Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service - By Ken Blanchard & Sheldon Bowles
Date read: 2017-04-14How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
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Short and insightful, a must-read for anyone in the customer service business. Three easy to understand rules for acquiring "raving fans" which sound straightforward but hard to implement.
Contents:
- SECRET #1 - DECIDE WHAT YOU WANT
- SECRET #2 - DISCOVER WHAT THE CUSTOMER WANTS
- SECRET #3 - DELIVER THE VISION PLUS ONE PERCENT
My Notes
Customer service covers all the customer's needs and expectations.
There are three secrets to acquiring raving fans: 1) Decide what you want, 2) Discover what the customer wants, and 3) Deliver the vision plus one percent.
Remember, you are the source. Create a vision of perfection centered on the customer.
Once you have a real vision, 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.
Discover the customers' vision of what they really want and then alter your vision if need be.
Unless you have your own vision, you will never understand the customers'.
When you find out what customers really want it will likely focus on just one or two things. Your own vision has to fill in the gaps.
You have to know when to ignore what the customer wants and be ready to tell the customer to take his vision elsewhere to be fulfilled.
When it comes to customer service, those who decide to really try to give good service often aim to be everything to everybody. That doesn't work.
In order to understand a customer's vision, you have to ask them. And when you do, listen closely both to what they say and to what they don't say. But first you have to discover who your customers are.
You have to listen to the music as well as the lyrics. Often what people really want doesn't show up directly in what they say. They may even say one thing and mean quite another.
Two traps of customer listening are: 1) Silence - is a message and usually it's not a good one, and 2) When a customer says "Fine" with a smile. If you get either of these then you have a problem. And when this happens, start asking more questions. Sincere questions.
You may have a pretty good idea of your own vision, but you'll likely only discover the customers' in small nuggets. These you fit into your vision or reject.
Most customers have a focus. You have to find that focus and then mine it for information. Often the narrower the focus, the more important that vision is to the customer.
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.
Consistency creates credibility.
Don't offer too much service, at least at the start. Limit the number of areas where you want to make a difference. This allows you to be consistent. And 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'll never bring it off.
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.
Don't drive promises down (aka under promise and over deliver). Instead, drive delivery up.
Meet first. Exceed second. The worst thing you can do is meet expectations one time, fall short another, and exceed every now and then. You'll drive your customers nuts and into the hands of the competition.
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.
The systems set the guidelines. However, team members should 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.
The systems are not rules. Rules create robots. The emphasis has to be on achieving the result, not the system for the system's sake.
Systems allow you to deliver a minimum standard of performance consistently.
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. You have to be ready to change direction when the vision changes, and one percent allows you to alter course. Customer's needs and wants change all the time.
Flexibility has to do with what is delivered as part of the customer service product. Consistency has to do with how it is delivered.