Insights

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.

12 Principles for Building Profitable Customer Relationships

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...

TEDx Talk: Thriving in an Always-on World

TEDx Talk: Thriving in an Always-on World

September is in full swing and for many of us that means the beginning of another busy season. How do you stay connected with family, friends, co-workers and clients without being a slave to your smartphone? Is being "always connected" a blessing or a curse? This TEDx...

Reinforce the “Power of One”

Here are some of the steps organizations are taking to reinforce the power of one. Think through how you could approach them with your customer service team. Educate each person on how much impact he or she has on the queue—incorporate these or similar scenarios into...

Forecasting the Customer Contact Workload

Everything to do with getting resources right in a contact center begins with predicting what the workload will be. Workload is what leads to how many agents are hired, what your schedule should look like, the number of work stations you need, even how many snacks are...

Strategy Drives Structure

Many contact centers have been through consolidations or restructurings that are really just cleanup efforts for lack of having or using an effective customer access strategy. For example, I recall helping an insurance company with agent group "consolidation." Their...

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...