to start and breaks it down into 4 simple steps:
Create personas
Identify touch points
Identify needs and expectations
Identify pain points
Brad Cleveland delivered another fantastic how-to manual, just the sort of work he has been known for in the contact center space for many years. He teaches how to start to build a sound CX strategy, get your leaders and team members on-board, and use voice of the customer and other data to stay on track.
Lastly, it really felt as if Brad was speaking directly to me when he wrote this, my favorite quotes from the book:
“Like termites you can’t see, poor experiences eat away at your brand and then threaten your future.”
The highest praise I can give this book is that it has remained on my desk since I read it a few months ago and I reference it often, especially the Recommendations at a Glance section at the end of the book. Leading the Customer Experience is a gem that I am certain to be revisiting throughout my career.