How Micro-Courses Can Transform Your Customer Experience

Full video transcript

But how can we stop all of the holes that are in our funnel that might cause them to fall out of the funnel and eventually either never purchase with us or only purchase once? The customer journey — I think when we hear a lot about customer journey as it pertains to marketing and sales, we’re not always approaching it in the right way. If you’re wondering where this online course actually fits, what your actual customer journey is, this is where we can leverage AI. I’m going to demonstrate with you my custom ChatGPT, which is a customer journey enhancer — I will share this with you once I’m done. But also know that you can just use tools like Claude or ChatGPT to brainstorm around your customer journey. Once we know our customer journey and the different touch points, then it’s easy to really identify what we should be creating courses around and where they’re going to fit in our customer journey.

All right, y’all, we are back in action, ready to rock and roll with Kelly Tenny up next to the stage. Kelly, hello, how are you doing? Good, I’m excited to share, good to see everybody here as well. Most of you have seen Kelly throughout the summit — she works with us here at Gen AI University as our director of wisdom, an expert on creating micro-courses, professional educator, and really a powerful resource for anyone learning how to use AI to grow their business. Kelly, I’m excited for your session today. I’m going to give you the spotlight — take it from here.

All right, amazing, thank you. Hello everybody, we are going to talk all about course creation, and I’m going to share a little bit about my own special process that I use with course creation, which is the concept around micro-courses. I want to share with you how we can leverage AI to really not only hone in on what types of content we might want to be creating for online courses and micro-courses, but also how we can accelerate the process of online course creation using some AI tools. I’ll be sharing some of my favorite AI tools that I use with my clients that are very simple — if you’ve been on a lot of these sessions, it’s all about easy integration and implementation, and that’s what I want to share with you today.

But before we start, I want to talk a little bit about the customer journey and something I think is important to understand: when we’re creating online courses, where does an online course fit into your customer journey? I’d love to see in the chat box — type in how many of you have an online course. If you have one, put “yes.” If you’ve been thinking about an online course but aren’t sure where you’d put it, put “thinking.” An online course today is something everybody feels like they need to have, and they can be really powerful, but we have to be really strategic about where we put them. My background is actually in education — I have a master’s in curriculum and instruction — so I always like to think about it from a curriculum standpoint: it’s not just what is this online course, but how does it fit into the entire thing. A lot of clients come to me with several courses that don’t all lead to the same thing, or don’t fit into the overall customer journey they want their clients to follow, and sometimes the courses even compete against one another.

So before we dive in, I want to share a little about the customer journey. The customer journey is the complete experience a customer goes through when interacting with your brand or service — everything from the first touchpoint, the first blog post they ever read, the first social media post they see, all the way to post-purchase interactions. When we talk about sales funnels and ask where an online course fits inside our sales funnel, think about that traditional cone-shaped funnel that narrows down to an opening at the bottom. But how many of you actually don’t want your clients to fall out of your funnel at the end once they purchase? I want us to shift our thinking from a funnel — where clients fall out after purchasing — to stopping the holes that cause them to fall out and never purchase again, or only purchase once.

Online courses and micro-courses can be really powerful for filling those gaps. Many of you, thinking about your own funnel and all the stepping stones from first introduction to purchase, might realize there’s a gap somewhere — maybe you’re great at creating awareness but there’s a hole between that and getting someone to actually convert. I want us to shift this concept from a sales funnel to a “flywheel” — where clients are always in your ecosystem, from the awareness phase through to becoming your biggest advocates, rather than falling out once the engagement ends.

Here’s a secret: I rarely promote what I do. I talk a lot about micro-courses, AI-powered micro-courses, and education, but I don’t often talk about the fact that I do one-on-one work and done-for-you micro-courses. People ask why I don’t promote that, and the answer is I don’t have to — my client roster is 90% referrals. I woke up this morning to two emails from people introducing me to someone because they loved my course and want my help. That’s product loyalty and product advocacy. Wouldn’t it be amazing not to worry about filling your funnel because past clients are sending you so many leads? That’s the shift from funnel to flywheel — my clients don’t say goodbye once we’ve created their course, because I have enough for that second part of the customer journey that keeps them in my ecosystem. Even if they never purchase from me again, I stay top of mind and they refer me.

So when you have a course, is it just the thing they purchase — and if so, what happens afterward, where do they go next? In traditional online course creation, it’s very much “create your course, put a price tag on it, sell it.” But in this new way of thinking, how do we bring them back so that once they’re done, they don’t go looking for someone else’s course — they come back to invest in a higher level of service or purchase another course from us?

Now, if you’re wondering what your actual customer journey is, this is where we leverage AI. And Darby, on the first day you ran his Market Sauce — I don’t know how many of you have the Market Sauce, but documents like that can be really valuable, because when we have a good enough, clear enough picture of who we serve, AI can really help us leverage the concept of a customer journey. I’m going to demonstrate with my custom GPT, a customer journey enhancer, which I’ll share once I’m done so you can try it yourself. Tools like Claude or ChatGPT can help you brainstorm around your customer journey. Once you know your customer journey and the different touchpoints, it’s easy to identify what you should be creating — because that’s another question I get a lot: is it a free course, a $47 course, a $5,000 course? How do I price it, where do I put it, who do I offer it to? That’s why you need to start with the customer journey piece.

