Customer Experience Certificate Program

Learn to Make Customer Experience Your Differentiator

Get ready to discover cutting-edge methodologies crafted by leading companies to elevate the Customer Experience within your organization. Business expansion, customer loyalty, engagement, and retention hinge on the relationships cultivated with your customers.
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Developed by industry thought leaders who are executive practitioners, the University of California, Irvine, Division of Continuing Education Customer Experience Certificate Program is globally acknowledged. Throughout this dynamic interdisciplinary curriculum, you will adeptly navigate the CX framework and learn best practices.

Position yourself as the CX professional who achieves remarkable outcomes for your organization!
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About the Program   –   What Others Say   –   Enroll Today!   –   Curriculum   –   Instructors

About the Customer Experience Certificate Program

This is our flagship CX program. Learn what it takes to create brand experiences that drive loyalty of both customers and employees. Develop deeper insights, achieve higher revenue gains, reduce costs, and integrate innovative strategies to help your organization see the world through your customer's eyes.

The UCI Customer Experience Certificate Program is designed by industry experts for professionals seeking practical tools for this fast-growing discipline. From your initial CX maturity assessment, vision development and goal setting, persona and journey design, to empathy stories, cultural engagement, and AI workshop, be ready to roll-up your sleeves and apply your new skills in this hands-on, interactive course. ​

Enroll Today!

Online Program ($4,995)
  • CX Portfolio & all course materials
  • Rolling admission - enroll at any time!
  • Interactive projects​
  • 8 Modules​
  • Payment Options Available

CX Curriculum

The Customer Experience Program meets the same high academic standards of UCI graduate programs, with a challenging interdisciplinary curriculum designed to prepare you to analyze, create, and deliver unique customer experiences.

Each module builds your skills, helps you develop strategies, and provides you a full CX Ultimate Toolkit with OVER 70 workshop booklets, team-focused activities, templates, eBooks, assessments, planning guides, customizable presentations, and culture posters. All to help YOU on the road to immediate success.

We develop CX professionals that do extraordinary things for their organizations. Throughout the program, you're encouraged to work on your own projects. By the end of the program, you'll have completed your Customer Experience Portfolio, with real solutions to apply immediately to the challenges in your workplace.

Module 1 - Customer Experience Introduction

Study the basics of “leaders and laggards” and what makes customer experience. Learn the definition used throughout the program, what makes a “beloved brand”, consider why businesses can easily and quickly fail by providing poor experiences, and take your first look at how your own brand compares.​
  • Identify why you love the brands you do, and why customer experience impacts brand value.
  • Discover what you can learn from leading and lagging brands, what sets them apart, and why some fail.​
  • Scorecard how your own company stacks up to your top competition and your beloved brand, across all channels..

Module 2 - Customer Experience Strategy for Success ​​

Learn why Customer Experience isn’t a project with a start and end date, and why this isn’t a state of mind – it’s a state of your organization and it starts at the top. Integrating Customer Experience into business strategy, and skillfully executing, leads to enormous rewards. You’ll achieve higher customer engagement, reduced churn, increased revenue, and greater employee satisfaction.​
  • Complete a full CX Maturity assessment for your company.
  • Discover elements that comprise an effective and strategic customer experience plan.​
  • Create your CX vision, critical goals, and a roadmap to help reach your vision.

Module 3 - Your Customers, Their Journey ​

Customer Experience Journey Maps are arguably the most important instrument for capturing your customer’s true interactions—emotionally and cognitively—with your company’s brand. Evaluate your customers and their experiences, and use these strategic tools for communications, analysis, planning, management, and innovation.​
  • Develop insightful customer personas and stories that promote cultural empathy and impact decisions.​
  • Identify critical customer views of interactions throughout multi-channel touchpoints.​
  • Use journey maps to capture experiences and emotions and help improve the lives of your customers.

Module 4 - Accelerate & Improve Decisions with Data

Customer Experience initiatives fizzle quickly if you don’t connect the dots between your customers’ perceptions, touch points, service delivery, cost savings and ROI. Customer churn rates, share of wallet, Net Promoter Scores, average handling times, and cost of acquisition can and need to tie to your bottom line.​
  • Discover the most relevant, actionable metrics for your organization to drive desired business results.
  • Gain a Survey Power Suite with ideas, tips, survey examples, action guidance, and case studies.
  • Drive ongoing business improvements by linking customer perceptions with operational costs and profitability.​

Module 5 - Customer-Focused Innovation

Customer-Focused Innovation is the perfect blend of theory, practice, strategy and invention. Innovating on behalf of your customers doesn’t start with a problem statement – it starts with your customer. Learn to use empathy techniques to break through the culture barrier at your company and close the “knowing-doing” gap.​
  • Apply creative strategies that support innovation.​
  • Gain insights to understand the needs of your customers. ​
  • Work to improve customer experience while adding value they’ll rave about.

Module 6 - Principles of Customer Relationship Building

Customer Experience is multi-faceted and relies on the strong relationships you build with your customers. Use the Customer Relationship Development Model to identify and define core elements to build relationships and improve overall experiences. Through collaboration and ideation, you create a maturity matrix specifically for your business.​
  • Apply modern ideation and relationship building models.​
  • Develop your own Customer Experience-based Customer Relationship Maturity Matrix.​
  • Discover essential elements that help build amazing partnerships with your valued customers.

