“Just having satisfied customers isn’t good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create Raving Fans.”
That’s the premise behind Ken Blanchard’s revolutionary approach to customer service.
It’s a lesson that’s relevant now more than ever in an age where delivering exceptional customer experiences is essential to driving brand loyalty and bottom-line growth. If you haven’t read the book, Raving Fans is a great one to add to your summer reading list.
In Raving Fans, Blanchard breaks it down.
Three steps to creating raving-fan customer service.
1. Decide what you want.
What kind of customers are you looking for? What type of relationship do you want to build with them? Answer those questions to help create a detailed vision of your future customer service model centered on your customers.
2. Understand what your customers want.
Be prepared to alter your vision in response to your customer’s feedback and individual needs.
3. Deliver plus-one.
Whatever it is that you do—perfect that—and then add 1% more. It’s the extra push that will set you apart.
At Shamrock, Raving Fans isn’t a theme—it’s part of our culture. Blanchard’s book has helped establish a framework for our customer-service directive. We use an internal auditing system that tracks how we exceed client expectations and identifies areas to improve and address and prevent problems before they impact our customers.
Be feedback fearless.
A pillar of Blanchard’s philosophy is that customer feedback is gold. But if you don’t have processes in place to collect that valuable input, you’ll come up short every time.
While our team asks customers to tell us what we can do to improve, we equally share that same raw feedback with our customers. For Shamrock, feedback is a two-way street; if our customers aren’t open to that exchange, then it’s not the right match for us. Shamrock’s fulfillment operations have a 99% accuracy rate—that stems from continuously tweaking and refining our processes based on customer feedback.
To deliver world-class customer service, you have to put systems in place to receive constant feedback. Further, you have to have people on your team who welcome and embrace that input. It ties back to culture. Can that open exchange work for you? Can you operate in a feedback-fearless mode? It’s a challenge worth considering.
