The demand for highly skilled and strategically adept CX professionals is on the rise. While various certifications exist, a new credential, the Mini MBA in Customering from the Field Bell Institute, is emerging as a significant contender, promising to accelerate careers by addressing fundamental gaps in customer education.
For years, the customer field has grappled with a lack of comprehensive, university-level education. Aarron Spinley, a Fellow of The Field Bell Institute who teaches the program, comments, “The existing ‘commodity certifications’ fall well short of providing the rigorous, foundational knowledge needed to effectively manage a customer base. Our 2023 study highlighted this gap, revealing that a staggering 90% of customer professionals desire access to education comparable to that available in other business domains”.
The Field Bell Institute’s Mini MBA in Customering has been specifically designed to address long-standing deficiencies in higher education and professional development within the customer field.
Closing the skills and education gap
A feature of the industry is that most of its courses are not provided by accredited educational organisations and are not independently assessed. In most industries this wouldn’t be permitted and according to Spinley, this leads to a reliance on popular CX concepts and jargon, much of it debunked, often based around software categories rather than evidence, professional competencies and management skills.
“For instance, many are taught that feedback is the basis of managing the customer asset, but are never trained on the asset domain itself, or its evidence-based managerial practices. It’s a quite staggering knowledge gap by industrial standards, and it harms careers”.
The Mini MBA in Customering directly tackles this by:
- Accredited & rigorous learning: Unlike many certifications, the Mini MBA is independently accredited, ensuring a standard of academic rigor and quality that is often missing. This accreditation is recognised in over 50 countries, providing a globally transferable credential.
- Foundational theory meets applied practice: The curriculum deliberately combines critical theory inputs from marketing science, economics, the humanities, information and systems theory, scientific management, quality management principles and so on. This deep theoretical grounding, coupled with instruction from ‘practice professors’ with decades of experience, aims to provide a comprehensive and robust understanding, moving beyond superficial tools and tactics.
- Holistic customer base management: The program’s end-to-end approach, covering everything from the ‘macro history of service’ to ‘budgeting and corporate reporting’, provides students with the most comprehensive education in the field. It emphasises understanding the customer base as a “distinct enterprise asset,” a foundational concept often overlooked.
Addressing emerging industry needs
The Institute also identifies a critical gap arising from evolving organisational structures. Spinley says, “There’s a global trend whereby marketing departments are increasingly tasked with managing the customer base, yet these teams, like many CX departments, lack the core training to do that effectively. This often leads to significant and costly errors due to a misunderstanding of the differences between, and the precise intersections of marketing and customer operations.”
By providing instruction on how these disciplines integrate, the program aims to equip professionals to:
- Avoid costly errors: By understanding the fundamental distinctions and specific intersections, graduates can protect the customer base from common errors that damage its health, while optimizing marketing’s performance within the asset.
- Drive profitability: The curriculum’s focus on the general economic patterns that ultimately define every customer base in the world, enable graduates to make measurable contributions to company profit.
- Empower marketing and CX teams: The program provides the foundational knowledge necessary for marketing teams to effectively manage the customer base and for CX professionals to elevate their strategic impact, their confidence, and their standing within the organisation.
In essence, the Field Bell Institute’s Mini MBA in Customering aims to be a ‘circuit breaker’ in customer education. It seeks to elevate the discipline of customer management by offering a globally recognised, university-level qualification that provides the critical theory and applied learning necessary for marketing and CX professionals.