
In this lecture you choose the four numbers your service function runs on and see which question each one answers, then.
This course is built from five disciplines: customer care management, process optimisation, emotional intelligence, international culture and sales techniques.
The map of the course
A simple dictionary for reading lectures from other fields as service work
Three questions to ask after every lecture
A short self-diagnostic that shows which sections to watch first
Download the Service Metric Set, plus the spreadsheet that fills itself in, and write your own numbers into it.
The main tasks and key functions of the role
The effect on customer experience and on business results
The key indicators: NPS, CSAT, CES, FCR
Working with marketing, sales and product, and leading change in service
The goals of an audit and how to assess the current state
Customer journey mapping
Collecting data through surveys, interviews and feedback
SWOT on the team, finding bottlenecks and defining growth points
Building the vision and mission of the service
Long-term and short-term goals
Service policy and standards
Choosing the model: omnichannel, self-service and the alternatives
Recruiting and onboarding into a support team
Regular training and coaching
Financial and non-financial motivation
Performance management, a culture of support, and career tracks
Analysing current processes and deciding what needs optimising
Using CRM and customer communication systems
Chatbots, AI and self-service
Building SLAs and SOPs, and controlling quality afterwards
Metrics for measuring customer experience
Metrics for measuring team performance
Analysing customer feedback
Reporting, visualisation and using analytics to decide
Types of difficult client and the approach to each
Conflict management and active listening
Escalation: how and when to involve a manager
Communication standards in a crisis, and preventing negative feedback
The technologies worth knowing about
Global trends and best practice
AI and big data in customer care
Omnichannel approaches, and building long-term service plans
What a process is and what characteristics it has
The different types of process
What process improvement means
What it actually buys the business
The core values of process improvement
What waste is, which in service is usually repeated contact
Standardisation and process maturity
The five phases, and where to start
What process mapping is and how it differs from modelling
Stakeholder, relationship and flow maps
Cross-functional and value stream maps
What a map consists of, and the stages of building one
The process improvement framework
How improvement connects to strategy rather than to tidiness
The phases from planning to implementation
What process architecture is and what it gives you
Process-oriented architecture
What process modelling is and how to manage it
Where to start
What problem solving is
5S, 5 Whys and 8D
Activity network and affinity diagrams, and benchmarking
Brainstorming, checklists, cause-and-effect and flow diagrams
Linear regression and the nominal group technique
The prioritisation matrix
SIPOC and SWOT
DRIVE, ICOR and the problem-solving funnel
What a culture of process improvement is
The phases of culture change
The components of a good one
Changing behaviour, and the roles of managers and HR
How emotional intelligence develops
Influencing through logic against influencing through emotion
Emotional intelligence and relationships
The ability to resonate, which is what a customer actually remembers
What emotional charging is
How an agent energises or drains the person on the other end
The role of stress, which in service work is constant
Recovery
How an emotionally engaged person behaves
What low emotional intelligence looks like from outside
Assessing your own level
Self-awareness, positive attitude and social intelligence
Awareness as the starting point
How people actually change
Positive attitude
Moving from a negative to a positive mindset
Whether fear motivates anyone
The power of single-mindedness
Coaching with empathy and building rapport
The elements of a conversation that changes something
The ideal image of yourself
Feedback as the correction mechanism
Cycles of life
The pyramid of life
The process of change
Choosing which competences to develop
The three development zones
Summing up
Analysing the environment your team operates in
What outstanding leaders do differently
A shared vision of the future
Group social identity and social groups
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.