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.
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
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 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
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
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
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...
Contact Center Management on Fast Forward – Fourth Edition Now Available
It's hard to believe that Contact Center Management on Fast Forward is in its fourth edition. It is a testimony to the strategic importance of contact centers to organizations of virtually any type. It has been a privilege to be a part of an industry that is dedicated...
Keeping Your Customer Advocates Engaged
Our customer advocates trust us. If they didn't, they wouldn't be advocates. They want that trust to continue and we need to do our part of this. Sadly, businesses lose advocates daily. Often, this stems more from neglect than from anything we do. The video below...
12 Principles for Building Profitable Customer Relationships
Over the past decade, ICMI has studied, codified and periodically published a summary of the most important principles behind building strong, profitable customer relationships. Lately, I’ve been asked, are these principles less important? Have evolving customer...
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