customer advocacy - Brad Cleveland

Customer Advocacy: Internal or External…or Both?

Jun 26, 2025 | Customer Experience, Customer Relationships, Customer Service, Leadership, Organization and Culture

In recent years, customer advocacy has been a hot topic in marketing and customer service circles. But if you do a search on the term, you’ll find two very different definitions. One is an internal perspective: focusing the organization on what’s best for customers,...

Encouraging Dialogue with Customer Advocates

Apr 3, 2025 | Customer Relationships, Customer Experience, Customer Service, Customer Surveys, Leadership, LinkedIn Learning

Customer advocates are influential, even as passive promoters. They write testimonials and reviews, and they answer questions to reviews or on forums. Their engagement is visible, and it’s very believable. You further customer advocacy as you encourage dialogue,...

Customer Advocacy: The Secret Sauce

Nov 1, 2024 | Customer Experience, Customer Relationships, Customer Service, Leadership, Organization and Culture

There’s a scene in the movie Jobs, the biographical drama of Steve Jobs’ life, where he is shown fiddling with a portable CD player. It’s clumsy, heavy, and he struggles to get the CD loaded. The next scene shows him throwing the device into the trash. Of course, the...

Knowing Your Customers

Aug 23, 2024 | Customer Experience, Customer Relationships, Customer Service, Customer Surveys, Leadership, Quality Management

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...

Empowering Employees as Customer Advocates: Overcoming Barriers

Aug 2, 2024 | Call Center, Contact Center, Customer Experience, Customer Relationships, Customer Service, Leadership, Organization and Culture, Quality Management, Workforce Management

The idea of empowering employees to be customer advocates sounds great to many leaders—in concept. But doing so is easier said than done if barriers are in place. These can include lack of training, misguided performance targets, limited decision-making authority and...