1-Page Summary

In Raving Fans, management experts Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles argue that successful organizations have one common central focus: providing an excellent customer service experience. And that any type of organization or business that serves people can benefit from these principles to create “Raving Fans.”

Raving Fans is a fable in which a newly hired Area Manager’s plans to focus on quality are upended when told by the President of the company to instead prioritize customer service, which she stresses is the foundation of the business. The ill-equipped Area Manager worries that, like his three predecessors, he will quickly fail at implementing successful customer service strategies and lose his position. Miraculously, his Fairy Godmother appears to teach him the three simple but powerful secrets to deliver outstanding customer service.

(Shortform note: Business fables have become an increasingly popular way to disseminate management principles due to the accessibility of their narratives. Other classics include The Greatest Salesman in the World, The One Minute Manager, and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.)

Happy Customers Are Core to Your Success

According to the authors, whatever work you do, the people you serve are central to your success. Happy customers can share positive reviews with thousands of people. Likewise, disgruntled customers can write terrible reviews, can damage your reputation, and won’t hesitate to abandon you for your competitors. With one click, your customers have the power to make or break you.

The world of business has rapidly evolved since 1993 when Raving Fans was published. Today, the marketplace is saturated with competitors for every type of product and service, and businesses now understand that they have to pay as much attention to their customer experience strategies as they do to their product and service offerings. Further, consumers now have more buying power and higher expectations than they did when Raving Fans was originally released. Consequently, some modern readers have argued that the principles in the book are outdated since consumers do not have to put up with poor service since they can easily move to a competitor.

However, the principles covered in Raving Fans may be more significant today than they were in 1993—due to the increase in competition and consumer buying power, businesses have to work harder to impress customers and stay ahead of the competition. Therefore, creating “Raving Fans” is essential to business survival.

“Satisfied” Customers Won’t Stick Around

Blanchard and Bowles argue that there’s a clear distinction between satisfying your customers and exceeding the expectations of your customers. If you merely seek to satisfy your customers, they’ll only stay with you as long as you’re not worse than the competition. The authors argue that, in contrast, happy customers are likely to:

According to the authors, businesses that successfully implement customer service experience strategies achieve higher customer retention rates and increased revenues.

Businesses tend to spend more on acquiring new customers than they do on investing in keeping the ones they already have. However, these customer acquisition and retention marketing statistics highlight how costly this approach can be:

Clearly, it pays more to invest in making your existing customers happy than it does to acquire new customers.

In this guide, we’ll explore the principles of outstanding customer service in greater detail and make them actionable with a range of exercises to help you transform your customers into enthusiastic fans of your product and company. We’ve deconstructed the book’s three stages into five concrete steps to create an excellent customer service experience:

Step 1: Define Your Ideal Customer Service Experience

The first step is to envision the best possible experience that your customers can have with your business. Blanchard and Bowles argue that customer experience is the impression your customers have of your business as a whole. This means that if they have a bad experience during one stage of their interactions with you, their judgment of you will go down regardless of how excellent the rest of your service was. Therefore, a great customer experience comes from providing excellence at every stage of contact.

According to one customer loyalty report, 63% of consumers confirmed they’d consider moving to a competitor after a single bad experience.

However, the impact of a single negative customer experience doesn’t simply end with the loss of current revenue. Consumers are quick to vent their frustrations in public ways, and these complaints rarely go unnoticed. Consider these statistics:

Therefore, a single negative customer experience doesn’t just result in the loss of existing customers but damages your reputation, and it has detrimental effects on your ability to acquire new customers.

Shortform Exclusive: The Customer Journey Map

Blanchard and Bowles don’t offer practical steps to define your customer service experience vision. To focus your vision, consider creating a customer journey map that details the actions your customers take during their entire engagement with your business.

First, create a chart and list each interaction step horizontally on your first row. This is an example of a few of the journey steps for a small offline store:

Step 1: Customer arrives at your store Step 2: Customer searches for a specific product Possible Step: Customer seeks product information Step 3: Customer purchases the product

Next, list these questions down the first column of your chart:

  1. What potential problems or hurdles can I eliminate?
  2. How can I make the process easier or more intuitive for them?
  3. How can I engage with them so they feel valued?
  4. How can I differentiate my customer experience service from what my competitors offer?
  5. What can I provide here to really impress my customers?

