Raving fans! by Kenneth Blanchard

Review by Andrew Gray

Raving Fans! is about the need to turn your customers into fanatics who will rave about your business. The book is written in the parable style of Ken Blanchard and follows a newly appointed manager. What the manager learns is that there are three steps to creating a “Raving Fan” culture within a business:

Step 1 – Decide what you want. You do this by creating vision of perfection centred on the customer.

Step 2 – Discover what the customer wants. It is crucial you have the flexibility to adapt your own vision if necessary to fill the gaps and meet the needs of the customer. But you also need to accept that sometimes the customer wants something you can’t give them, something that falls outside the limits of your vision. Be prepared to let them buy these things elsewhere.

Step 3 – Deliver the customer’s vision, plus one percent. There are two elements to this. First, you have to deliver, consistently, all the time. Second, you need to promise 100% but deliver 101%.

The key messages that Kirkpatrick & Hopes are using to help us are:

• Consistency really is crucial and the only way you can guarantee consistency is by having great systems. System Builder software is helping us and can help you
• Beware of how dogmatic you are in applying systems. They are guidelines, not rules. Use systems to guarantee delivering to customers the minimum standard of service consistently; use the ‘Raving Fan’ mindset in your team to deliver even more than that (the extra one percent).
• Don’t limit your ‘Raving Fan’ ambitions to customers. You should look at everyone who comes into contact with your business as a potential ‘Raving Fan’, including your own team.
• Complaints are a golden opportunity to find out what the customer wants and to create a new ‘Raving Fan’.

Raving Fans is a great book, you can read it in a couple of hours. It has many examples of how different businesses have created Raving Fans. I am sure these will inspire lots of ideas about how you can do the same in your business.