This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Customer strategy usually ends exactly where its execution begins. You define who the customer is, what they pay for and what experience you promise — and then hand it to people who were not on any of those slides.

The promise survives until the first conversation with an employee

And that conversation is not governed by your strategy. It is governed by whether the person having it has the authority to keep your promise and any reason to try. This is why customer programmes stall so predictably: the diagnosis is good, the charter is written, the training happens, and six months later the satisfaction score is where it started. Customer experience is not produced by a strategy document — it is produced by one person in one exchange, and the quality of that exchange follows from what the person thinks about the company they work for. So half this course is about the customer and half is about the conditions under which the promise gets kept.

What this course covers

Forty-two lessons. Who buys and what they value: being the voice of the customer inside your own company, product-market fit and sustaining it, portfolio decisions with the BCG and McKinsey matrices, researching need through Jobs to be Done and design thinking, customer journey mapping, hypothesis validation, north star and pirate metrics, monetisation models, and unit economics with lifetime value against acquisition cost. Then the promise you make outward: who owns the brand, a same-day audit including how AI assistants describe you, positioning turned into six messages the front line can repeat, tone of voice, campaign anatomy, and a dashboard separating awareness, consideration, preference and loyalty. Then the experience itself: net promoter score, satisfaction, customer effort and first-contact resolution, an audit built on journey mapping, the service strategy and the choice between omnichannel and self-service, the team, process automation with service level agreements, feedback analysis, difficult customers and escalation, and preventing the negative review rather than answering it. Then the culture that produces all of it: whether culture can be created, the eight-step model, describing culture through behaviour, rituals and the power of repetition, selecting for fit, launching and measuring a culture, and the seven elements of one that works. Then the promise made inward: why most value propositions for employees fail, diagnosing the gap between internal and external, designing one per audience, communicating it without marketing language, and measuring it. Finally engagement as the measurable input: why it is not satisfaction or loyalty or motivation, the twelve elements taken apart with an action against each, three generations of practice, one-to-one conversations, and a culture of high engagement.

Nineteen of the forty-two lessons are about employees, and that is the argument

I would rather state it than have you discover it in section nine. The chain from an engaged employee through service quality to a loyal customer to revenue has been described and measured for decades, and it is usually acknowledged with one slide in a customer course before everyone moves on. Here it gets half the running time. The employee value proposition block is the same exercise as a customer value proposition with the audience reversed — a promise, the gap between the promise and reality, and a way to measure whether it holds. The culture block explains why the person on the phone behaves as they do. The engagement block gives you a validated instrument for the input. If you want customer strategy with the people part left out, that is a shorter course and it is also the one that does not work.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike Pritula. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 42 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: the Jobs to be Done frame, the customer journey map, the messaging matrix, the service model choice, the experience metric set, the eight-step culture model, the value proposition structure, and the twelve engagement elements with actions

• Both halves of the chain in one course, rather than the customer half on its own

Where to start

Read your customer promise out loud, then ask whether the person who answers your phone has the authority to keep it. If the answer is no, the strategy was never the problem. Enrol now and start today.