Customer Experience Program (2024)

The Customer Experience Program meets the same high academic standards of the Minnesota State Mankato graduate programs, with a challenging interdisciplinary curriculum designed to prepare you to analyze, create, and deliver unique customer experiences.

Each module builds your skills, helps you develop strategies, and provides you a full CX Ultimate Toolkit with OVER 60 workshop booklets, team-focused activities, templates, assessments, and planning guides, and culture posters. All to help YOU on the road to immediate success.

We develop CX professionals that do extraordinary things for their organizations. Throughout the program, you're encouraged to work on your own projects. By the end of the program, you'll have completed your Customer Experience Portfolio, with real solutions to apply immediately to the challenges in your workplace.

Module 1 - Customer Experience Introduction​

Define the concept of Customer Experience. Find out what makes a beloved company and the essential elements that endear these brands to us.​

• Identify Customer Experience leaders and laggards.​
• Discuss what sets these types of experiences apart from others, making you less likely to advocate for a certain brand.​
• Create your comparison scorecard to identify critical elements that set leaders apart from the rest.

Module 2 - Customer Experience Strategy For Success​​

Learn why Customer Experience isn’t a project with a start and end date, and why this isn’t a state of mind – it’s a state of your organization and it starts at the top. Integrating Customer Experience into business strategy, and skillfully executing, leads to enormous rewards. You’ll achieve higher customer engagement, reduced churn, increased revenue, and greater employee satisfaction.​

• Develop insights into what a customer-centric organization looks like and how to get there.​
• Discover elements that comprise an effective and strategic customer experience plan.​
  
• Create critical goals and roadmap to help reach your customer experience vision.

Module 3 - ​Your Customers, Their Journey​​​

Customer Experience Journey Maps are arguably the most important instrument for capturing your customer’s true interactions, emotionally and cognitively, with your company’s brand. Discover your customers and their experiences, and use these strategic tools for communications, analysis, planning, management, and innovation.

• Develop insightful customer personas and stories that promote cultural empathy and impact decisions.
• Identify critical customer views of interactions throughout multi-channel touchpoints.
• Use journey maps to capture experiences and emotions and improve the lives of your customers.

Module 4 - Accelerate & Improve Decisions With Data​

Customer Experience initiatives fizzle quickly if you don’t connect the dots between your customers’ perceptions, touch points, service delivery, cost savings and ROI. Customer churn rates, share of wallet, Net Promoter Scores, average handling times, and cost of acquisition, can and need to tie to your bottom line.

• Explore leading practices that drive ongoing business improvements.
• Link customer perceptions with operational costs and profitability.
• Discover the most relevant, actionable metrics for your organization to drive desired business results.

Module 5 - Customer-Focused Innovation

Customer-Focused Innovation is the perfect blend of theory, practice, strategy and invention. Innovating on behalf of your customers doesn’t start with a problem statement – it starts with your customer. Learn to use empathy techniques to break through the culture barrier at your company and close the “knowing-doing” gap.

• Apply creative strategies that support innovation.
• Gain insights to understand the needs of your customers.
• Work to improve customer experience while adding value they’ll rave about.

Module 6 - Principles Of Customer Relationship Building

Customer Experience is multi-faceted and relies on the strong relationships you build with your customers. Use the Customer Relationship Development Model to identify and define core elements to build relationships and improve overall experiences. Through collaboration and ideation, you create a maturity matrix specifically for your business.

• Apply modern relationship building models.
  
• Develop your own Customer Experience-based Customer Relationship Maturity Matrix.
• Discover essential elements and apply the Technology Framework for CRM and Customer Experience.

Module 7 - Customer First Culture

Great customer experience start with great employee experience. Educate yourself and your workforce on how to foster a customer-first culture that positions you for the greatest, longest-term success. This isn’t “blowing up” the culture you already have – it’s embracing what you have and collaborating to make a difference for your customers.

• Accept the reality that your customer experience will never exceed your employee experience.
• Engage the hearts and minds of your people.
• Determine how to work togetherto deliver your brand promise and great customer experiences.

Module 8 - Navigating Politics Of Change

Change is hard, people are resistant, and the market is becoming more fiercely competitive every day. Organizations must quickly evolve or be left behind. It takes a special leader to navigate these waters and get your entire organization marching to the same drummer. Arm yourself with these indispensable leadership skills.

• Discover how to drive adoption across your entire organization.
• Successfully jump start your role by gaining quick wins and bring others along with you.
  
• Become a successful change-agent for experience-first thinking and inspire change.

Capstone Project: Your Customer Experience Strategic Plan