The Customer Service Course That Changed My Learning Platform
The Best Decisions Often Begin as Irritations
The biggest business decisions don’t always come from years of strategic planning. Sometimes they come from a single experience that makes you realize you may have outgrown the way you’ve been doing things.
A few weeks ago, I was putting the finishing touches on a new course about customer service. The timing couldn’t have been more ironic.
During the review process, I ran into an unexpected challenge with the platform. It wasn’t the experience I had anticipated while publishing a course about creating better customer experiences. After a few conversations and a fair amount of back and forth, I realized the review itself wasn’t really the problem.
I decided it was time to build the learning experience I actually wanted my students to have. Stop participating in somebody else’s platform, and create my own.
Frustration Is Just Information
I’ve been teaching online (and offline) for many years, and I’m grateful for what marketplace platforms have made possible. They lower the barrier to entry for instructors, introduce students to new topics, and make online education accessible to people around the world.
But every platform you participate in as a content creator is designed around its own priorities, not necessarily yours. No matter how successful you are, a platform can change overnight and change that success in an instant. They have policies, processes, review systems, and guidelines because they need to support thousands of instructors and millions of students.
What became clear was that, once again, the experience I want to create for my students no longer fits comfortably inside someone else’s framework. I’ve been there before. Sometimes you don’t discover you’ve outgrown a system until you bump into one of its rough edges.
Shaping the Learning Experience
For a long time, I treated course delivery as something that happened after I’d finished creating the content. I would record the lessons, upload the videos, create exercises, write descriptions, and click “publish”. The platform handled the rest for me.
It seemed easy, but over time, I started thinking differently about my setup. The course content itself is only one part of learning. An important part, yes, but students often want to be part of the course community: get updates as topics evolve, recommended next steps, and a clearer path from one course to another. They benefit from seeing how different subjects connect instead of collecting isolated certificates like digital souvenirs.
That student experience is much harder to create when everything is primarily controlled by a marketplace. I always wanted to build an environment where learning could continue long after someone clicked “Join”.
Becoming Platform Agnostic Again
One of the things I value most is freedom: having the ability to make a different choice, if you wish. In travel and business that often translates to flexibility. Platforms, algorithms and marketplaces can be useful, but they also take away some level of control in exchange of the apparent convenience they provide.
Rather than building everything around a single marketplace, I’m moving back toward being platform agnostic. I’m giving up some of the comfort in exchange for getting a bit of control back over my student experience.
For me, that doesn’t mean abandoning marketplaces altogether. Many of my introductory courses will remain there because they’re still an excellent place for people to discover my work. What changes is where the deeper learning happens.
Service is a mindset, not a department
Over the past several months, I’ve been rethinking how I teach and bringing back the delivery under my own control. As a result, you’ll find more comprehensive courses, downloadable resources, updated content, structured learning paths, and an experience designed to help build practical skills rather than simply finish another course and collect a certificate (but yes, we will have certificates too!).
That’s the part I’m genuinely excited about (not the certificates, but the learning experience on the new platform). It gives me the freedom to keep improving the experience long after someone has signed up for a course.
Ironically, my new customer service course ended up reminding me that customer experience doesn’t begin when someone buys something. It begins when you’re designing the product for people you’re trying to help. As I’ve said before: customer service is a mindset, not a department.
Get Into Action
My new customer service course will be the first major course released through this new learning platform, and I’m excited to finally share it.
If you’re interested in building practical customer service skills that go beyond scripts and checklists, you can pre-register now at a special early registration rate before the full course launches. I’m aiming to release it over the next few weeks, with September 1 as the latest launch date.
Whether or not customer service is your profession, I think it’s one of the most underrated business skills you can develop. It’s about communication, trust, problem-solving, and creating experiences that people actually remember. Fittingly, building this course also reminded me that the same principles apply to the platforms we choose and the businesses we build.
