Leadership - Brad Cleveland

What true motivation is (and is not)

Oct 8, 2021 | Call Center, Contact Center, Customer Experience, Customer Relationships, Customer Service, Leadership, LinkedIn Learning, Organization and Culture, Quality Management

As a leader you have to be able to motivate your team members. In fact you probably need to be able to motivate others well beyond those who formally report to you. You may be asking yourself, how on earth can I get people to do things they may not want to do? But...

Equipping Your Agents to Be Customer Advocates

Sep 30, 2021 | Call Center, Contact Center, Customer Experience, Customer Relationships, Customer Service, Leadership, Organization and Culture

Customer advocacy is a hot topic in marketing and customer experience circles—and especially so following the economic upheavals of 2020 and 2021. Many of today’s most forward-thinking leaders—Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Emily Weiss, to name a few—see it as the...

Execute a Voice of the Customer Strategy

Sep 23, 2021 | Call Center, Contact Center, Customer Experience, Customer Relationships, Customer Service, Customer Surveys, Leadership, LinkedIn Learning

Feedback from customers and employees is like oxygen. Your organization must have it to survive and thrive. Whether you’re a print shop with three employees, a government agency with 3,000, or a multinational company with 300,000, you need a strategy to fully...

Embarking on new customer experience initiatives? Avoid common pitfalls

Sep 17, 2021 | Call Center, Contact Center, Customer Experience, Customer Relationships, Customer Service, Leadership

“75% of customer experience initiatives fail!” That’s a sensational headline. And one, even with a modest search of cases and literature, you’ll see often (in fact, estimates go as high as 93 percent). My question is, if your focus on customer experience fails, what’s...

Customer Service Excellence

Sep 9, 2021 | Call Center, Contact Center, Customer Access Strategy, Customer Experience, Customer Relationships, Customer Service, Leadership, Organization and Culture

Recently, I gave a presentation at the Tugboat Institute Gathering of Teams. The talk focused on common missed opportunities in customer service as well as steps that leaders and teams can take to make a difference for their customers. It concluded with several...

5 Universal Customer Frustrations

Sep 2, 2021 | Call Center, Contact Center, Customer Access Strategy, Customer Experience, Customer Relationships, Customer Service, Leadership

Apple, the trillion-dollar tech giant, is also a giant in customer service. When my iPhone battery life began to diminish, I found myself on Apple’s online support pages, where I was quickly offered four options: bring the product into a store, send it in for repair...