Understanding Customer Experience

Ultimately, the customer is the sole judge of the quality of an organizations’ offer and is the actor that, in one way or another, pays for it. Due to this, the customer experience is important and a point of departure for marketing and organizational development. Understanding Customer Experience is an open access graduate course from the Karlstad Business School in conjunction with the Service Research Center – CTF. The course is designed for professionals with an interest in customer experience and is available to both for-credit and non-credit participants. It is designed for professionals from a wide variety of business areas as well as public organizations. The level of the course content is on advanced university level based, builds on research conducted at CTF and is facilitated by active researchers. The course centers around– Open, collaborative and networked learning practices.– Interactive video lectures, openly available on all your devices.– You and your personal and organizational situation. We regard learning as a constructive, collaborative, self-directed and contextual process and believe that using the emerging ideas of networked learning is the way forward for lifelong learning. One major intention in designing the course this way is to develop a community of practice around the course content as well as research at CTF. More importantly, the course encourages and nurtures rich interaction through a number of open spaces such as our Twitter hashtag #uce151, and our participant blog hub. The open nature of the course and the sharing that it inspires, benefits current and future participants, especially as the goal of the course is to foster and develop long-term, authentic, professional connections. As such, the pedagogical design builds on other open courses such as CK008, EC&I 831, FDOL and ONL. Participants will upon completion of the course be able to:– reflect on central concepts and models linked to psychological aspects of the customer experience and customer experiences of the physical environment in the service sector,– reflect on central generic and contextual theories that explain why and how the phenomena of customer interaction is realized as well as affect strategies,– identify and evaluate sources of information in the area of customer experience, and– analyse, assess and handle complex customer experiences.