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.

10 Things Senior Leaders Should Know About Contact Centers

A prerequisite to getting good support from senior management is that they have at least a basic understanding of what contact centers do. To fulfill their potential, customer contact centers need commitment and involvement from the top. And a prerequisite to getting...

Essential Metrics for the Service Operation

There are many variables in customer service and there are almost always different perspectives of what's important. What should you focus on? Explore answers to that question in my Lynda.com video "Essential Metrics for the Service Operation" from my recent course...

How Management and Agent Roles Are Changing

Recently, I was reminded of an article that I wrote for ICMI "How Management and Agent Roles Are Changing." The article discusses the relationship between specialization and generalization. Often, the end of the summer gives us a chance to reflect on the current state...

Caution: Don’t View Contact Center Performance Measures in Isolation

Consider a few examples that illustrate the interrelated nature of contact center performance measures: Cost per contact going down may actually be a bad sign. Viewed alone, a dropping cost per contact would seem like a positive indication. However, if errors and...

Common Misconceptions of Customer Service Quality Standards

Sometimes within an organization, there's resistance to quality standards. Why is that? They're a good thing, right? Dig a little deeper, and we've found there are several common misconceptions that can hamper their development and use. This video from my recent...

15 Ways to Strengthen Your Contact Center

For some contact centers, summer is a slower time of year with fewer customer contacts. If that is true for your center, you might take this time to think of ways to strengthen your center for busier days to come. Several months ago I wrote an article titled "15 Ways...