CX CERTIFICATION & WORKSHOPS
“The Horizon CX-PRO training and certification program provides a phenomenal foundation of CX concepts and practices. The program provides a launching pad toward the CCXP. The CX-PRO provided me with exactly the fuel and support I needed to begin my CX Career Journey!”
Chris Zepeda, CX-PRO, CCXP, Sales Director, Force Management

NEW: CX-PRO™ Customer Experience (CX) Foundations and Certification Training
Customer experience is a growing profession and organizations that adopt and prioritize customer-centric practices have been shown to drive three times more revenue growth. The CX-PRO training and certification course recognizes your knowledge and experience with the profession’s fundamental practices and will make you stand out to both your current and future employers and be well positioned to advance your career.
Consider how formalized and structured training in the essentials of customer experience can help you build your CX knowledge base, accelerate your career, and enhance the success of your organization. The CX-PRO Customer Experience (CX) Foundations and Certification Program is now offered in a blended learning approach that combines both self-paced and live instructor-led sessions that will prepare you with the knowledge and skills needed, regardless of whether your role is that of a CX professional or any of today’s business roles that build upon customer-centric practices. These roles include the following:
- Customer Experience Director/Manager
- Contact Center Leader/Manager
- Customer Success Manager
- Sales Leader/Key Account Manager
- Customer Service Manager
- Customer Care Specialist
This course brings those fundamental elements of CX to the forefront to better equip you within your role as a business professional to lead and manage within a customer-centric framework. Through formalized and structured training in the essentials of customer experience, you will develop a more substantial knowledge base around CX principles that will provide you with a broader and more insightful business perspective along with best practices toward achieving a world-class reputation for your organization. Successful completion and passage of a post-course on-line exam will earn the participant their CX-PRO Certification.
NEW: CX-PRO: A Practical Guide for the New Customer Experience Manager book is included in the course and will be mailed to each participant along with their certification.
What the CX-PRO certification can do for you…
HorizonCX developed the CX-PRO™ Customer Experience Certification Training Program to help jump-start or accelerate your success in CX by structuring each of the following core learning modules in an experiential fashion. What you can expect from this certification course is learning fundamental CX concepts, practicing them through hands-on exercises, and being presented with organizational examples where these CX concepts are being successfully applied. Led by the experience and guidance of two seasoned CCXP Certified Customer Experience Professionals, your biggest takeaway from this course will learning how these concepts can best be applied within your organization’s culture. The capstone for this course and the requirement for your earning the CX-PRO™ certificate is passing a 60-question post-training on-line exam and achieving a passing score of 75%. The CX-PRO™ Course follows the D.E.A.R. Model—Defining and designing, Executing, Analyzing and acting, and Refining. The key learning objectives for this course are as follows.
1. Understanding Customer Behaviors
The first step toward providing the right customer experience is understanding the customer. This means creating an accurate, consistent, and shared understanding of who your customers are, what they want, and how they perceive the interactions they’re having with the company today. A solid customer understanding program can help a company identify problems with current customer interactions, maximize the business value of improvements to those interactions, and build new experiences that resonate with customers.
- Goals objectives (business and personal) and measuring success
- CX Mission statements
- Thinking in systems – customer journeys
- Persona exercise
- Establishing a baseline
- Governance
- Definition of a customer
- CX Maturity
- CX Strategies
2. Developing a Customer Experience Strategy
A customer experience strategy defines the type of experience a company wants to provide. This definition guides employees as they choose which activities to perform and how to allocate resources. Organizations that define, socialize, and use a customer experience strategy properly can say no to tempting, but off-strategy ideas and stay on track to create the experience known to be right.
3. Measuring and Tracking Customer Experience
Organizations with good customer experience measurement practices track customer experience quality on an ongoing basis using customer perceptions as the ultimate test of what’s “good.” Such practices are critical to maturity because they allow the company to understand the state of its current customer experience, which levers it should pull to improve experiences, and most importantly, how efforts are progressing over time.
4. Creating Accountability for CX (Governance Structures)
Governance systems are the way in which companies manage customer experience in a proactive and disciplined way. They create accountability by assigning specific experience management tasks to specific people, and include the processes a company will use to monitor experience quality and improve it on a continual basis. Governance processes are critical to customer experience maturity because they help organizations create broad awareness of customer experience programs, keep bad experiences from getting out the door, and hold people accountable for their role in the customer experience ecosystem.
