BC 606: Managing the Customer Experience

Overview

Customers are scarce in today’s mature economy due to the expanding options of goods and services, and an increasingly global marketplace. Businesses that want to thrive in the future must become customer focused, learning to retain customers for long-term profits. In this course, you will explore the rationale and methods for customer retention. You will also learn how to tie customer retention to the bottom-line profits of a company, both short and long term. Additionally, you will study ways to turn a company and its divisions away from strictly product centered and toward a customer-centered focus. Finally, you will design a new position for yourself as chief customer officer (CCO).

All assignments in this course build upon each other and most contribute to your final portfolio project, in which you present the rationale for your organization to become customer focused and yourself as the best choice to lead the effort.

Introduction

This course is written so that most organizations’ leadership can benefit — both for-profits and nonprofits. This course is not about customer service only, but digs deeper into understanding how to realign an entire organization around the desires and needs of the customer on whom all profits depend. Even If you find yourself uninterested in occupying the leadership position of CCO, be sure to fully explore the position to be able to recognize good customer-focused leadership in your organization.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Calculate a company's goods and services value proposition through the eyes of the customer.
• Articulate the correlation between customer retention and leadership's view of its employees.
• Conduct an assessment of the long-term value vs. the short-term value of customer relationships.
• Assess your business’ power structures to determine strategy for implementing a customer-centered focus.
• Create a plan for implementing a customer-centered focus in an organization that addresses internal culture challenges, measurement strategies, implementation strategies, and roadblocks.
• Create a position description of and execute a detailed leadership plan for chief customer officer functions.

Required Texts
BC 606 texts are available from the JIU/MBS bookstore