DeVry University Schools Executives in Customer Experience

Few customer experience professionals have formal training in the discipline. Many are simply assigned "ownership" of CRM or customer experience as their organizations embrace those strategies. However, as executive positions in these areas continue to proliferate, educational opportunities should follow. Master's of business administration programs with concentrations in CRM and customer experience management are rare today, but that may change. At DeVry University, for example, graduate school business courses in customer experience management (CEM) will soon become a reality.

The 80-year-old university will begin offering a graduate certificate in CEM this summer, in partnership with RightNow Technologies. The program will consist of eight courses and will be a concentration within the MBA curriculum. Students can pursue two paths: one focused on analytics and business intelligence disciplines; the other geared toward marketers, with a concentration on customer experience strategies and consumer behavior.

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Here, Oscar Gutierrez, national dean for DeVry University's College of Business & Management, and Steve Pappageorge, senior director of business services for DeVry University, discuss such issues as what issues customer experience professional should focus on and the importance of incorporating real-world instruction into graduate school business curriculum.

What should the customer experience leaders of tomorrow be focused on today?

Steve Pappageorge: The customer experience leader of tomorrow [should] focus on the development of tools and processes for integrating the totality of the customer's interactions with the business. The most significant tools and processes will include: 1) voice of the customer and identifying and understanding what customers truly say and feel; 2) social media?how to ?integrate it into their service center and connect with customers to build loyalty; 3) Six Sigma/process reengineering/continuous improvement, which helps companies take action on what their customers tell them. Using a methodology is critical to driving results; 4) frontline staff development and training. This is not a one-time event; it needs to be continual and should be tied to career paths; and 5) customer recovery in terms of how to turn dissatisfied customers into company advocates?and not lose them in the process.

What challenges do you expect customer experience leaders to face this year and what real-world knowledge will help them to solve these dilemmas?

Oscar Gutierrez: OG: Several challenges come to mind:?1) budget constraints. Companies will need to do more with less while not sacrificing quality of service; 2) social media. Just because it's a new way to interact with customers doesn't mean the fundamentals of customer service change.?We still need to respectfully and efficiently serve people. It's just that the contact mechanism is slightly different and the expectations for speedy responses are higher; and 3) recruiting the right talent. The pool of labor is large, but finding the right people, more specifically the right attitude, is critical.?

In what ways have the business and marketing environment changed that having a certificate in customer experience will help future marketers and customer strategy leaders?

SP: The pace of technological developments that impact customer experience has increased dramatically in the past few years. There is much more access to information in the hands of the consumer and, more recently, in the hands of networks of consumers, making them much more savvy and empowered.

Businesses have had to provide the adequate technical support to better inform and support the requirements of this new consumer profile. A certificate in customer experience will prepare future marketers and customer strategy leaders to better understand the behavior of this new type of consumer.

OG: If you look at the historical world of customer service?it's typically been on-the-job experience. Some people work in the service center and then work up the ranks. Maybe they have a degree going into their jobs, or maybe they don't, but it rarely involves the consumer world, social media, and different customer channels. Basically the general change in American consumer behavior? changes the landscape significantly of how you manage a customer service function and operate it.

We feel that there is a significant opportunity?to help managers really understand the consumer experience, leverage it, satisfy it, and then drive operational improvements. Some programs out there focus on CRM, but those programs focus only on the infrastructure?the systems that support the recording of information pertaining to the customer's records. We think that what may be appealing to some potential students is the possibility of focusing on the marketing aspect of [customer experience] or the analytics aspect. Our intention is to develop courses that target new channels of communication that allow companies to take a much more proactive role in how they interact with consumers. We'll look at the consumer experience from the behavioral aspect and allow individuals to make decisions on that. We believe this fills the void.

How will students who attend a college CEM program be better prepared in business when they graduate?

SP: Part of what our students and, ultimately, professionals in the consumer space understand?.is that not only will they have a better appreciation of having [customer] data, but also how they take that information and drive it into an actionable plan and make their employees' lives easier and the customer experience better. Hopefully, we'll see the end results in better service to consumers in organizations.

Source: http://www.1to1media.com/linkpass.aspx?Action=pagelink&page=View.aspx?DocID=33339&From=RssDocument&utm_source=RSSDocument&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=01-09-2012

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