5. Designing Customer Experience Through Co-Creation
Practices in this discipline include following a formal design process, co-creating experience designs with key stakeholder groups, and iterating rapidly to hone in on the best designs quickly. Taking the time to implement these practices helps an organization leverage expertise and ideas from customers, employees, and partners, and helps weed out bad ideas early in the process.
6. Building a Customer Experience Culture
A customer-centric culture is essential to a mature experience. The goal of culture-building activities is to establish customer-centricity as a core value, as a means of embedding practices from the other five disciplines into employee DNA. Reaching that goal will turn customer experience excellence into a habit, and make future change much easier.

September 2019 CX-PRO Training & Certification Workshop
(L to R) Faith Cohen, Dionna Ford, Jim Bass, Mark Borst
Certification is earned by completing the experiential CX-PROTM training course and passing a 72-question exam. The CX-PRO certification demonstrates a fundamental level of knowledge Customer Experience Management and provides a statement of basic CX competency for individuals within their current role as well as to prospective employers. This listing is updated after each class has completed the requirements of the CX-PRO Certification.
View the List of CX-PRO Certified Professionals
Name | Date Earned | Organization | Location |
---|---|---|---|
Peter Swaim | 5/22/18 | Staples | Framingham, MA |
Brett Sharp | 5/30/18 | athenahealth | Roswell, GA |
Kelly Woodruff | 6/4/18 | athenahealth | Watertown, MA |
Hanna Pastor | 6/4/18 | athenahealth | Watertown, MA |
Melinda Turnbull | 6/4/18 | athenahealth | Watertown, MA |
Annie Griffin | 6/4/18 | athenahealth | Watertown, MA |
Justin Sill | 6/8/18 | Centra Health | Lynchburg, VA |
Janice Huang | 7/17/18 | DuPont | Taoyuan, Taiwan |
David Su | 7/17/18 | DuPont | Taoyuan, Taiwan |
Craig Deschner | 7/18/18 | DuPont | Buffalo, NY |
Yao Wu | 7/23/18 | DuPont | Guangdong, China |
Susanne Stuebinger | 7/23/18 | DuPont | Neu-Isenburg, Germany |
Richard O'Brien | 7/24/18 | DuPont | Wilmington, DE |
Lucy Du | 7/30/18 | DuPont | Guangdong, China |
Maggie Gu | 8/4/18 | DuPont | Guangdong, China |
Doris Lin | 8/14/18 | DuPont | Taoyuan, Taiwan |
Lauren Driggers | 11/19/18 | TSYS | Columbus, GA |
Don Foucher | 11/20/18 | Federal Reserve Bank | Boston, MA |
Rachel Brown | 12/5/18 | Cultural Care Au Pair (EF) | Cambridge, MA |
Tammie Sebelius | 12/11/18 | Cultural Care Au Pair (EF) | Cambridge, MA |
Kasey Paul | 12/14/18 | Partners Healthcare | Somerville, MA |
Kevin Sousa | 6/13/19 | Eastern Bank | Boston, MA |
Dionna Ford | 9/15/19 | Genuine Parts Company | Norcross, GA |
Jim Bass | 9/16/19 | ADP | Alpharetta, GA |
Mark Borst | 9/17/19 | DeKalb | Roswell, GA |
Rebekah McKie | 9/25/19 | Hologic | Marlboro, MA |
Kristin Stanton | 10/4/19 | Hologic | Marlboro, MA |
Jamie Tetreault | 10/18/19 | Hologic | Marlboro, MA |
Brandi McHenry | 3/19/2020 | Heritage Parts | FT. Wayne, IN |
Robert Scott | 3/31/2020 | Digital CX | Haverhill, MA |
Russell Onofrio | 4/9/2020 | Cross-Rhodes | Hopkinton, MA |
Diane Tamagno | 5/29/2020 | CX/Customer Success | Hopkinton, MA |
Paul Anderson | 5/31/2020 | YMCA | Bergen, NY |
Elena Marinska-Lopez | 6/3/2020 | e2f | San Jose, CA |
Richard Dorfman | 5/22/2018 | Eastern Bank | Boston, MA |
Kim Ozment | 9/22/2020 | Macquarium | Atlanta, GA |
Hannah Johnson | 8/31/2020 | Macquarium | Atlanta, GA |
Sagar Naidu | 12/16/2020 | QuestionPro | Pune, India |
Cortney Regan | 12/18/2020 | EG America | Westborough, MA |
John Tourles | 1/31/2021 | Santander Bank | Middleboro, MA |
Jon Cox | 1/31/2021 | WellPet | Tewksbury, MA |
Lana Murakami | 2/8/2021 | American Savings Bank | Honolulu, HI |
