Customers are the heart of your business, and it is critical that they are happy with the products and/or services you provide. To ensure you provide service beyond their expectations, and create life-long customers, you will need to understand the concept of raving fans and creating lifetime value for your customers.
“Raving Fans” is a book written by Ken Blanchard, released in 1993. The concept behind creating Raving Fan customers is simply to figure out what your vision is, determine your customer’s vision, and then deliver against that vision plus 1%. What does this mean?
When your customers come to visit your business, whether you have one small business in a country town or you have the vision to create a worldwide franchise, it must create the WOW factor, so that every single customer that was touched by you and your company walks away talking about how extraordinary you and your business experience was. This extraordinary experience must be served from the courier to the CEO or Director of the company. Creating a vision for your specific area of responsibility includes incorporating everything you want your business to be, and everything that you believe is necessary to be successful. For example, if you are a receptionist, you have incredible client power. Your voice is the first one heard when a client calls in, and you can make or break a client relationship simply with how you answer and handle phone calls. (See the pre-qualifying section for phone script details.)
Once your vision is in place for the way you wish to operate, you will want to check that against your customer’s ideas for who they believe you should be.
Customer surveys are paramount to finding out exactly what your customer wants. It is not just important to get your customers to fill out a customer survey but it’s of vital importance to get them to answer the questions that you need to know so that you can improve your place of business to accommodate your “A’ grade clients needs.
Finally, “Deliver against your vision plus 1%”. Once your vision is in place for how you want to interact with customers—deliver against that plus 1% improvement against that vision every day. The great thing about vision is that it changes with time, customer needs, market needs, and personal or professional needs. Adjust accordingly, but continue to deliver the core of what you started when you realigned yourself to create true “Raving Fans” customers.
The bottom line is this: to create customers who not only come back, but go out of their way to visit your establishment or to purchase your products or services, it is imperative that you provide service far beyond “satisfactory” to ensure that those customers don’t shop anywhere but where you are. Satisfied customers will keep looking once they are “hungry” again—or may shop your competition if there is a cheaper like product for sale. Raving Fan customers won’t even think about going anywhere but to you…and will tell everyone about how great your service is.
To survive in business—you need Raving Fan customers. Otherwise, you will leave people wanting more and remaining simply satisfied.