You’ll end up with a chart that looks like this:

raving_fans_customer_journey_map.png

Use the chart you’ve created to brainstorm ideas on how you can provide excellent service throughout each interaction. For now, just focus on your ideal experience—don’t worry about what you can realistically achieve (we’ll cover that in Step 3).

Step 2: Discover Your Customers’ Ideal Service Experience

After defining excellent customer service in Step 1, you may assume that you have a clear understanding of what your customers want. But you won’t know for sure until you ask them, which is Step 2.

When the authors talk about your customers, they’re not just talking about the people who buy your products or services. Even if you’re a freelancer or sole owner, your business has many internal and external customers or stakeholders.

External customers are the people who see your business as a provider of something they buy. They’re the people that you create your products and services for and bring in revenue.

Internal customers participate in your business and are invested in your success. They include your team members, departments within your business, suppliers, and manufacturers.

According to the authors, internal customers can be anyone businesses interact with to fulfill their responsibilities. In the case of a restaurant, the external customers are the patrons sitting at the table, while the internal customers include the staff working in the restaurant, as well as the individual suppliers they rely on to provide the ingredients. Both internal and external customers are essential to the success of your business.

(Shortform note: Some experts disagree with the authors’ suggestion that all parties invested in the success of your business should be classified as internal stakeholders. Further, many experts classify each stakeholder according to how much they contribute to your business, and whether they are directly or indirectly impacted by the success of your business. These classifications are useful to know when considering who to approach for feedback.)

Find Out What Your External Customers Want

First, the authors suggest that you listen to your external customers to clearly see how you’re currently impacting them—are you meeting their expectations or are there things you need to improve?

How to Ask for Feedback

Blanchard and Bowles don’t provide actionable steps to obtain feedback from external customers, and this frustrates some readers. The authors also don’t acknowledge that consumers are picky about how they spend their time and can be reluctant to respond to feedback requests. With these points in mind, we’ve created a framework to help you plan your approach to collecting feedback.

Aim to collect feedback from people who have an interest in purchasing products and services from your company—people who have previously interacted with your business or plan to do so. What you want to know:

Segment your existing and potential customers (by interests, purchase history, and so on) and only ask relevant questions. (For example, don’t ask a customer what they thought of your offline store if they’ve only interacted with you online.)

Ask open-ended questions specifically related to steps on your customer journey map—don’t rely on your customers to provide the necessary context for you. Without linking your questions to specific steps, you may find it difficult to interpret and judge the feedback you receive. (For example, the general question: “What did you think of our service?,” elicits the response: “Slow and irritating.” You don’t know what step of the process they are complaining about. A better question: “What did you think of our checkout process?”)

Find Out What Your Internal Customers Want

Blanchard and Bowles argue that when your internal customers are happy they’re more likely to take the necessary steps to ensure that your external customers are happy. Therefore, identifying who your internal customers are and what they want is essential to the success of your business.

(Shortform note: Why should you treat your employees like customers? A study on why employees quit their jobs reveals that lack of motivation and engagement impacts your employees’ sense of loyalty and reflects in the work they produce up until their departure. Many experts agree that businesses can turn this around and encourage commitment to their company’s mission by assessing and meeting the needs of their employees in the same way that they attempt to meet the needs of their customers.)

How to Keep Internal Customers Happy

Blanchard and Bowles don’t explain how to organize and assess feedback to complete this step. However, they clearly state that the goal here is to define what your internal customers need to feel happy and satisfied at work. Let’s narrow down the characteristics of a positive work environment:

For each of the areas listed above, ask if your internal customers:

The feedback you receive will allow you to have a deeper understanding about what motivates and satisfies your employees.

Step 3: Integrate Your Vision With Their Needs

You’ll discover that there are some things your customers want that will be too difficult to accommodate. The authors recommend that you set boundaries on what you’re willing to offer—it’s more productive to limit yourself by accepting that you can’t please everyone and to instead focus on doing fewer things exceptionally well.

