Accountable for the Service Other People Deliver
You are here by one of two routes: a valid CSEP certificate, or five years of leadership experience in a customer service, customer experience, service quality or service delivery role, confirmed in writing by your employer. Either route also requires a bachelor's degree or a recognised equivalent. The course assumes you can run a service operation and that you have improved one. It does not teach the counter again, and it does not teach the improvement cycle again except where a manager has to run it through other people.
- Modules
- 21
- Study time
- about 19 hours
- Delivery
- Online, self-paced
- Leads to
- CSEM
What you will be able to do
- State where a service function stands today in terms an executive committee can act on, and build a case for change it can fund.
- Set a service standard for an area, communicate it, and resource it well enough that it can actually be met.
- Recognise a target that can only be met by breaching clauses 4.1 to 4.5, and refuse to set it.
- Design a differentiated or VIP service track without creating a second, lower standard for everybody else.
- Plan and run service for a mass event, a conference or a state occasion, including the control rhythm on the day and the after-action review that follows it.
- Map the stakeholders who control what you need, and lead people who do not report to you.
- Plan service capacity against a demand pattern you have actually measured, rather than against an average.
- Write service standards, policies and governance that leave the discretion frontline judgement requires.
- Choose a small set of service measures that cannot all be gamed at once, and link them to a business outcome.
- Report service performance to an executive or a board honestly, including what got worse.
- Lead a service organisation through a failure at scale, and communicate during it without lying or disappearing.
- Design an escalation system, and manage a complaint that has become a reputational or regulatory matter.
- Build the capability of a service team through coaching, and hold performance conversations that treat people ethically.
- Run a service transformation that survives after you stop looking at it, and evidence it end to end.
Course syllabus
Every module, in order. The lesson material, the questions and the assessed milestones open once you are enrolled.
Module 1: Strategic Service Excellence Leadership
What changes between professional level and manager level, why clause 4.7 is the whole of that change, what a service strategy actually consists of, and how to recognise a target that can only be met by breaking the standard.
about 52 minutes
Module 2: Building and Leading a Customer-Centric Culture
Culture as what is rewarded, tolerated and resourced rather than what is declared; how to read the culture you actually have from four observable signals; and how to move one behaviour instead of announcing a set of values.
about 50 minutes
Module 3: Executive-Level Customer Experience Management
Stating where your service function actually stands in terms an executive can act on, owning an experience that crosses functions you do not manage, and building a case for change that gets funded rather than admired.
about 55 minutes
Module 4: VVIP and VIP Service Excellence
How differentiated service can exist without creating a second and lower standard for everybody else, how to design a VVIP track that actually works under time pressure, and what confidentiality means when the customer's movements are the sensitive information.
about 52 minutes
Module 5: Protocol, Etiquette and Executive Guest Management
Protocol as a system for removing public decisions rather than a table of rules, how to brief the people who will actually meet the guest, and an arrival sequence worked through minute by minute.
about 50 minutes
Module 6: High-Profile Customer and Stakeholder Engagement
What actually changes when an account is high-profile and what must not, how to build an escalation route that works before it is needed, and how to refuse a powerful customer without damaging the relationship or breaching the standard.
about 50 minutes
Module 7: Mass Events Service Planning and Management
Sizing service for a crowd using arrival rate, service time and the bottleneck; what a service plan for a mass event must contain; and how to staff and brief a workforce that is largely temporary.
about 55 minutes
Module 8: Large-Scale Event Coordination and Service Operations
The control rhythm that keeps a large event coordinated on the day, why shift handovers are where service quietly dies, and how to run an after-action review that produces evidence rather than opinions.
about 52 minutes
Module 9: Service Delivery for Conferences, Summits and Major Events
The delegate journey across several days, why accreditation and the first ninety minutes decide how the whole event is remembered, and how to measure service at an event that only happens once.
about 55 minutes
Module 10: Executive Hospitality and Premium Guest Experience
What a premium promise actually obliges you to, personalisation without holding information a guest never agreed to give, and the recovery a premium guest expects when something has gone wrong.
about 50 minutes
Module 11: Stakeholder Coordination and Cross-Functional Leadership
Mapping stakeholders by what they control rather than by rank, leading people who do not report to you, and turning a cross-functional agreement into something that survives the meeting it was made in.
about 55 minutes
Module 12: Service Operations Planning and Resource Management
Measuring your own demand pattern instead of planning against an average, rostering to that pattern, and why a service operation planned to run at full utilisation will always fail.
about 55 minutes
Module 13: Service Standards, Policies and Governance
Writing a service standard people can actually meet and check themselves against, the discretion a policy must leave for frontline judgement, and the minimum governance that keeps a standard alive.
about 52 minutes
Module 14: Service Performance Management and Service Excellence KPIs
Choosing a small set of measures whose members check each other, setting targets and thresholds without doing harm, and establishing a manager-level baseline that connects service to a business outcome.
about 58 minutes
Module 15: Customer Experience Analytics and Executive Reporting
Turning unstructured feedback into ranked causes, reading CSAT, NPS, CES and first contact resolution without over-claiming, and writing the one page an executive can decide from.
about 63 minutes
Module 16: Crisis Management and Service Continuity
What a service manager does in the first hour of a failure at scale, how to communicate during one without lying or disappearing, and how to build continuity arrangements that survive contact with a real day.
about 52 minutes
Module 17: Managing Complaints, Escalations and Reputation Risks
Designing a complaint system so that most complaints never need to escalate, handling a complaint that has become public, and dealing with regulators and the record you will eventually be judged on.
about 52 minutes
Module 18: Coaching, Developing and Leading High-Performance Service Teams
Finding out what your team genuinely cannot do and why, coaching through observation and evidence rather than opinion, and running performance conversations in a way you could defend under the leadership attestation.
about 69 minutes
Module 19: Service Innovation, Transformation and Continuous Improvement
Knowing whether you are running an improvement, a redesign or a transformation, piloting in a way that proves something, and making a change survive after you stop looking at it.
about 67 minutes
Module 20: Executive Service Excellence Strategy and Implementation
Putting a service strategy on one page, deciding what to do first when everything is failing, and building the business case that an executive committee actually approves.
about 55 minutes
Module 21: Preparing Your Portfolio and the Panel Defence
What the service transformation portfolio must contain and how it is marked, how to assemble it from the four milestones without writing it twice, and how two independent assessors will question you about it.
about 55 minutes
The certification this leads to
The Certified Service Excellence Manager is the senior credential in the pathway. It certifies that the holder can set service strategy, lead teams and drive service transformation across a function or organisation, verified through portfolio and a panel assessment.
Who it is for. Heads of service, customer experience managers and executives accountable for service performance.
Certified Service Excellence Manager (CSEM)
Entry requirements, assessment, fee and validity are set out in full on the certification page.