This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Every company measures customer satisfaction. Very few can say what they would change if the number dropped four points next month.

That gap is the whole subject of this course: the distance between having service metrics and running a service function.

What a struggling service function looks like

The team is judged on how fast tickets close, so tickets close and the same customer comes back three times with the same problem. Automation was added on top of a process nobody described, which means the chatbot is now efficiently doing the wrong thing. Escalation exists but has no rule, so the loudest customers get the manager and the patient ones do not. The agents burn out at a rate everyone treats as normal for the industry. And a customer in another country writes something that reads as rude and was meant as direct, and gets handled accordingly.

How the course is put together

Thirty-eight lessons in five parts. The function first, eight lessons on running customer care: the metric set and what each one actually tells you, a full audit with journey mapping and SWOT, building a strategy and choosing a service model, hiring and developing a support team, automation with SLAs and SOPs behind it, difficult clients and escalation rules, and where the field is going.

Then operations, because most service problems are process problems wearing a customer's face. Eight lessons on process optimisation: waste, standardisation, maturity, value stream and cross-functional mapping, and the toolkit — 5 Whys, 8D, SIPOC, DRIVE, the prioritisation matrix.

The people doing the work, and the customers on the other side

Then eight lessons on emotional intelligence, which in a service function is not a soft topic. The emotional load agents carry is what drives turnover there, and the ability to resonate is what a customer remembers long after the resolution. Self-awareness, empathy, energy, stress and recovery.

Then culture. Eight lessons on serving customers who are not from where you are: high and low context communication, why the same complaint means different things in different places, power distance and what it does to an escalation, and attitudes to waiting — which is exactly what a support queue asks of people.

And finally six lessons on the commercial layer: SPIN and AIDA, objection handling with LAER, CRM, and funnel analysis applied to the service journey.

Who is teaching this

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. My students are in 185 countries, which is where most of what I know about cross-cultural service came from.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all course materials

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments and real business cases

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

Start here

Take last month's satisfaction number and write down what you would actually change if it dropped by four points. If the answer is "look into it", the function is being measured but not managed, and that is what the next thirty-eight lessons fix. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.