The vision you created in Step 1 will be useful in helping you to judge what customer needs you’re willing to fulfill and what needs you won’t attempt to fulfill. This is why it’s important to define your own vision of excellent customer service before defining the customers’ vision.

When given free rein, customers will suggest unrealistic features that they believe will improve their customer service experience with your business. But if you attempt to meet every demand and please every whim, you’ll either burn out, lose revenue, or end up with a generic service experience. However, the idea of ignoring certain requests and missing out on potential sales can be uncomfortable for businesses to consider.

Seth Godin (author of Purple Cow) insists that businesses need to be clear about who they intend to serve. He argues that identifying your smallest viable audience will help you to focus and refine what you offer. In other words, you’re more likely to create an excellent service experience if you’re clear about who your customers are.

Shortform Exclusive: The Customer Journey Map

Define Your Customer Service Priorities

Compare your vision from Step 1 with your external customer feedback from Step 2. For each step of the customer experience journey answer these questions:

Step 4: Build Effective Systems to Ensure Consistency

During this stage, Blanchard and Bowles insist that you focus solely on making changes and improvements that you can consistently meet. If you make promises that you fail to meet, your customers will judge you harshly for it. The only way to build customer trust is to start small and focus on achieving consistent delivery of each new improvement before introducing additional changes.

To achieve consistency, work with your team to define your goals and build systems that guarantee you deliver what you promise every single time. The authors argue that systems and training procedures are at the core of every successful customer service experience strategy. Your consistency will create credibility, foster high expectations, and help to build your base of loyal customers.

Build Systems to Achieve Consistency

Blanchard and Bowles don’t provide advice on how to create effective systems to achieve consistency. Therefore, we’ve adapted an effective goal-setting process from Measure What Matters to help your team work together to define goals and create the systems you need.

Using this process to define both your long-term and short-term goals will ensure that all of your team members are:

Step 5: Exceed Customer Expectations

To achieve an excellent customer service experience, the authors argue that you need to accept that your work will never be done. Customer expectations are ever-evolving, so stay aware and continually work on small improvements that you can implement quickly and deliver consistently. To achieve this, your systems need to remain flexible enough so that you can quickly respond to customer demands and adapt as necessary.

While they stress the importance of adapting to customer needs, Blanchard and Bowles don’t explain how to do this. Therefore, we’ve listed the main features you need to build into your systems to ensure you stay up to date with your customers’ demands.

The authors claim that the final key to providing an excellent customer service experience is to exceed your customers’ expectations every time they interact with you. In other words, once you’ve built the necessary experience and resources to consistently deliver high standards, you need to deliver more than your customers expect. You can achieve this by pre-empting your customers’ needs. Or you can think of little ways to surprise and delight your customers so that their experiences with you are above and beyond positive. If you build this final step into your strategy, you’ll not only win your customers’ continued loyalty, but their support and advocacy too.

Excellent customer service can include offering free products and services. However, to shift the way you approach this step and to inspire new ideas, remember that each of your customers is a unique person—people tend to connect more to genuine acts of kindness and empathy. The simple act of taking the time to listen to and engage with a customer can brighten their day. Consider these memorable examples:

Shortform Introduction

In Raving Fans, management experts Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles argue that successful organizations have one common central focus: providing an excellent customer service experience. And that any type of organization or business that serves people can benefit from these principles to create “Raving Fans.”

Raving Fans is a fable in which a newly hired Area Manager’s plans to focus on quality are upended when told by the President of the company to instead prioritize customer service, which she stresses is the foundation of the business. The ill-equipped Area Manager worries that, like his three predecessors, he will quickly fail at implementing successful customer service strategies and lose his position.

Miraculously, his Fairy Godmother appears to offer guidance and lead him on a path of discovery. The Fairy Godmother introduces the Area Manager to successful business owners, all graduates of “The Raving Fans School,” who teach him the three simple but powerful secrets to deliver outstanding customer service:

The Area Manager graduates from “The Raving Fans School,” successfully implements all of the advice he receives and proceeds to impress both his customers and the President of his company.

