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.

Employee Engagement: A Key Metric in All Service Environments

Employee Engagement: A Key Metric in All Service Environments

Employee engagement should be a key metric in all service environments. Research shows that employee engagement influences - even drives - customer satisfaction and loyalty. Retention, productivity, and quality are all strongly and positively correlated with employee...

GM Leverages AI in Social Customer Care

GM Leverages AI in Social Customer Care

GM, America's largest automobile manufacturer, has more than 17 million social brand mentions and engages in more than 400,000 customer care conversations each year. GM set (and met) two aggressive goals to support their customer-centric vision. Goal 1: Deliver on...

Contact Center Scheduling Can Be Creative and Collaborative

Contact Center Scheduling Can Be Creative and Collaborative

It's a new year and a great time to reflect on challenges in your contact center. Chances are that if you've managed a contact center for any length of time, organizing schedules has been one of them. But there is good news. Scheduling is creative. It's collaborative....

Hands-on Leadership

Hands-on Leadership

One of the keys to high levels of employee engagement in contact centers - and the strong performance that follows - is hands-on involvement from the top. For example: Among other endeavors, Dan Gilbert is the founder and chairman of Quicken Loans, the giant...

Quality and First-Contact Resolution: From the Agent’s Perspective

Quality and First-Contact Resolution: From the Agent’s Perspective

Quality and first contact resolution are essential aspects of effective service. Handling contacts with quality is at the heart of a customer service agent's role in the organization. First contact resolution is an outcome of quality, really an extension. Better...

The Edge of Service: Principles of Effective Budgeting

The Edge of Service: Principles of Effective Budgeting

It's that time of the year, and as you head into budgets and budget presentations, I encourage you to make them as complete as they need to be — but as brief and to the point as possible. In a recent issue of The Edge of Service®, I include an excerpt from one of the...

Putting Yourself in Your Customers’ Shoes

Putting Yourself in Your Customers’ Shoes

Many of the most successful leaders I've worked with are uneasy depending on surveys and rolled-up data alone to tell them what's really happening. They want to put themselves in their customers' shoes. They want to see the organization, products, employees and...

When Building Your Brand, Be Yourself

When Building Your Brand, Be Yourself

In a recent issue of The Edge of Service®, I relay my experience meeting actor and author Henry Winkler at a recent ICMI Conference. Winkler reminded me of advice that my mother used to give me, especially when facing awkward or difficult challenges—"just be...