Module 7 - Customer First Culture

Educate yourself and your workforce to create a customer-first culture that positions you for the greatest, longest-term success. This isn’t “blowing up” the culture you already have – it’s embracing what you have and acting together to make a difference in how your brand is perceived. Enjoy this creative session to deconstruct cutting-edge cultures and set the vision and goals for your own.​
  • Accept the reality that your customer experience will never exceed your employee experience.​
  • Engage the hearts and minds of your people to deliver your brand promise and great customer experiences.
  • Enjoy an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Workshop to engage your organization's culture while using AI as your innovative assistant.

Module 8 - Navigating Politics of Change

Change is hard, people are resistant, and the market is becoming more fiercely competitive every day. Organizations must quickly evolve or be left behind. It takes a special leader to navigate these waters and get your entire organization marching to the same drummer. Arm yourself with these indispensable leadership skills.​ Activities in this module come together to build your own Executive “Charting The CX Revolution” presentation!
  • Identify critical business drivers, then make the CX connection to operationalize CX.
  • Successfully jump-start your role by gaining quick wins and bringing others along with you.​
  • Become a successful change-agent for experience-first thinking and inspire change.

Capstone Project: Your Strategic Organizational Plan

During the program, you’ll work on your Capstone Project. This strategic document allows you to capture your new skills in a real plan to help accelerate change. By the end of the program, this document along with the templates, worksheets, and other course materials, becomes your very own Professional Customer Experience Portfolio.

CX Instructors

Carol Buehrens

Carol is the Chief Experience Officer and author of the best-selling customer experience book Happy RAVING Customers! and Creative Workshops with AI: Engaging Business Teams in Dynamic Workshops Using Artificial Intelligence. Carol is a leading customer experience expert and speaker, and has been constructing extraordinary customer experiences for over 30 years for major companies such as Liberty Mutual, Northrop, McDonnell-Douglas, Bechtel, GE, Mercury Marine, and ICW Group Insurance Companies.
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Carol’s passion for improving customer experience has resulted in numerous awards, including the prestigious “CX Innovation Award” from the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), the ICW Group CEO Award, and the Liberty Mutual Star Award. She's also listed in the World's Top 30 Customer Service Professionals.

A Founding Member and Expert Panel Member of the international Customer Experience Professional Association (CXPA), Carol is also an active member of the San Diego Customer Experience Special Interest Group (CX SIG), and Professor at California State University Fullerton and University of California San Diego.

Michael Truett

Michael is known for creating, improving, and executing Collaborative Design Thinking sessions and Customer Experience frameworks across diverse industries at different stages of growth. He has worked with companies such as Spotify, The New York Times, Dow Jones, Tech start-ups, and Telecom providers globally.

​Erich Dietz

Erich Dietz is the Vice President of Worldwide Strategic Accounts for InMoment. He has over 15 years of executive experience spanning consulting, business development, and solutions architecture. Erich joined InMoment in 2003 and primarily works with InMoment’s large, complex client organizations within their B2B, B2B2C, and B2C markets. Erich partners with clients to architect and implement Customer Experience Management (CEM) & Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs that enhance critical business measures including revenue generation, operational efficiency, cross-channel service alignment, customer retention, base management, loyalty, and brand advocacy. He is also a designated CXPA Expert and regular contributor to the community’s Google+ Hangouts and other events.

​Prior to InMoment, Erich was a Management Consultant for several global consulting firms. He holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Rutgers School of Engineering.

JP Saini

JP Saini is a C-level IT executive for a B2B company with 20 years of in-depth business, technology, operations experience and strong leadership skills. Because of his extensive portfolio, he's able to advance the overall strategic direction of information technology to align with strategic business plans, growth goals, and position IT as a strategic business enabler and partner. His sharp focus on excellence is driven by his knowledge of client service and performance-based metrics.

Mr. Saini has been successfully managing IT business and strategy by harnessing technology for business growth and profitability, risk mitigation, and the identification of commercial opportunities.

Gary Maggetti

Gary is General Manager of Disney California Adventure Park in Anaheim, California. Since beginning his career with the Walt Disney Company as a Jungle Cruise Skipper during the 1992 Fall College Program, Gary has had a variety of roles at the Disneyland Resort from Restaurant Manager to Training and Development. He has also worked internationally as Director, Food & Beverage for the Tokyo Disney Resort, providing strategic input to Oriental Land Company, who manages all operations at that location.

​Gary is the Advisory Board Experience Chair for the Customer Experience program, Division of Continuing Education at UCI. He also serves as Vice Chairman on the Board of Directors for the California Restaurant Association and has served on the Board of Directors for several local community organizations including the Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County, and the Executive Advisory Board for the Hospitality Management program at CSU Long Beach. Gary graduated cum laude from the Northern Arizona University School of Hotel and Restaurant Management.

What others say about the CX Certificate Program

"Becoming a CX expert doesn't happen automatically or overnight. It requires on-the-job training AND taking a course at a reputable university. That's exactly what I did and recommend you take this same program. Read about my #CX class experience and how you can differentiate your brand, too!"
- Stacy Sherman, MBA, CUA, Customer Experience Leader

"This program has done a great job of putting customer experience front and center for our organization. The concepts and presentations in the program are engaging and easy to follow, and the worksheets allow me to easily apply the concepts to my daily work. I recommend this CX program for anyone looking to bring customer experience to the forefront of their business."
- Jenny Baranowski, Awards Director, SIIA

"This course has been great for me and my company. It has given us new ways of thinking, allowed us to look at different ways of doing things and pull from successes in other industries that have translated into successes in our business that we wouldn’t have explored before."
- Brett Fish, Cognizant,  Senior Director Business Development
UCI DIVISION OF CONTINUING EDUCATION - CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE PROGRAM