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.
Boosting the Strategic Value of Customer Interaction
Delivering effective customer service is not a program, a back office function or an initiative – it’s a way of doing business that produces value for customers and the organization. One of the most important leadership priorities in today’s uncertain economic...
Powerful Lessons in Innovation
Recently, I got to live out a lifelong dream of mine. The experience taught me some unexpected and powerful lessons on innovation and quality. The innovation that occurred in the life of the Spitfire was dramatic: over 24 variants produced in only 10 years! How...
Managing Customer Feedback in Real Time
Managing customer feedback includes both short and long term objectives. It involves responding to feedback as it occurs and collecting and analyzing feedback from many customers to look for recurring problems and opportunities. What does it take to respond to...
Celebrate—Often!
Would you go to a game and wait until your team won to cheer? Building an organization (or division, function, or team) that consistently delivers great customer experiences takes focus, work and unwavering commitment. Celebrating progress along the way is essential...
Harnessing Customer Service for Product Innovation
When data from customer service interactions is captured and shared and acted on, the entire organization benefits. Customer service can help the organization pinpoint and fix quality problems, and can help research and development identify customer expectations and...
Gallup’s Employee Engagement Bombshell: Why I’m Not Buying It
Gallup's latest State of the Global Workplace report (2024) finds that 77% of employees worldwide are not engaged at work. I'm not buying it. Here's why: Why are the numbers so dire? Part of the answer can be in how engagement is defined, the sample, or the...
Thriving in the Midst of Change: A Practical Guide for Contact Center Leaders
What standout cultural trait do you see in the most effective contact centers? It's a question I'm often asked. But before I throw my thoughts into the ring… what would you say? An engaged workforce? A customer-first focus? A strategic mindset? These are all great...
Knowing Your Customers
How do you know what a customer needs? There are many sources of customer information and each has an important story to tell. To learn more about how service interactions, operational data, customer surveys, customer and professional reviews, online forums, focus...
The Biden Administration’s “Time is Money” Initiative
Bad customer experiences invite costly regulation. These compliance costs and liability risks are unnecessary burdens that could be avoided if organizations simply prioritized their customers' best interests from the outset.








