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.
Ensuring service metrics are SMART
Have you ever had a metric that drives the wrong behavior? A bus company in a city with a well established international and cosmopolitan flair, had a reputation for too often running late. Leaders decided to give drivers incentives for ending their routes on time....
The Pros and Cons of Virtual Queues
Many contact centers are grappling with labor shortages, surging workloads, or a brutal combination of both. The resource mismatches have resulted in long wait times and frustration for customers, and high occupancy and burnout for agents. More serious implications...
Cross-functional benefits of customer advocacy
Customer advocacy is most effective when the entire organization works together to do what's best for customers. That's great for customers, of course, and the organization benefits from their loyalty. But departments across the organization benefit as well. That's a...
Leveraging technology for improved customer experience
With a clear vision and sound processes, the right technology solutions for your customer experience efforts tend to come into focus. Some improvements will be incremental — small wins here and there — and others will be more sweeping. In some cases, you might even...
Avoiding pitfalls when managing customer feedback
There are vast differences in how organizations are collecting and using customer feedback, and some are far more effective than others. Your approach to managing customer feedback must be action-oriented. You must do something with it. Too often, organizations miss...
7 Ways to See Your Business from Your Customers’ Perspective
The most successful leaders don’t rely solely on data to tell them what’s happening. They take steps to put themselves in their customers’ shoes. They want to deeply understand the business—its products, employees, and competitors—and experience it as their customers...
What true motivation is (and is not)
As a leader you have to be able to motivate your team members. In fact you probably need to be able to motivate others well beyond those who formally report to you. You may be asking yourself, how on earth can I get people to do things they may not want to do? But...
Equipping Your Agents to Be Customer Advocates
Customer advocacy is a hot topic in marketing and customer experience circles—and especially so following the economic upheavals of 2020 and 2021. Many of today’s most forward-thinking leaders—Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Emily Weiss, to name a few—see it as the...
Execute a Voice of the Customer Strategy
Feedback from customers and employees is like oxygen. Your organization must have it to survive and thrive. Whether you're a print shop with three employees, a government agency with 3,000, or a multinational company with 300,000, you need a strategy to fully leverage...