ICMI - Brad Cleveland

Really Listening to Customers: Your Strategic Advantage

Apr 24, 2025 | Call Center, Contact Center, Customer Experience, Customer Relationships, Customer Service, Customer Surveys, Leadership

This article was originally published earlier this month at ICMI. I get it. “Listen to customers” has become an oft-repeated cliché — and one that often seems to collide with daily reality. Customer feedback isn’t always positive, easy to hear or...

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...

The Psychology of Queues

Oct 14, 2022 | Call Center, Contact Center, Customer Experience, Customer Relationships, Customer Service, Workforce Management

Queues are a fact of life—especially now, given staffing shortages and growing workloads in many organizations. All contact centers—even emergency services—queue customers some of the time. Answering every contact immediately would take as many staff as inbound...

Do your goals and metrics foster employee engagement?

Jun 30, 2022 | Call Center, Contact Center, Customer Experience, Customer Relationships, Customer Service, Leadership, Organization and Culture

This has been a brutal few years for many contact centers. Supply chain problems and the Great Resignation have caused challenges on every aspect of customer care. The work we’re handling has surged and become more complex, while the employees we need to handle it...