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.

Build Customer Expectations into Plans and Direction

Build Customer Expectations into Plans and Direction

Anticipating customer expectations is essential to developing effective customer service. In fact, customer expectations ultimately define what good service means. Truly understanding your customers can help you stand out in an environment that evolves every day. So,...

Keep Your Strategy Current

Keep Your Strategy Current

When a strategy goes out of date, decisions become fragmented and results begin to suffer. Effective leaders know how to develop strategies that don't go out of date. They know how to implement processes and procedures that will keep the strategy current and the...

Your Organization’s Personality

Your Organization’s Personality

Motorcycle company Harley Davidson has incredibly loyal customers. Riders join clubs and wear Harley clothes, and some even have Harley tattoos. Many CEOs and chief marketing officers point to Harley as the holy grail of customer loyalty, and wonder what they can do...

Customer Advocacy: Harnessing Service and Operations

Customer Advocacy: Harnessing Service and Operations

It's a smart move and highly recommended for any organization to instill the principles of customer advocacy in the customer service and operations functions. Unfortunately not all do. In this video from the LinkedIn Learning course "Customer Advocacy," we'll look at...

Empowering Your Customer Service Team

Empowering Your Customer Service Team

Many organizations want to do the right thing for customers, but too often put a multi-layered, time-eroding approval process in place to get there. By then, the customer is gone, or the loyalty that could arise from their experience has dwindled. That’s not effective...

Boosting the Value of Customer Service

Boosting the Value of Customer Service

Ensuring that your organization is getting maximum benefit from the effort and investments you're putting into customer service is an important leadership opportunity. In this video, I explore three levels on which effective service creates value. This video is from...

The Stay Interview: A Powerful Retention Tool

The Stay Interview: A Powerful Retention Tool

The best contact centers continually work on the root causes of turnover. There are many common causes of turnover, such as insufficient development opportunities, pace of effort required, feeling of not being appreciated, the list goes on. What is most important in...

Understanding What Motivates Your Team

Understanding What Motivates Your Team

I'm going to say something that may be a surprise. You will not, now or ever, be able to motivate your team. It's not going to happen. You can, however, help motivate the people who are a part of it. Yes, it's true, many of us refer to "motivating the team," but what...

Improving Performance: Two Types of Standards

Improving Performance: Two Types of Standards

The cornerstone of an effective quality observation process is documenting specific, observable behaviors and tailoring coaching accordingly. An effective way to consider performance (quality) standards is to categorize them as either “foundation” or “finesse.”...