ICMI Founder Brad Cleveland at Bpro’s CX Summit: Why Better Customer Service Costs Less, Not More

Brad Cleveland is an author, consultant, and a founding leader of the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI), and one of the most widely recognized authorities on customer experience and contact center management. Loren Moss, founder and publisher of Finance Colombia, spoke with Cleveland on the sidelines of the Asociación Colombiana de BPO (BPrO) Customer Experience Summit in Cartagena, Colombia, where Cleveland was a featured speaker. Their conversation — touching on his latest book, Leading the Customer Experience, the role of artificial intelligence in customer service, and why better service often costs less — has been lightly edited for clarity.

Finance Colombia: I’m here with Brad Cleveland. It’s great to see you again, Brad. I’ve known you for a long time and been an admirer, as the founder of ICMI. I’ve been kind of an outside affiliate for a lot of years, as a judge for the awards that you all have. We’re here in Cartagena, Colombia, at the CX Summit put on by BPrO, which is the industry association here in Colombia. And it’s quite a nice surprise to see you here. Is this your first time at the CX Summit here in Colombia?

Brad Cleveland: It is, Loren, and great to see you. I know we’ve run into each other at a bunch of other events, and to be here in Colombia — yeah, this is my first time, and I’m really enjoying it.

Finance Colombia: Wonderful. I hope that after the event, whatever you do, you take a couple of days to go out and enjoy it and see things. We’re here in Cartagena, which is a beautiful, historic city. There’s so much to see.

I always try to do that when I’m here on business. But let me ask you: yesterday, you talked about leadership in customer experience, and I believe you also have a book that’s recently come out on that topic. Leadership is such a broad topic. Every industry talks about how important it is. LinkedIn is flooded with posts on leadership — but what is it about customer experience that prompted you to write this latest book? You talked about that yesterday, and that’s why I want to touch on it, because it’s a theme that is obviously very important and that you’ve given a lot of thought to.

Brad Cleveland: Yeah, well, thanks for the question. You’re on the right track. I would say there’s so much on leadership. I felt that customer experience needed more structure in terms of leadership. So Leading the Customer Experience covers the 10 pillars, starting with: what’s your vision, and the values behind that? And then it goes chapter by chapter. The second is that we’ve got to get our team on board. We really need them on board as we establish our vision, right? So these things do work together. And then there’s the customer engagement, the customer service, and the customer advocacy that we put in place as a culture; the budget — that’s a chapter. How do we budget for this? So the idea was to really lay this out step by step — not the customer experience cookie cutter. It’s big. It’s everything. It’s products, services, processes, our brand, our reputation. But I felt like there was a place for a little more structure in how we lead this.

Finance Colombia: You know, you bring up several good points right there, because a lot of times companies… And you see the companies that — not to overuse the word — lead in this area get it, and they integrate the customer experience into the whole fabric of who they are as a company.  And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a consumer products company like Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG), Smucker (NYSE: SJM), or Nike (NYSE: NKE) that doesn’t necessarily interact with its end user on a day-to-day basis, or those companies that do. We both got here on airlines.

And the airline industry is going through a lot of changes, and people are trying to figure out how to get it right. One of the things — when we talk about leadership — that I see and that concerns me is how AI, which I think overall is a good thing, is being implemented into CX, and how the decisions are being made around that. And my concern is not like a lot of people’s: “Oh, it’s going to replace all the jobs, it’s going to replace everything.” It’s not so much that. But if you remember — I’m old enough to remember — back in the ’90s when IVRs came out, everybody, especially the telecom carriers, went to replace everything with interactive voice response (IVR) systems. And you’d get into a loop. First they tried to have voice — that rudimentary voice recognition — and it would say, “I don’t understand. Can you repeat that?” And you’d get into this loop and you could never get out; you could never reach anybody. They just thought they could turn on this IVR system, fire everybody, go home, and everybody would be happy. It didn’t quite work out that way. I feel like it’s déjà vu all over again. Is there a breakdown in leadership, or what do you see that could be precipitating this?

Brad Cleveland: Well, there were predictions out of the World Economic Forum in Davos back in the 1990s that the internet was going to take over customer service. That proved to be exactly wrong. I mean, the internet grew the need for customer service. We’re seeing much the same with AI. It is a powerful, powerful capability, but we can’t make the same mistakes we’ve made in the past. There are three levels of value, and here’s how I like to think about this. The first level is efficiency. We’ve got to be efficient at what we do. A second level is customer experience: are we making things easier and better for our customers? The third level is strategic: what are we learning in the course of serving our customers that can help us improve products, services, and processes? This is a goldmine of insight. So right now, much of the industry is focused on, “Well, we’ve got this work — how can AI help with it?” Oh, and then there’s agentic AI, and there’s this and there’s that. We’ve got to think of all three levels and really put ourselves in our customers’ shoes: what’s going to work best at all three levels, where AI can be a partner with us — and a powerful one — if we use it right.

