
How the role evolved, and how it differs from the technical and commercial ones
Being the voice of the customer where decisions actually get made
Balancing business, users and technology
What that balance costs when it tips
Vision and mission for what you sell
Finding product-market fit, and sustaining it once found
Strategic priorities
Linking what you offer to what the business needs
The life cycle, stage by stage
The BCG and McKinsey matrices applied to a real portfolio
Deciding whether to invest, maintain or retire
Balancing the core, the adjacent and the bets
Methods for researching market and customer need
Jobs to be Done, and design thinking
Customer journey mapping
Tools for validating a hypothesis before building on it
Roles: managers, designers, analysts, researchers
Tribes, squads and goal alignment
Agile and Lean as an operating model
A culture of experiment rather than opinion
The north star metric and the ones supporting it
AARRR, the pirate metrics
Product analytics tooling
Deciding on the data rather than around it
Freemium, subscription, transaction and licence models
Growth loops and product-led growth
Unit economics, and lifetime value against acquisition cost
Financial accountability for what you sell
What changes as the company grows
Supporting expansion into new markets
Technology and market risk
Building security and compliance into the process
Driving change from a commercial seat
Artificial intelligence and platform business models
Partner ecosystems and open innovation
What the role looks like next
Where brand ownership sits between marketing, product and service
The six layers of a brand, and which layer each decision belongs to
A map of thirty-plus AI tools arranged by task
Brand equity, and what a strong brand is worth
Internal and external audit in five blocks, run in a day
Competitive analysis of what rivals claim
How ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini currently describe your company
Awareness, consideration, share of search and net promoter score
Mission, vision and values written so the front line can use them
Branded house against house of brands
One positioning statement turned into six repeatable messages
Naming, and checking availability
Logo, colour, typography and image style as working constraints
Moodboards and illustration with generative models
Teaching an AI model to write in your tone of voice
The brand book, and copyright around generated assets
Big idea, creative, channels and activation
Thirty concepts in an hour, then discarding twenty-nine
Headlines, body copy and calls to action with AI as co-author
Organic, paid, press, influencers and partnerships in one mix
Awareness, consideration, preference and loyalty as four separate numbers
Social listening that runs without you
Monitoring how AI assistants mention your brand
A ninety-day implementation plan
The main tasks, and the effect on business results
Net promoter score, satisfaction, customer effort, first-contact resolution
Working with marketing, sales and product
Leadership and change inside a service function
What an audit is for, and how to scope it
Building the customer journey map
Collecting data through surveys, interviews and feedback
Strengths, weaknesses, bottlenecks and growth points
Vision and mission for the function
Long-term and short-term goals
Service policy and standards
Choosing the model: omnichannel, self-service and the rest
Hiring and settling people in
Training, coaching and development
Motivation, financial and otherwise
Performance management and career tracks
Working out what actually needs optimising
Customer relationship and case management systems
Chatbots, AI and self-service
Service level agreements and operating standards
Experience metrics: net promoter score, satisfaction, customer effort
Team metrics: handling time, first-contact resolution, service level
Analysing the feedback you already have
Reporting, visualisation, and using it to decide something
The types, and the approach to each
Conflict management and active listening
When to escalate, and how
Preventing the negative review rather than answering it
The technologies worth knowing about
Global trends and best practice
Artificial intelligence and large data sets in service
Planning the function long-term
Whether culture can be created deliberately
Why it matters commercially rather than decoratively
How a culture appears when nobody designs it
The Netflix case
Describing behaviour, creating rituals, selecting people who fit
Integrating newcomers, communicating, training
Leading by example, and supporting culture through accountability
The Miro case
What you actually want people to do
The mistakes that make a culture description useless
Who to involve, and what to do with the previous values
Vision, mission and values, with the Tesla case
What a ritual is, and the power of repetition
Rituals against discipline
Designing interview questions, and where tests help
Integrating new people, with the Starbucks and Buffer cases
Communicating it across every surface you own
Training people on it, and using each situation to teach
Building accountability rather than announcing it
How to measure culture, with the Basecamp case
Transparency, positivity and measurement
Recognition, uniqueness and listening
How mistakes are treated, which decides everything else
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.