Clint Wheelock | 4/22/2021 | Dash Network | Denver, CO |
Daniel Lunger | 4/23/2021 | DuPont E&I | Nottingham, PA |
Jonathan Keller | 4/23/2021 | Dash Network | Golden, CO |
Scott Foll | 4/25/2021 | DuPont E&I | Circleville, OH |
Timmy Choi | 5/4/2021 | DuPont E&I | Hong Kong |
John Speth | 5/10/2021 | QuestionPro | Mesa, AZ |
Jennifer Perry | 5/24/2021 | National Quality Review | Princeton, MA |
Marianne Gonzalez | 5/28/2021 | National Quality Review | Boston, MA |
Polly LeBarron | 6/2/2021 | National Quality Review | Boston, MA |
Caitlin Reeves | 6/11/2021 | National Quality Review | Boston, MA |
Richard Hoekstra | 6/16/2021 | National Quality Review | Angier, NC |
Rory O'Donnell | 6/17/2021 | National Quality Review | Milton, MA |
Nathan Abbott | 6/29/2021 | National Quality Review | Boston, MA |
Katie Welch | 7/6/2021 | National Quality Review | Wilbraham, MA |
Patty Shea | 7/16/2021 | National Quality Review | Boston, MA |
Jeffrey Hilger | 7/17/2021 | PBCX Consulting | Atlanta, GA |
Keith Kirkpatrick | 7/17/2021 | Dash Research | Lynbrook, NY |
Sherril Hanson | 7/17/2021 | Dash Research | Boulder, CO |
Ruth Georgevits | 7/18/2021 | National Quality Review | Boston, MA |
Juliette Krovi | 7/19/2021 | Pfizer | Shrewsbury, mA |
Michael Bowers | 7/22/2021 | PriorityCX | Atlanta, GA |
Ron Curtis | 7/27/2021 | National Quality Review | Boston, MA |
Michael Drees | 7/28/2021 | National Quality Review | Boston, MA |
Paulina Rodriguez Chiang Sam | 10/4/2021 | QuestionPro | Merida, Yucatan |
Ojas Rao | 10/4/2021 | QuestionPro | Bangalore, India |
Natalie Shiinoki | 10/8/2021 | Hawaii Convention Center | Honolulu, HI |
Daniel Neumann | 10/22/2021 | Perry Homes | Houston, TX |
Deron Austin | 10/23/2021 | Mueller Water Products | Ooltewah, TN |
Raul Sanchez | 10/29/2021 | QuestionPro | Huitzilac, Morelos, Mexico |
Emiliano Orduña | 11/4/2021 | QuestionPro | Dallas, TX |
J Bertrand | 11/10/2021 | Perry Homes | Houston, TX |
Julie Mahaffey | 11/10/2021 | Perry Homes | Houston, TX |
Austin LeBlanc | 11/10/2021 | Perry Homes | Houston, TX |
Priscilla Barrios | 11/11/2021 | Perry Homes | Houston, TX |
Cari Infante | 11/12/2021 | Perry Homes | Houston, TX |
Patty Soltis | 11/28/2021 | Kinetic Edge Consultants | Odessa, FL |
Natalie Collet | 5/2/2022 | French Cultural Center | Boston, MA |
Cristian Bennett | 5/9/2022 | National Quality Review | Boston, MA |
Rebecca Meagher | 5/26/2022 | National Quality Review | Boston, MA |
Silvi Kansal | 5/31/2022 | QuestionPro | Chandigarh, India |
Shanna Hayes | 5/31/2022 | Southern New Hampshire University | Dover, NH |
Norman Lee | 6/26/2022 | Comcast | Aurora, CO |
Igor Kalenny | 6/27/2022 | Maximus | Avon, IN |
Joanne Nelson | 10/26/2022 | Perry Homes | Houston, TX |
Christopher Zepeda | 11/13/2022 | Force Management | Whittier, CA |
Ishara Rice | 12/12/2022 | Inteleos | Columbia, MD |
Shubha MIshra | 12/17/2022 | AppFolio | San Diego, CA |
Catherine Zamarin-Gedney | 1/20/2023 | Inteleos | Rockville, MD |
“This course gave me a solid introduction to the fundamentals of CX and went over the ‘whole game’ by not only teaching different pieces of CX from a ‘birds-eye’ view but also showing how they fit together. For a person like me, coming from both software development and a UX background, it was very valuable to understand the main CX “pillars” which gave me a firm essential theoretical foundation to see the breadth of the subject. Furthermore, learning from the material allowed me to start seeing the relationship between UX and CX which is very important to understand for professionals in both of those fields. I was new to CX prior to taking this course; however, I was glad I took it because this very event led me to an important decision and a subsequent personal realization to make the next logical step in my career path: to pursue transitioning from UX to CX.”
