Raving Fans
I was recently at one of my favorite coffee retailers in lower Manhattan, Puerto Rican Coffee Importers and while I waited on a long line, one of the young workers changed the soft pleasant music to blaringly loud punk rock. I had nothing against the music but the volume was at an 11 on a scale of 1 to 10. Some of us decided to kindly ask the young man to lower the volume a bit…his response: “Deal with it” (in a mocking tone).
While everyone agrees that good customer service is one of the critical points of successful business of any sort, in practice in today’s corporate world (small or big business) customer service often suffers. Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service aims to change this trend in today’s business world. It is pretty obvious that better customer service can create a positive company reputation, as well as a good corporate environment.
Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles assert that customers today are used to poor customer service, mediocre treatment, and can provide a huge boost to businesses if they can move from satisfied customers to raving fans. The principles in Raving Fans can apply to any business, and offer a way to improve the success and reputation of your business in a slow and doable way.
The book encourages companies to set a reasonable vision for customer service that they can deliver consistently. By listening to your customers, you can learn their priorities and strive to meet those priorities, both voiced and unvoiced. A successful company will first work to meet basic customer service needs, including polite service, cleanliness and promptness, and then work to improve on customer service once consistency is achieved.
The “Rule of One Percent” offers a simple strategy that will lead to happy customers and corporate success. Blanchard and Bowles sum it up simply in Raving Fans, “If you try to do too much at once, it is likely that you will fail to deliver consistently, at the least you'll feel frustrated or overwhelmed by the enormity of the job ahead. If you improve by one percent each week, you feel confident you can do the job. By end of the year, you have improved your product or service by more than 50%.” This easy to implement strategy can help your business create many raving fans in a short time.
What happened to the young man? I do not know if he is still there, since I stopped shopping there but I will be writing a letter to the owner shortly. I will keep you posted.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
