Customer service is important to any business. Yet, it’s not enough to merely satisfy your customers. To have a massively successful business, you need Raving Fans. This book by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles presents a simple but powerful 3-part framework to help you to deliver amazing customer service and achieve outstanding bottom-line results. In this free Raving Fans summary, we’ll briefly outline the 3 secrets of creating raving fans.
In America, service standards have become so low that customers expect poor service. They’re satisfied so long as your service is no worse than your competitors’.
You can acquire and retain customers by delivering customer satisfaction, i.e. by being just better than your competitors. However, to have a booming business, you need to create Raving Fans, i.e. to make your customers so wildly happy that they can’t help talking about you and recommending you to others.
The 3 Secrets of Creating Raving Fans
Through a fable, this book presents a simple framework on how to build a raving fan base. The story is about an Area Manager who has been tasked to go beyond product quality to create Raving Fans for his company. With the help of a mysterious fairy godmother, he meets with several successful business leaders and learns the 3 secrets of creating Raving Fans. Here’s a quick overview of the 3 secrets. Do get a copy of our full 8-page summary for more details.
SECRET #1: Decide on your Service Vision
Define your service vision in detail, with the customer as the focal point. You must know the ideal way you want to serve your customers (seeing each service detail in your mind) before you can create it in reality.
SECRET #2: Discover What your Customer Wants
Once you’ve developed your service vision, you must discover what your customers want, i.e. uncover their service vision. Only then can you integrate the 2 service visions to offer the perfect service that meets both your passions and your customers’ needs.
Using your service vision as a foundation, incorporate specific aspects of your customers’ vision to integrate the 2 visions. In the complete Raving Fans summary, we share (i) more tips and examples on what to look out for in drawing up the 2 visions above, and (ii) why you must define your service vision before your customers’ vision.
SECRET #3: Deliver What the Customer Wants…Plus 1%
Once you know what the customer wants, you must (i) deliver that all the time (without exception) and (ii) seek to over-deliver and continually improve by 1%. In our complete summary, you can learn more about establishing trust/credibility with consistency, the difference between rules vs systems, and why you must continually refine your service, 1% at a time.
Getting the Most from Raving Fans
In this article, we’ve briefly outlined some of the key insights and strategies you can use to achieve desired change. For more examples, details, and actionable tips to apply these strategies, do get our complete book summary bundle which includes an infographic, 8-page text summary, and a 17-minute audio summary.
This is an extremely easy-to-read book, presented in a short story that illustrates the key ideas clearly using common scenarios that anyone can relate to. You can purchase the book here for the full details, or check out more details at www.kenblanchard.com.
If you’d like to learn how to translate any new customer into a raving fan, do check out our summary on Never Lose a Customer Again! Or learn how to create raving fans through Unreasonable Hospitality.
About the Authors of Raving Fans
Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach for Customer Service is written by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles.
Ken Blanchard, PhD is one of the most influential leadership experts in the world. He has co-authored 60 books. In 2005 he was inducted into Amazon’s Hall of Fame as one of the top 25 bestselling authors of all time. He’s also the recipient of numerous leadership awards and honors. Together with his wife, Margie, Ken founded The Ken Blanchard Companies, a leading international training and consulting firm.
Sheldon Bowles is an entrepreneur, author and speaker. He began his career as a newspaper reporter. He later became vice president of Royal Canadian Securities, the president and CEO of Domos Gas, and helped to turn a manufacturing plant into a multimillion-dollar business.
Raving Fans Quotes
“A customer’s vision has meaning only in the context of your vision.”
“Consistency creates credibility.”
“Visions do only two things. They grow or they die.”
“Listening to customers is powerful…Responding to what customers say is dynamite.”
“The purpose of systems is to ensure consistency, not create robots…Systems give you a floor, not a ceiling.”
Click here to download the Raving Fans summary & infographic
