Mini-MBA: Customer-Centric Management Curriculum

Customer Experience Strategy: Experience Based Differentiation

This session takes the fundamentals of customer experiences and frames them in a strategic business context. Knowing your company, your customer and your competition is vital to experience-based differentiation. This module will help managers charged with experience transformation to align strategic business objectives to a line-of-site to the experiences that people have with your brand.

Key Takeaways:

  • Learn ways to understand your customer and how you differentiate from the competition
  • Learn to apply experience design thinking to create a customer experience strategy and feature set innovation
  • Communicating your UX strategy to executives, partners, and your team

Voice of the Customer- Listen, Analyze and Act

Harnessing the valuable source of information known as the Voice of the Customer (VoC) can be daunting. On the surface, it seems simple enough – all businesses receive phone calls, emails, and text messages from their customers, after all. But all of this feedback is unstructured data, so implementing an organizational-level program that would allow you to turn keen insights about trends into actionable strategies and tactics is a challenge. With the skills to identify trends for improvement in people, processes, and technology gained from this module, your VoC program has the potential to vastly improve the customer experience. Take the feedback mechanisms we share, and the insights they capture, and effectively close the loop with your customers, employees, and partners to create a VoC program with impact.

Key Takeaways:

  • Apply VOC insights to various scenarios and business needs
  • Be able to define Voice of the Customer and employee
  • Understand the various methodologies for capturing Voice of Customer
  • Know the required components of a successful VoC program
  • Learn the importance of VOC programs as part of your CX efforts

Customer Experience: To Journey or Not?

The interaction between a customer and a business is where value is created for each. Visualizing the touchpoints between the two exposes new opportunities for improvement and growth. Experience maps align customer-business interactions in a way that gives strategic focus to create solutions with impact. Journey mapping is an exercise intended to offer organizations a comprehensive view of the customer’s experience from initial contact throughout the relationship, with a goal of helping organizations gain an overall understanding of the customer and their needs. With this data in hand, it becomes clear that caring for the customer can no longer be confined to the customer service department; rather, it must be the responsibility of everyone within an organization to meet the customer’s needs.

Traditional journey mapping sessions can consume a great deal of time and resources. This session is intended to provide participants with a unique and effective means for understanding the customer journey through their interaction with a company’s products and services.

Key Takeaways:

  • Learn the principles and process for touchpoint alignment, showing value creation for the customer and for the business.
  • Acquire the skills needed to initiate and conduct an experience-mapping project.
  • Gain hands-on experience visualizing and documenting the customer experience.

The Rise of the Omni-channel Customer: Your Customer Journey in Practice

In this thought-provoking session that draws on years of both research and real-world experience, the instructor will help you understand how B2B and B2C customers browse, shop, and buy using every channel at their disposal — and how your business must respond. This module will help you assess your ability (or lack of) to meet customers' needs across multiple channels, touchpoints, screens, and sessions.

Key Takeaways:

  • Explore what world-class companies are doing in marketing, sales, e-commerce, fulfillment, and customer service as your customers’ browsing, shopping, and buying habits continue to evolve.
  • Learn how to develop the people, processes, and platforms necessary to respond to changing customer needs today and in the years to come.
  • Understand the evolution of "multi-channel retailing" to "omnichannel retailing" and the importance of mobile and social media in online customer acquisition

Personalizing Customer Experience with Data and (Digital) Technology

Understand what an ideal technology stack looks like, and how to get it without draining your resources. This session explains the critical components of a customer experience technology program. It provides examples of technology that deliver great CX, and presents a practical approach for IT innovations and amazing ROI. 

Key Takeaways:

  • Tools to build a digital transformation, and as a result, stronger customer experiences
  • Gain a thorough understanding of what a customer experience technology stack actually is
  • Learn the gaps and opportunities in your particular company's customer experience lifecycle

Leveraging Data (Analytics) to Drive Customer-Centricity

Every customer-interaction creates opportunities to better understand what the customer wants -- or MAY want. Organizations collect massive amount of this data that are treasure troves of information about how to delight the customer. This session opens the door to real-world methods to obtain this data; and how it can be leveraged to gain ongoing, sustainable customer delight!

Key Takeaways:

  • What data sources are readily available that can be leveraged to see the world through their customers' eyes.
  • How to measure customer-centricity via easy-to-determine metrics
  • How to leverage data to realize competitive advantage via customer-delight
  • Creating a data-driven user model

Generating Customer Insights Through CX Design

Do you truly understand the theory behind customer experience (CX) design? How do you quantify the customer experience (CX), mine those experiences for key insights and then take action on those insights to impact the bottom line? The interaction between a customer and a business is where value is created. Understanding this connection exposes new opportunities for improvement and growth; aligning customer-business interactions in a way that gives a more pragmatic focus. Mining customer insights is essential to designing an effective and profitable customer experience. This means creating a customer experience (CX) listening program as a way of collecting, analyzing and acting on opportunities. In this module, you will learn how to generate customer insights and how those insights can impact the bottom line.

Key Takeaways:

  • Learn the core fundamentals behind customer experience (CX) design
  • Learn methods for understanding your customer experience (CX) via cutting-edge measurement methodology 
  • Learn the primary types of customer insight that a customer experience (CX) program can produce and how those insights can be leveraged
  • Learn how to demonstrate the impact a world-class customer experience (CX) program can have on your business

Measurement, Metrics and ROI

As a leader, the knowledge of digital measurement will empower you to make better investment decisions throughout your business. ROI maximization includes partnering with agencies and service providers to create an ecosystem of success, and knowing the right questions to ask of your team or partners is critical. This session will explore key frameworks for measuring digital effectiveness and return on investment (ROI).

Key Takeaways:

  • Understanding how customer-centric metrics fit into a voice of the customer program
  • Focusing on the right metrics that capture the customer experience
  • Finding the balance of qualitative and quantitative metrics
  • Learn the most important uses

Jobs To Be Done: A Way of Seeing

The concept of jobs to be done (JTBD) provides a lens through which we can understand value creation. It’s a straightforward principle: people “hire” products and services to get a job done.  This approach has gotten a lot of attention recently. Still, practical ways to applying the concept of JTBD in real-world settings is largely missing. This workshop is designed to give you concrete, practical skills use can use to apply JTBD to create high-value products and services. We’ll work in groups to get hands-on experience and have lively conversations.

Key Takeaways:

  • Find out how to create solutions customers want. Shift your mindset and make innovation work.
  • Help your organization see the market from the customers’ perspective–as individuals trying to get a job done.
  • Extend the ways in which you view customers

Customer-Centric Organizational Leadership and Transformation

How do you evangelize customer centricity and create a shared vision within your organization? Learn the best ways to parlay your leadership style in a way that engages and inspires your managed employees and business colleagues to adopt and deliver a customer-centric business strategy. This session will focus on ensuring that the customer experience initiatives undertaken by your organization are visible, understood and supported by your employees.

Key Takeaways:

  • Learn the framework for being a catalyst for transformation
  • Learn key steps to create customer-centric abilities in your employees
  • Be able to identify what true transformation looks like

Program Overview

For an overview of our Mini-MBA: Customer-Centric Management program plus program benefits and outcomes, please click here.