“The CX-PRO Certification Course provided me with an exceptional set of tools and a knowledge base that helped prepare me for my new CX position at Centra Health. The topics were all relevant to my work, enabled me to hit the ground running, and helped me make meaningful contributions to our CX program right away. I highly recommend this course to anyone looking to quickly build experience and expertise in CX design, program design and execution.”
“I was able to take away several golden nuggets from the class and the training really helped crystalize some of my thinking around CX.”
“Karl and his dedicated Team at HorizonCX delivered two amazing customized workshops for our organization in both CX-PRO fundamentals and Journey Mapping. As an HR Director, I have organized many training courses and worked with many training providers, but I would consider Karl a consummate training professional. His hands on approach, engaging manner and deep, passionate knowledge of CX and Journey Mapping continue to impress. He is now my Gold Standard for training professionals and will be my “go-to” person for any further training or expertise in this area. Karl and his Team received the highest rating of any of the many training programs we sponsored over the last 5 years. The workshops delivered through HorizonCX exceeded all our expectations!”
“I had the pleasure of attending the CX-PRO course by HorizonCX in March 2020. I found the evening sessions to be very informative and educational. The course materials were very good, the mentoring approach taken by the instructional team fostered interactions and working with other participants via an online setting was extremely beneficial. They did a great job of communicating and making it a more intimate arrangement, where other online courses fail because of the isolation. As an individual with over 20 years of CX experience, I would highly recommend this course to anyone regardless of Experience Level."
“The CX-PRO course and certification helped me understand CX with clarity. I was able to improve communication with clients both existing and new which impacted the overall results. Thank you for your support and expertise.”
“The HorizonCX CX-PRO course provided me and our entire customer experience improvement team with the background needed to understand our customers’ journey and facilitated discussions and ideas on how to best measure our customers’ experiences in a standard way. Once CX is measured, customer experience deficiencies can be prioritized and improvement projects launched. I would recommend this course for not only new CX professionals, but anyone who interacts directly with a customer in any significant way.”
“As a Customer Success Manager, the CX-PRO certification course helped me upskill by providing a fundamental understanding of CX and how to more effectively create a customer-first culture which drives client success and fuels company growth. The course also helped me gain credibility within the CS and CX communities, and ultimately helped me land a new job empowering companies to grow through customer obsession.”
“The CX-PRO certification course covered a broad range of CX topics and gave a great overview of the Customer Experience field. It was extremely helpful, not only for gaining a broad competency and knowledge of Customer Experience, but also to check our progress against CX standards and to generate ideas of where to take our CX Program from here. Finally, I appreciated the interactive aspect of the class, as we got to hear what other companies are doing with their Customer Experience programs, where they’re struggling, and work together to generate new ideas. I recommend this class to anyone with 1-2 years of experience in a CX role who is looking to broaden their knowledge of Customer Experience, or who needs a fresh perspective on their CX efforts.”
Next Improvement in Customer Experience (NICE) Workshops
To make your investment in VoC and Customer Experience strategies pay off, it takes an aligned organization with firm grasp on customer centricity to help create the right perceptions in the minds and hearts of the customers you serve. Customers don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care and that is the essence of the MCEC Workshops—aligning your organization with your customer experience strategies and objectives.
What HorizonCX can do for you…
HorizonCX offers customized workshops geared around your VoC data that helps to bring this alignment into place across your enterprise. It can be based on customer feedback from a broad spectrum of customers across the enterprise or on customers served within a region, geography or segment of your business. Below is an example 6-hour workshop agenda that has been applied with a great deal of success at other organizations—but understand that this can be specifically customized to meet your exact requirements.
- Why measuring customer feedback is important
- Why acting on customer feedback is even more important
- Which of your customers get surveyed
- What questions are asked of your customers?