Finance Colombia: I think that’s key. People look at it too much as a line on a spreadsheet and say, “Hey, this can reduce these costs.” And yes, it can, but you can do it the right way and you can do it the wrong way. It’s just like there’s nothing at all wrong with running a BPO in India, for example — not to pick on India. There’s nothing wrong with doing that in itself, but so many people did it wrong. India wasn’t the problem; the way they implemented it was the problem.

Brad Cleveland: Well, right. And the same with our team, the same with technologies. It’s really all a matter of going back to our vision and values, and then the support behind that to make it work. Steve Jobs once said — and we’ve all heard this quote, but it’s a good one, and there’s a reason we repeat it so often: “You’ve got to start with the customer and then work back to the technology.” And the same thing is true with anything. You’ve got to start with the customer and then work back to our standards, our objectives, the processes we’re putting in place, the technology — everything to support that.

Finance Colombia: You know, I just had a problem at home with our fiber internet to the house, and I was so upset. I said, “Well, I’ll just change to the other company.” So I went to the other company’s sales channels, and they had tried to implement these automated chatbots. And I was ready — I was so mad at the other company that I was ready to buy. And I got put into a loop. I can show you — I can pick up the phone and show you where they never answered their own system that they had implemented. So that’s a failure on their part. And I sat there thinking to myself: if there were a third telecom option, an additional option, that would charge me more money but give me somebody to handle a problem when I have one, I would pay 20% more, maybe even 30% more. You can’t get ridiculous, but I would pay more.

Brad Cleveland: And the surveys all say that we all want it to be easy. Here’s the irony: it costs less internally to do a great job and to really involve humans where humans are best, because we’re going to get your business, right? And we’re going to have those problems solved so they don’t come back over and over. You put a pencil to that, and it doesn’t cost more to provide better service. It’s very rewarding to the budget side of things.

Finance Colombia: You can charge more, too. I’m not a rich guy, but I did not fly in the budget economy here. I paid more. I didn’t fly first class or anything, but I paid more to get the extra legroom and the free boarding and those little things. So you can charge more, too. Don’t be afraid to do that. There are people out there who will pay. There’s always going to be the bargain basement, but there are people who will pay for that experience. Now, I don’t want to take up too much time, because I see lunch is starting — I don’t want us to starve here. But I do want to mention that ICMI’s Contact Center Expo is coming up, I believe, October 27th to 30th. It’s always at the Loews Royal Pacific in Orlando, unless it’s been moved or something.

Brad Cleveland: Yes, it’s there this year again.

Finance Colombia: Okay, I’ve got to make my reservations. I always make my reservations early. So if you could — is there a website? I know ICMI is part of Informa. And if you don’t have it, don’t worry, we’ll add it in the lower thirds.

Brad Cleveland: Yeah, you can find it easily just by going to ICMI.com and looking for events — it’ll drop down. And, yeah, I’ve got to make my reservations as well. It’s coming up. It’s going to be a great conference. It’s an important time right now, with all the developments taking shape.

Finance Colombia: And ICMI — I’m there almost every year. It’s so important. It’s worth it. It’s a great conference, just like this one. It’s not a huge convention like something in Las Vegas, but it’s where you interact with your peers. Just like here at the CX Summit, there’s always a lot of thought put into the keynotes. You always leave not just inspired, but having learned something. And it’s big enough to be worthwhile, but small enough to really interact with people — not just the vendors, but colleagues. And I think that colleague interaction is a lot more important. Last question for you: what’s your impression — not just of your first time in Colombia, which I know you haven’t really seen outside of the lovely Hilton — but of the Customer Experience Summit put on by BPrO?

Brad Cleveland: I have loved it so far. It’s a great event, very focused on not just the technology and not just the management part, but the heart of customer experience — how it’s impacting our cultures, our future, our families. There have been some really great sessions that give a comprehensive view of where things are going and how important customer experience is to all of us. And just while we’re here — the food, the people are great. It’s just been a fun experience.

Finance Colombia: Absolutely. Just like with Informa, just like with ICMI, they’ve got great leadership at BPrO and CX Summit, and I think that makes a difference.

Brad Cleveland: Yeah, what a great team. What a great team they have.

Finance Colombia: Great. Brad, see you in October.

Brad Cleveland: Thanks, Loren. See you soon. Thank you.