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Ongoing learning initiatives are vital for employee growth, enhancing employee satisfaction and improving retention rates while adding valuable skill sets to a company. Brands looking to facilitate such growth, as well as CX professionals interested in improving their knowledge, are now turning to numerous online courses available for customer experience. Let’s look at the top five online customer experience courses and certifications.
Customer experience is one of the top priorities of most forward-thinking businesses today. The soft and hard skills necessary to be a customer experience professional are in high demand. According to a 2022 report from Research and Markets, the global customer experience management market size is expected to reach $38.98 billion by 2030.
Certifications are in high demand across many industries. Many businesses view certifications as a way of ascertaining that an applicant has the knowledge and skills necessary for the position. Customer experience professionals use certifications as a way of demonstrating their commitment to keeping their skills current. Additionally, CX certifications help to increase the credibility of a CX professional.
The national midpoint salary for a customer experience specialist is $45,500, according to Robert Half, with the entry-level position starting around $35,00 and the advanced-level position at $52,000 in Columbus, Ohio, a city often used to show a snapshot of the United States. Certifications often enable job applicants to start a job at a higher salary and help to differentiate one candidate from another.
A culture of continual learning, including certification courses, is beneficial to employees because it enables them to gain the new skills required to move up within a company, improves employees’ personal satisfaction and enhances the overall employee experience. Peter Hirst, senior associate dean of Executive Education at the MIT Sloan School of Management, told CMSWire that a culture of continual learning is the mark of a healthy organization with engaged employees. “Research increasingly shows professional development is one of the top drivers of employee retention and a positive employee experience. Organizations that support continuous learning understand the enormity of the challenges their leaders are facing today and their need to be supported, connected and empowered to lead.”
For many brands, certifications provide a way for their customers to learn more about their software products. HubSpot is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform provider, so while its courses (described below) provide a curriculum that teaches customer experience and marketing, they also provide the student with a deeper understanding of HubSpot’s CRM platform.
“Certifications can be a great addition to any education program as customers who are proficient in your organization’s tools are likely to get much more out of them, leading to increased retention, loyalty, and advocacy,” said Greg Rose, chief experience officer at Intellum, a leading education platform provider. “Major players in the certifications field such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and many others like Instagram, Snap and Pinterest, all partner with Intellum to deliver world-class customer education and certification initiatives.”
Related Article: 8 Tips to Build a Winning Customer Experience Strategy
LinkedIn Learning offers courses on a huge variety of topics for business professionals. A monthly subscription to LinkedIn Learning is $39.99, with the first month free as a trial period, and an annual subscription works out to be $19.99 per month, also with the first month free. All subscriptions to LinkedIn Learning include LinkedIn Premium as well, and, conversely, those who subscribe to LinkedIn Premium receive full access to LinkedIn Learning.
LinkedIn Learning has a multitude of customer experience courses, including:
Creating a Positive Customer Experience
Customer Experience: Journey Mapping
Customer Experience Leadership
Design Thinking: Customer Experience
Customer Experience: Creating Customer Personas
Aligning Customer Experience with Company Culture
A Design Thinking Approach to Putting the Customer First
Leading a Customer-Centric Culture
Journey Mapping: Case Study in Action
The Design Thinking: Customer Experience course includes one project file, three chapter quizzes, and when completed, a certificate of completion. This course helps the student understand the different components that make up customer experience, such as archetypes, activities, interactions and experience principles. Using real-world examples, the course demonstrates how these components facilitate a brand's relationship with its customers and is broken into four parts:
The Customer Experience Context
The Layers of Customer Experience
Customer Experience at Work
Conclusion
Once students successfully complete the course, they are able to add the certification to their LinkedIn profile page.
Alison offers students 4,000 courses on practically any subject, including IT, health, language, business, management, sales and marketing, engineering, and teaching and academics. In addition to the courses offered for free to individuals, Alison offers upskilling services for businesses.
Alison also offers free certification courses on customer experience, customer service, Voice of Customer, and more. Alison’s Voice of the Customer Course course is broken into four parts, consisting of the Introduction, Lean Six Sigma: An Overview, Voice of the Customer Tools and Close Out. Each part contains instructional videos and a quiz that must be passed in order to move to the next part.
Students can take notes on the course page, set study reminders, participate in course discussions and once all parts have been completed, take the course assessment so they can obtain the certification. Digital and physical copies of the certification can be purchased from Alison once the course is successfully completed.
