Certified Customer Experience Specialist

Who this is for

• You answer for the experience

  Customer experience, service, service operations or quality. You have to decide which touchpoint to fix first and prove that the fix worked. This is where indicators collected and never used do the most damage.

• You operate a touchpoint

  Digital channel, store, contact centre, logistics or after-sales. Your area is one stretch of the journey, and you need to understand how it affects the perception of the whole and what the brand expects of you there.

• You sponsor the change

  You approve the experience budget, set indicator targets and answer for the culture. You need to know what to ask before approving an initiative, and what separates a real improvement from a number that went up.

What you take with you

• A permanent verification code

  Anyone confirms your credential at pmcert.org/verify, without having to ask you for anything.

• Approval that does not expire

  A credential you earned does not lapse, asks for no annual renewal and charges no subscription.

• LinkedIn and a public profile

  Add it to your licenses and certifications section, or share the link to your profile.

• A certificate with your score by domain

  In PDF, showing how you performed in each area assessed.

What you need to know

Seven domains, drawn at random from a bank written for this exam. Read each one and see where you stand.

• Fundamentals of customer experience

  What the experience is: the internal and subjective response of whoever interacts with the brand, and not what the brand executes. The memory that response leaves and that conditions the next interaction, and the distinction between experience, service, relationship and satisfaction.

• The customer journey

  The complete path, not the internal flow: the three stages, the behaviour expected at each one and the moments that set the memory of the whole. A journey drawn from the inside out reproduces the org chart and erases the stretches where perception forms without the company.

• Touchpoints

  The concrete encounter between brand and customer: when to design, adapt, monitor and prioritise. Classifying the touchpoint by its owner, including the partner one and what happens beyond the reach of the brand, and choosing which to fix when the budget does not cover all.

• Metrics and indicators

  Choosing the indicator by the question to answer, and recognising what is not an experience indicator. What measures one service episode does not measure the relationship, and volume of traffic does not measure perception. Balancing a set instead of maximising one number.

• Data, information and capabilities

  Capturing, interpreting and disseminating information about the journey: the three verbs together, because capturing alone produces an archive and interpreting without disseminating produces a report nobody reads. What granularity to keep in order to reconstruct the path of whoever had trouble.

• A customer-centred culture

  The layer that holds up the rest: the transition starts with the leadership and not with the front line, and the culture is read in what the organisation measures and rewards, not in what it declares. Recognising when the experience demands a capability the house does not have.

• The strategic people cycle

  Whoever delivers the experience: attracting, developing, compensating, retaining and appraising those who operate the touchpoints. Retention as a consequence of the earlier steps, and the one-to-one meeting as an instrument of daily operation.