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Leadership Academy

Learn to Make Customer Experience Your Differentiator

Companies providing excellent customer experiences set themselves apart from the competition. They understand how they deliver to their customers can be as or more important than what they deliver. The Customer Experience Certificate Program offered through Linfield University Online and Continuing Education may be one of the most important investments your company can make.

Download the Customer Experience brochure

About the Customer Experience Program

Learn what it takes to create brand experiences to drive loyalty, achieve higher revenue gains and reduce costs. Develop deeper insights and integrate innovative strategies to help your organization see the world through your customer's eyes.

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

Register now

Program details

The cost of the Customer Experience (CX) Program in either format is $4,995.

Online format: eight modules

Rolling admission - start anytime:

  • Self-paced
  • CX portfolio and all course materials
  • Hands-on projects
  • Interactive discussion boards

In-person format: four consecutive days

Dates TBD:

  • Breakfast and lunch
  • CX portfolio and all course materials
  • Hands-on projects
  • Networking events

The curriculum

The Customer Experience Program meets the same high academic standards of Linfield University graduate programs, with a challenging interdisciplinary curriculum designed to prepare you to analyze, create and deliver unique customer experiences. Customer experience impacts all areas of your business, but how do you get started? Simply register now! You'll get guidance, practical tools and straightforward advice, along with examples and case studies to help you create a great customer experience strategy.


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 (CX) portfolio with real solutions to apply immediately to the challenges in your workplace.

  • Module 1: Customer Experience Introduction​

    Define the concept of customer experience. Find out what makes a beloved company and the essential elements that endear these brands to us.​

    • Identify customer experience leaders and laggards.​
    • Discuss what sets these types of experiences apart from others, making you less likely to advocate for a certain brand.​
    • Create your comparison scorecard to identify critical elements that set leaders apart from the rest.
  • 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.​

    • Develop insights into what a customer-centric organization looks like and how to get there.​
    • Discover elements that comprise an effective and strategic customer experience plan.​
    • Create critical goals and roadmap to help reach your customer experience 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. Discover 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 improve the lives of your customers.
  • Module 4: Accelerate and Improve Decisions With Data

    Customer experience initiatives fizzle quickly if you don’t connect the dots between your customers’ perceptions, touchpoints, 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.

    • Explore leading practices that drive ongoing business improvements.
    • Link customer perceptions with operational costs and profitability.
    • Discover the most relevant, actionable metrics for your organization to drive desired business results.
  • 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 relationship-building models.
    • Develop your own Customer Experience-based Customer Relationship Maturity Matrix.
    • Discover essential elements and apply the Technology Framework for CRM and Customer Experience.
  • Module 7: Customer First Culture

    Great customer experience start with great employee experience. Educate yourself and your workforce on how to foster 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 collaborating to make a difference for your customers.

    • Accept the reality that your customer experience will never exceed your employee experience.
    • Engage the hearts and minds of your people.
    • Determine how to work together to deliver your brand promise and great customer experiences.
  • 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.

    • Discover how to drive adoption across your entire organization.
    • Successfully jumpstart 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 Customer Experience Strategic Plan

    The program culminates in your very own strategic plan for your organization. To achieve the highest ROI, you're encouraged to add to the capstone throughout the program. By following your strategic plan, you'll operationalize and infuse customer experience ideals into your cultural DNA.

    As an added bonus, by the end of the class, you'll have completed your very own professional CX portfolio.

Meet the leadership team

Portrait of Carol BuehrensCarol Buehrens

As your Faculty Chair, Carol Buehrens is a Customer Experience Strategist, Author, Keynote Speaker and Educator. Her best-selling customer experience book, Happy R.A.V.I.N.G. Customers! provides practical advice to bring customer experience best practices to your own organization.

Focusing on constructing extraordinary experiences for over 30 years, Professor Buehrens has led numerous teams to success at large corporations, including Northrop, McDonnell-Douglas, Bechtel, Liberty Mutual, GE, Mercury Marine, and ICW Group Insurance Companies. At Northrop (now Northrop Grumman), Carol innovated the learning experience to meet and surpass the requirements of the government development contract for the B2 Bomber program, leading the way for disrupting how 3D Modeling and Design engineering training was traditionally conducted. Her tutorial-facilitated program would go on to train over 15,000 engineers for numerous stealth programs, far exceeding contract expectations.

For the past 20 years, she has lead teams in the improvement of Customer Experience. In her 18 years at ICW Group, she actively helped the organization grow from a $40M company to over $3B in business annually. Her passion for improving customer experience has resulted in numerous awards, including the “CX Innovation Award” from the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), ICW Group CEO Award, and the Liberty Mutual Star Award. She has been listed in the top 20 of the Global Top 30 Gurus for Customer Service since 2015, and is a Founding Member and Expert of the international Customer Experience Professional Association (CXPA), and an active member of the San Diego Customer Experience Special Interest Group (CX SIG).

Professor Buehrens provides corporate and educational workshops on Customer Experience worldwide. She brought to fruition the first University-backed, accredited Customer Experience Certificate Program, now taught across the nation and internationally at leading Universities.

Portrait of Mike TruettMichael Truett

Michael is known for creating, improving and executing Collaborative Design Thinking sessions and Customer Experience frameworks across diverse industries (Media, Streaming Services, Ed Tech, Health & Wellness, SaaS, PaaS) at different stages of growth - early-stage start-ups, seasoned companies looking to transform, high growth and declining businesses.

His experience ranges from Professor, Board Member, Keynote Speaker to leading Global Business Transformation (B2B, B2C, B2B2C), Business Development/Launch Strategy, Customer Experience, Customer Success, Customer Engagement, Customer Retention, Customer Service, Lifecycle Management and AI Transformation at companies like Spotify, The New York Times, Dow Jones, Tech start-ups and Telecom providers globally.

Michael’s passion for DT & CX is based upon his adventurous lifestyle where he is always seeing a new experience. He has a love for traveling, experiencing new cultures, surfing, golfing, running ultra marathons, participating in triathlons, and spending time with his friends and family.

Client initiatives Michael supports include Customer Obsessed Strategic planning, Experience Journey and Persona mapping (customer, employee, process, and product), AI – Artificial Intelligence Transformation, Service CRM/Omni-Channel Transformation, Strategic Business and Product-level Transformation, Operational Best Practices and Centers of Excellence, Mobile/Digital Product and Platform Strategy, Global Experience (LATAM, APAC, EU and BRIC), C-suite Alignment and Change Management.

Portrait of Erich DietzErich Dietz

Erich is the vice president of worldwide strategic accounts for InMoment. He has more than 15 years of executive experience spanning consulting, business development and solutions architecture. He is also a designated CXPA expert and regular contributor to the community’s Google+ Hangouts and other events.

Portrait of JP SainiJP Saini

As chief information officer for TRC, JP focuses on leveraging technology to digitally transform business and support profitable growth through improving customer experiences. JP is passionate about the mix of CX and technology and the impact of ensuring infrastructure is reliable, maintainable, scalable, flexible and secure for all customers.

What others are saying about the Customer Experience Program

Stacy Sherman, MBA, CUA, Customer Experience Leader

"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 the same program offered by Linfield University. Read about my #CX class experience and how you can differentiate your brand, too!"

Jenny Baranowski, Awards Director, SIIA

"The program has done a great job of putting customer experience front and center for our organization. The concepts and lectures 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 the program for anyone looking to bring customer experience to the forefront of their business."

Brett Fish, Cognizant, Senior Director Business Development

"The 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."