About the Authors

Kenneth Blanchard is an author, business consultant, and motivational speaker. He is the co-founder and Chief Spiritual Officer of The Ken Blanchard Companies, a management training firm that, as of 2019, had been named one of the top 20 leadership training companies for ten years in a row. Blanchard has authored and co-authored over 60 books on the subject of leadership. He is most well known for his bestselling book (co-authored with Spenser Johnson) The One Minute Manager.

Connect with Kenneth Blanchard:

Sheldon Bowles is an entrepreneur, noted speaker, and co-author of High Five!, and Big Bucks! Called a “customer service legend,” he’s the chairman of Precision Metalcraft Inc., the president of Ode to Joy Limited, and the founding president of Domo Gasoline Corporation.

Connect with Sheldon Bowles

The Book’s Publication

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993

Raving Fans was Blanchard’s 12th book and 1st of several with Bowles, including High Five! The Magic of Working Together, and Gung Ho! Turn On the People in Any Organization.

The Book’s Context

Intellectual Context

Since the 1960s, business fables like Raving Fans, which combine storytelling with the wisdom and advice of management lessons, have become increasingly popular. The stories are designed to engage readers while also giving context to the principles contained within—the fictional context illustrates how to apply these concepts and makes them more memorable. As a result, many readers prefer the simplicity of business fables compared to the complexity of standard non-fiction business books. Successful books in this genre include:

Who Moved My Cheese?, Spencer Johnson

The Greatest Salesman in the World, Og Mandino

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni

The Go-Giver, Bob Burg and John David Mann

The One Minute Manager, Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson

The Book’s Strengths and Weaknesses

Critical Reception

Prior to the publication of Raving Fans in 1993, providing exceptional customer service was not a priority for most businesses. Consequently, consumers felt like they were being taken for granted and, with few alternatives available to them, they not only tolerated poor customer service, they expected it. But the early nineties brought a shift as businesses began to acknowledge the need to provide excellent customer service. As a result of this rising awareness, Raving Fans originally received a warm welcome from innovative managers and leaders and has since sold over a million copies.

The book’s success is due in large part to how simply the authors express the concepts that underpin their view of excellent customer service. Their short story quickly puts the concepts into context and effectively demonstrates the different types of businesses that can benefit from this model. As a result, Raving Fans is required reading in many customer-focused organizations.

However, this simplistic approach has also received criticism. This is mainly due to the unrealistic depictions of “Raving Fans Businesses” within the story. Further, the book doesn’t offer practical steps to apply the principles. As a result, some reviewers see the book as overly childish and impractical.

Commentary on the Book’s Approach

The fable offers a useful framing device to quickly deliver the three secrets to create “Raving Fans.” It offers an effective way to put the principles into context and attempts to engage the reader by foregoing the standard format of non-fiction writing.

Commentary on the Book’s Organization

Overall, Raving Fans is well organized—the Fairy Godmother introduces the three secrets to the Area Manager in sequence, and each secret builds on the one before it. However, the story doesn’t include chapter breaks, which makes it difficult to distinguish between the three secrets. In addition, the third secret, “Deliver What They Want + 1%,” attempts to deliver a lot of information by referring to multiple concepts in a back and forth way. As a result, this non-linear approach creates confusion and makes the secret difficult to implement.

Our Approach in This Guide

To make the ideas covered in Raving Fans more relevant to today’s rapidly evolving business world, we look beyond the fable and focus on ways to make the principles more actionable—we’ve included a range of exercises to help you apply these principles in your work.

In addition, we’ve deconstructed the third secret, “Deliver What They Want +1%,” into three steps to make each easier to apply. Consequently, our guide lists five steps to create an excellent customer service experience:

Happy Customers Are Core to Your Success

Raving Fans is a fable in which a newly hired Area Manager’s plans to focus on quality are upended when told by the President of the company to instead prioritize successful customer service strategies, the foundation of any strong business. The ill-equipped Area Manager worries that, like his three predecessors, he will quickly fail at this task and lose his position. Miraculously, his Fairy Godmother appears to offer guidance. The first piece of advice his Fairy Godmother offers: businesses need to go beyond merely satisfying their customers and instead focus on how to create “Raving Fans.”

(Shortform note: Business fables have become an increasingly popular way to disseminate management principles due to the accessibility of their narratives. