Call Center - Brad Cleveland

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...

Using AI in Customer Service: Steps for Seamless Integration

Jul 26, 2024 | AI, Call Center, Contact Center, Customer Access Strategy, Customer Experience, Customer Relationships, Customer Service, Leadership, LinkedIn Learning, Multi-channel Support

As customers, we’ve all experienced technologies that aren’t helpful or that create even higher levels of frustration. They offer many options, just none that we need. They force us to enter account numbers or other information that’s not passed...

What’s Happening with Contact Center Workload?

Jul 2, 2024 | AI, Call Center, Contact Center, Customer Access Strategy, Customer Service, Leadership, Multi-channel Support, Organization and Culture, The Edge of Service

What’s happening with contact center workload? Is the work handled by agents declining as AI capabilities become more robust and prevalent? Are calls being supplanted by digital channels and self-service? These are important questions—the answers will impact your...

Embracing Change in Contact Centers: 20 Trends and 3 Recommendations

Jun 14, 2024 | Call Center, Contact Center, Leadership

We are midway into 2024. How’s it going? It has certainly been a year of new developments in customer experience and contact centers. In January I wrote an article series for ICMI on the future of contact centers. The last article in the series identifies 20 trends...

The Future of Contact Centers: 5 Insights

May 9, 2024 | Call Center, Contact Center, Leadership, Multi-channel Support, Organization and Culture

After ICMI’s most recent Contact Center EXPO, I wrote a series of articles with reflections on the future of contact centers. I was recently reminded of them and thought I would share five thoughts from the first article. 1. AI Augmentation, Not Replacement Contact...