Week 5 Ascend Your Start-Up

 As a start-up, it is imperative to listen to your customers and stay close to those who invest in you and offer advice. Being able to listen and truly understand your customers will set you apart from competitors. In Ascend Your Start-Up, there are 5 competencies to build a customer-centered organization: treat customers as assets, align intentionally around customer experience, build an active customer listening path, deliver consistent and reliable customer experience, and create a culture of accountability around customer experience. By working with existing customers, there is no need to onboard, but meeting quarterly to review and reconnect can help align priorities and mapping out a process. Onboarding a new customer can cost five times more than working with an existing customer. 


The journey is typically six stages: evaluate, invest, deploy, adopt, expand, and advocate. The customers also expect the following functions from you as the start-up: marketing, sales, pre-sales, services/partners, customer success, education, support, product, engineering, and operations. There are multiple pieces of the puzzle to fit into the journey with your customers. Communication is key. If there is an instance where things fall through the cracks -- have a protocol for follow up, share notes, learn from each other, and deliver great customer experience. 


With all the puzzle pieces previously mentioned, there must be a team in place to take action: board members, the CEO, executive team, and frontline workers. It takes everyone to achieve successful customer service. Customers will realize you are there to support them, however sometimes it is crucial to step back to move forward. Recharge, reconnect, learn from failures, and pinpoint the reasons for success. Practice, acclimate, listen, learn, and reflect on current processes and quality. Figure out what your customers want from you and work together. Find the solutions customers are looking for. 


At a local restaurant, there was a survey for customer feedback. I filled it out, and gave them my contact information for future specials, happy hour deals, etc. A few weeks later I had a card in the mail. Inside was a handwritten thank you note from the waiter thanking me for coming to their restaurant. It was thoughtful and unexpected. I definitely have returned to the restaurant and appreciate the gesture. In healthcare, the patients are the ones who should benefit from quality care. There are quantitative measures such as reports from the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQI) that determine quality of care, and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has a comparison section. Anybody can compare ratings based on quality measures of various healthcare settings. In the hospital, patients are asked to fill out a patient satisfaction survey prior to discharge. This data is collected, and hospitals can use it to create quality improvement projects that directly benefit patients. Listening to the customer is essential, however it may have different priorities depending on the business. 

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