Inside this custom GPT, I share who I am — an online course creator who specializes in micro-courses to help create an up-leveled customer journey. My company, Teacher Brilliance, is about recognizing that while an online course is a great way to generate passive revenue, there should be more meaning behind why you’re creating a course. I focus on how courses can help clients move through the customer journey faster. I also share who my ideal client is — a coach, consultant, or industry expert who wants to reach more people through education for more impact, influence, and income. This is where, if you have a Market Sauce, you’d plug in your entire avatar — the more you give AI, the better it understands who you’re trying to serve. Then I ask: where are some places I can educate my ideal client to elevate the customer journey so they want to create their own micro-courses, with the intention that they’ll come work with me.

The GPT already knows the five stages we discussed — awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy — and suggests ideas for each: LinkedIn groups and industry-specific communities for awareness; guest appearances on podcasts and webinars, professional networking, and speaking at conferences for awareness and consideration; introductory courses on online course marketplaces as a demo of expertise for consideration; and educational email content for purchase and retention. This is where micro-courses — very short, specific, niche courses — can move someone from “maybe this is for me” to actually purchasing or working with you directly, sometimes even without a price tag, simply to build trust that leads to a higher-ticket engagement.

Once I like an idea — say, “the power of micro-courses: building impact in small steps” — I take it to my second custom GPT, the “micro-course Maven,” which outlines the course. You can do the same in Claude or ChatGPT by simply asking it to help create a micro-course outline from your idea. In seconds, you get a full outline with multiple modules, objectives, and learning points, plus a suggested call to action inviting participants to a follow-up workshop or consultation.

At this point I want to talk about ethics and authenticity. At Gen AI University, we’re all about using AI ethically. Once you have an outline, I encourage you to stay away from asking AI to fully script your course and reading it verbatim — because then it’s not your expertise being recorded, it’s AI’s. What sets you apart from everyone else in your industry is your unique wisdom and experience. My background as a 15-year classroom educator with a master’s in curriculum and instruction is what makes me different from anyone else talking about online courses — if I let ChatGPT fully script this, I’d be losing my own story and teaching AI’s wisdom instead of mine. So we want to get AI to a detailed outline, then take over: add your own stories, examples, and unique systems, and ask AI to expand on sections or weave in your experience. If you have blogs or files documenting your own system, you can upload those to reference as it builds your outline.

Once I have a more detailed outline with fuller learning points, I feel confident moving to the recording tool and speaking from those talking points rather than reading a script — bringing in my own client examples along the way to stay authentic.

On length: microlearning research says the brain learns most efficiently in 10-15 minute chunks, so video modules should stay under 15 minutes. How many modules you need depends on where the course sits in the customer journey and its price — earlier-journey, awareness-stage micro-courses should be shorter and shouldn’t give away your entire system, while a course meant to sell your full signature system can have more modules. The rule of thumb: the “what” you do is free, low-price content; the “how” to do it is what people should pay you for. On distribution, it depends on purpose — a lead magnet might just go out by email, a paid micro-course might be sold via an email campaign, a workshop, or a YouTube video.

Now that I have my outline, it’s time to record. AI has really accelerated video editing — recording isn’t the hard part, editing is, and I spend far more time editing than recording. I use Descript, which has both free and paid tiers (the main difference being storage length). Descript now has a built-in record button, and it also connects with Zoom for quick import. I put my outline in my notes app or a Word document, press record, and speak from the bullet points one module at a time — never a full AI-generated script — then press stop.

Descript automatically transcribes what I said. That transcript can then be given to Claude or ChatGPT — uploaded as a document — to help create a course based on your own unique knowledge, since it captures your actual spoken expertise. From there, Descript’s AI tool, Underlord, can apply studio sound to clean up audio, detect and let you remove filler words, delete an awkward opening, and even adjust eye contact (currently in beta) or re-center you in frame. It can also generate clips and highlight reels from a longer video — picking layouts and pulling standout moments — which is useful for turning a full micro-course recording into social promotion content.

In a micro-course, slides usually aren’t necessary, but for a longer, more robust course (in the $97-$197+ range), Gamma is the tool used to turn an outline into slides before recording with slides.

On hosting: once your course is recorded and edited, you can put it on a course platform (Teachable, Thinkific, Customer Hub, or Circle, which is used inside the Gen Community for course releases). If you don’t have a platform yet, it doesn’t have to be complicated — you can deliver each module through an email sequence, or put it on YouTube as a private channel accessible only to buyers. This is also a low-cost way to test market interest in a course concept before investing in a dedicated platform.

On average duration: every video module should run 10-15 minutes, with a full micro-course completable in 60-90 minutes or less — some run as short as 40 minutes. Micro-courses can also tie into book funnels: since a book already contains the hard work of content creation, a chapter can be turned into a micro-course, an approach used in a collaboration with a publishing company that treats courses as a key part of an author’s book funnel.