- The key customer loyalty metric
- How your customer metrics have been trending over time
- How you handle short-term customer service issues
- How you continue to improve service delivery over the long term
- How do you communicate survey results back to your customers?
- What’s driving your customer satisfaction and loyalty the most?
- What are customers saying (in their own words) about service delivery
- How can you improve customer satisfaction and loyalty over the next 12 months?
- Generating and implementing a plan of action within the next 30 days
- Tracking action plan progress and evaluating success on a quarterly schedule
CX Awareness Workshops
Whether you are just beginning on the Customer Experience Journey or are fully engaged with Customer Experience, making your investment in VoC and CX strategies pay off requires an aligned organization to consistently create the right perceptions in the minds and hearts of the customers you serve. Customers don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care and that is the essence and aim of a CXA Workshop—aligning your organization with customer demands and your intended customer experience strategies and objectives.
What HorizonCX can do for you…
HorizonCX offers both standardized and customized workshops designed around creating empathy and a rudimentary awareness of customers within the context of your CX strategies and objectives regardless of where you are in the CX journey. Beginning with fundamental concepts such as “the definition of a customer” this 2.5-hour workshop aims to orient and prepare your targeted employees groups to exhibit the intended and expected attitudes and behaviors toward those hard-earned and key customers that depend on you just as much as you depend on them.
Below is an example 2.5-hour workshop agenda that has been applied with a great deal of success at other organizations—but understand that this can and probably should be specifically customized to meet your exact requirements. Based on the target employee segment (sales, service, application support, product development, call-center, etc.) this curriculum would typically be developed around the following concepts.
- Customers defined
- The difference between an aligned and a misaligned customer
- Why retaining customers is essential to business sustainability
- Why CX needs to be intentional vs. by chance
- Why customers are more demanding and tend to get what they want, when they want it
- Communication—the key pillar of any Customer-Centric strategy
- Six fundamental principles that drive customer-centric behavior and deliver superior performance on a sustained basis.
- Clear beliefs and complete understanding of what’s important to the organization
- Frequent internal communications to make sure that employees understand priorities
- Creating excitement around customer success through CX metrics, public acknowledgments, and reward and recognition systems
- Compelling stories that shape culture and demonstrate customer-centricity
- Employee engagement through training and enabling tools such as Incentives and perks
- Empowering employees to ensure that customers’ issues can be solved on the spot
Customer Journey Mapping (CJM)
Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) is a key tool for managing customer experience programs. They are a visualization, typically an infographic representation, of the end-to-end customer experience. This visualization allows your business to make value-driven decisions based on how the customer perceives their experiences with your organization. Performed by an independent 3rd party, this provides an unbiased understanding of the customer’s journey.
Customer journey maps are built from the customer’s point of view. Ideally, they represent an unbiased understanding of the customer’s experience along the many touchpoints they have with your organization—whether this might be a selected and specific part of a journey or the entire journey. This helps deepen your understanding of your customers’ behaviors, thoughts, and feelings across those touchpoints in their journey and which of those touchpoints are most critical to customer retention and loyalty.
Most importantly, customer journey maps should be actionable. Building customer journey maps with these key elements in mind will help to ensure that you have identified the key components of customer experience for your business and helps to establish an experience strategy for your organization.
What HorizonCX can do for you…
In many respects, customer journey mapping should be one of the earlier tasks in any CX program but is often deferred to a later time within the CX maturity continuum. At HorizonCX, we recommend journey mapping earlier in your CX program as this will properly and systematically identify those more critical touchpoints that you will then be able to prioritize, act upon, and measure the success of as an ongoing part of your CX program. Our process consists of the following major steps.
- An initial facilitated session consisting of up to 12 key individuals from within your organization with the objective of understanding and delineating the internal perspective of one customer journey segment to serve as a baseline.
- A facilitated session with up to 12 customers, representing the targeted client segment to capture and validate those customers’ perceptions of their experiences relative to their goals, needs and expectations.
- Alternative to the above client session, this could be accomplished through 12 equivalent and independent customer interviews done either in-person or by phone depending on client location.
- Determine the current and future desired state from the customers perspective to identify gaps where needs either are or are not being met and assess any emotional constraints around each touchpoint.
- Create a visual representation (map) of the customer journey that will optimize all stakeholders’ understanding, engagement, and decision-making based on story of the customer’s journey.
- After the map is completed, Horizon CX will guide you in the application and use of the map to manage change.