Raving Fans! by Ken Blanchard
by Parker · 51 things on NewTwos
- A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service
- Foreword
- Success comes to those who are obsessed with looking after customers
- Goods aren’t sold; products and services are bought
- Customer service covers all the customer’s needs and expectations
- Bottom line: People expect bad goods and rude service. Give ‘em junk and they’re not surprised. Just what they expected. As long as the abuse isn’t any worse than they expected, they’ll be back for more
- If you really want to ‘own’ a customer, if you want a booming business, you have to go beyond satisfied customers and create Raving Fans
- Charlie is the fairy godparent
- The first secret is Decide what you want
- When you decide what you want you must - create a vision of perfection centered on the customer
- That vision is always in my mind. I know exactly what perfection looks like so I know what my goal is.
- Once you have a real vision, what you have to do is bring down the picture from your mind and impose it over your organization and see where the bumps and warts are. That’s what you work on
- Systems are beautiful
- All play and no work makes Charlie a failed Fairy Godmother
- The second secret is Discover What the Customer Wants
- All you need to do is discover the customers’ vision of what they really want and then alter your vision if need be
- Often what people really want doesn’t show up directly in what they say. They may even say one thing and mean quite another
- Customer service is as much a part of your product as any screw or bolt.
- Recognize that ‘Fine’ or silence is a message in itself and you start asking more questions. Sincere questions
- If you don’t look after your people, they won’t look after your customers. And when they do, if you say thank you and reward them, they’ll do it again and again
- Some of these complainers were customers who should be told politely that what they wanted wasn’t part of his company’s customer service package. Rather than give them extra time and attention - further diverting his company from its true vision - he should suggest they look elsewhere
- "If you get up in the morning expecting to have a bad day, you'll rarely disappoint yourself." - Wayne Dyer
- "Don't be a duck. Be an eagle. Ducks quack and complain. Eagles soar above the crowd." - Wayne Dyer
- The third secret is Deliver Plus One
- Deliver the Vision Plus One Percent
- Consistency is key to delivering Raving Fan Service. When you’re creating Raving Fans it’s a fragile relationship. They’ve been burned before and they don’t trust easily. You’re trying to pull them in and they’re usually trying to resist. Consistency will overcome resistance
- Don’t offer too much service, at least at the start
- To start with, limit the number of areas where you want to make a difference. First, it allows you to be consistent. Second, you’ll be much further ahead doing a bang-up job on one thing rather than introducing a whole string of customer service goals all at once
- You can always build toward the total vision once you’re successful with one or two things, but it’s difficult, if not impossible, to try to change too much at once
- There is no sense in doing just one thing if the size of the service promise is too large to successfully implement quickly. Better to find a smaller thing, a smaller service promise, you can deliver consistently
- What I didn’t do was put the hurdle too high to start with and I didn’t raise the hurdle until we could consistently deliver. What you have to do is promise more and deliver more. Just don’t promise too much at once
- To create Raving Fans, don’t drive promises down. Drive delivery up
- Regardless of what you promise, though, it’s consistency that’s important. Customers allow themselves to be seduced into becoming Raving Fans only when they know they can count on you time and time again
- Exceeding expectations is important but it’s even more important to consistently meet expectations
- At the core of every great customer service organization is a package of systems and a training program to inculcate those systems into the soul of that company. That’s what guarantees consistency
- Delivering your product or service properly time after time after time without fail is the foundation of Raving Fan customer service. Systems are what allows you to guarantee delivery - not smiles and ‘Have a nice day.’
- Research shows friendly people talk about topics not directly connected with the business transaction at hand and so we train team members to do just that
- The systems set the guidelines. However, our team members know that delivering Raving Fan Service means sometimes they have to alter the play to better serve the customer and they’re encouraged to do just that
- Sometimes customers are in a big hurry and would feel any extra talk was delaying them. Our team members have to judge that
- What we have are systems. Not rules. Rules create robots. Not systems. Systems are predetermined ways to achieve a result. The emphasis has to be on achieving the result, not the system for the system’s sake. That’s the difference between systems and rules. With a rule the emphasis is on the procedure, not necessarily the result. We have rules about smoking within ten feet of a gasoline pump. We have systems for delivering service
- Before I actually do anything, I have to discover what the customer really wants. If my customers feel as you do, I‘ll alter my vision
- The biggest problem I have in delivering my vision is knowing what to do next. Either I try to do too much at once and get frustrated or I sit immobilized because of the size of the job ahead. The rule of one percent reminds me that all I have to do is to improve by one percent. That I can do. If I improve one percent next week and again the week after that, by the end of the year I’m ahead by more than fifty percent
- Things can’t help but improve if you keep at it one percent at a time
- Ongoing one-percent improvement will take you a long way from where you started, but it also means you don’t blindly set a course and then follow it. One percent allows you to add the magic ingredient that guarantees improvement rather than just change: flexibility. More customer service hopes have been wrecked on the rigid shores of immobile bureaucratic minds than anywhere else
- The perfect vision isn’t a frozen picture of the future. Customers’ needs and wants change all the time
- A Raving Fan relationship goes far beyond your company’s product. If you don’t listen to your customer’s thoughts to learn his needs and desires, you fail to give him what he needs as a product because you simply don’t know what that need really is. Further, you reject him as a person. By not listening to him, you’re saying his thoughts have no value
- First, you can serve your customers’ needs because now you know what they really are. Second, you’ve asked, listened to, and respected their opinions. You’re treating them like intelligent human beings. That’s powerful
- Listening to customers is powerful. Responding to what customers say is dynamite
- It’s not really customers and company. It’s not even customers and employees. It’s just people and people. People arrive with needs and people go out and serve them to fulfill those needs
- Customers have needs beyond the need of the company’s product, whether it comes in a box or is a particular service. People need to feel they belong to the group. People need to feel that they’re important and that what they do, think, and say truly matters