Related Article: Put Your Things Together for an Awesome Customer Experience
Coursera is a bit more expensive than the other certification providers we’ve discussed. After a seven-day free trial, students pay $39 per month to continue learning. Students then have access to over 7,000 courses, projects and certifications, as well as the CX course itself. The CX course is extremely thorough and is said to take five weeks to complete. However, there are a total of 11-hours' worth of instruction, and all Coursera courses are self-paced, so students can take as much or as little time as they wish to complete the course.
The Customer Experience course is part of the larger Branding: The Creative Journey Specialization course and is designed to explore the synergies between and the intersection of branding and customer experience. The topics for each week are as follows:
Week One: Converging on a Common Definition for CX – 11 videos, 4 readings, and 1 quiz
Week Two: Customer Journeys as the Lens for Brand Experience – 10 videos, 4 readings, and 1 quiz
Week Three: Aligning Brand and Customer Experience across all touchpoints – 10 videos, 6 readings, and 1 quiz
Week Four: CX relationship with Employee Experience, Outsourcing and Ethics – 10 videos, 9 readings and 1 quiz
Week Five: THE CAPSTONE PROJECT – 4 videos, 2 readings and 2 quizzes
HubSpot Academy offers courses and certifications for many different topics, including customer experience, marketing, SEO and more. HubSpot’s courses and certifications are widely recognized by many colleges and universities. The Wayne State University’s Mike Ilitch School of Business requires students taking their Inbound Information Technology course to become HubSpot certified. Additionally, Northeastern University accepts HubSpot certifications as transfer credits for their Social Media Concentration in either the Master of Professional Studies in Digital Media or the Masters in Corporate and Organizational Communication. HubSpot partners with over 500 colleges and universities to align its curriculum with industry expectations.
HubSpot’s Creating a Customer Journey Map course takes the student through the ins and outs of the creation of a customer journey map, and discusses the implications a journey map will have on a business.
The course consists of two videos and a quiz, along with a resource section featuring the slides from the videos, transcripts and links to related articles and blogs. The two videos, Understanding the Customer Journey and Creating a Customer Journey Map, are about developing a deeper understanding of the customer experience through the creation of a customer journey map, with the goal of improving the customer experience. Although there is no certification associated with this particular course, it is an excellent introduction to the subject of customer journey mapping.
Udemy offers tens of thousands of courses on a wide variety of subjects including business, marketing, design, programming, SEO and customer experience, with varying prices for each course.
Its Customer Experience Management Class costs $24.99 and consists of 26 sections featuring 93 video lectures for a total of eight hours of instructional material. It was designed for CEOs, client and sales executives, client success professionals and others who are interested in creating exceptional customer experiences. Section topics include:
CX Management in a New World (a post-COVID look at CX)
The Benefits of Great CX
Best Practices for CX Leaders
Customer Experience Pitfalls to Avoid
How To Measure and Analyze Customer Experience
The Main Causes of Bad CX and What You Can Do About It
Practical CX Strategies Using Technology
How To Create Memorable Customer Experiences Even Post-COVID-19
Udemy offers a very wide variety of customer experience courses, each of which covers many different aspects of CX.
Customer experience course titles offered by Udemy include:
Customer Experience in Industry 4.0
The Ultimate Customer Experience Course
Omnichannel Customer Experience Management
Customer Experience Management Fundamentals
Customer Experience Management Blueprint
Customer Experience Management – Customer Journey Mapping
Using Customer Experience to Grow Your Customer Base
How To Create an Excellent Customer Experience
Uncover Cognitive Biases in the Customer Journey
Customer Experience: Brand Promise & Customer Loyalty
Of all the CX course providers mentioned, Udemy offers the widest variety of CX courses for CX and marketing professionals at a very reasonable cost.
With so many customer experience courses and certifications available at little to no cost; CX, marketing and sales professionals have the opportunity to add to their knowledge, increase their skill set, become better assets for the businesses they work for and learn to create an exceptional experience for their customers.
For nearly two decades CMSWire, produced by Simpler Media Group, has been the world's leading community of customer experience professionals.
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Today the CMSWire community consists of over 5 million influential customer experience and custom service leaders, the majority of whom are based in North America and employed by medium to large organizations. Our sister community, Reworked gathers the word's leading employee experience and digital workplace professionals.
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For nearly two decades CMSWire, produced by Simpler Media Group, has been the world's leading community of customer experience professionals.
.
Today the CMSWire community consists of over 5 million influential customer experience and custom service leaders, the majority of whom are based in North America and employed by medium to large organizations. Our sister community, Reworked gathers the word's leading employee experience and digital workplace professionals.
