Brad's 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.
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
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
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
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 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
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
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.”...
Using Strategy to Guide Decisions and Direction
Organizations that consistently use their strategies to help guide decisions tend to go from strength to strength. They make better decisions and then have a better read on how well those decisions ultimately support their vision. How can you best use your strategy to...
Make Your Customer Access Strategy Uniquely Yours
What access channels should be opened up? What’s the nature of service you intend to provide? Beyond applying sound management principles, these decisions are yours to make. My overarching advice: Make your customer access strategy uniquely yours — do what’s best for...









