CMI 522 Assignment Example
Providing an outstanding customer experience is a challenge that demands skill, dedication, and a deep understanding of customer needs.
CMI 522 Managing the Customer Experience is designed to help managers understand their roles and responsibilities in managing the customer experience. Learners will explore the key elements of a strong customer service culture and the customer journey. When managed well, these factors can significantly contribute to an organization’s success.
Table of Contents
Assessment Questions
Calderhead Veterinary Referrals is a specialist small animal referral hospital taking cases from around 340 first-opinion veterinary practices across the North of England, employing 190 people including specialist clinicians, residents, registered veterinary nurses and a client care team. Most clients arrive on referral rather than by choice, frequently distressed, and the paying client is the animal’s owner while the referring vet is also a customer. The author is Head of Client Services. Organisational detail is illustrative and anonymised.
Learning Outcome 1: Understand the principles of managing the customer experience
AC 1.1 Analyse the factors which influence the relationship organisations build with customers
Who the customer actually is. Analysing the foundational complication at Calderhead, the hospital serves two customers whose interests usually align and occasionally do not. The owner pays and makes decisions about their animal. The referring practice sends the case, receives the animal back, and decides whether to refer again. Losing an owner costs one case; losing a referring practice costs every case that practice would have sent.
Emotional state at the point of contact. Analysing the factor that distinguishes this from most service settings, owners arrive frightened. Their animal is seriously ill, the referral itself signals that the local vet could not manage it, and costs are substantial and often unexpected. Analysing the consequence, the ordinary language of customer service sits awkwardly here, and what owners describe valuing is clarity and honesty rather than warmth.
Cost and the absence of universal insurance. Analysing a factor with no equivalent in human healthcare, treatment is paid for privately and many animals are uninsured or underinsured. Owners routinely face a decision in which cost and outcome are explicitly traded, and the experience of that conversation shapes the relationship more than any other interaction.
Absence of choice. Analysing this factor, most clients did not select Calderhead; their vet did. The relationship therefore begins without the goodwill a chosen purchase carries, and the hospital inherits whatever the referring practice said about it.
Clinical outcome, and its independence from experience. Analysing an uncomfortable factor, some patients die despite excellent care. Experience and outcome are separable, and an owner whose animal died can still report that they were well treated, though the two are correlated in feedback data in ways that complicate measurement.
Staff capability and emotional labour. The relationship is carried by clinicians and nurses working under real emotional strain, and the research is clear that the quality of day-to-day management determines how much of themselves people bring to the work (Barends, Rousseau and Janssen, 2023). Compassion fatigue in this sector is well documented and degrades the experience directly.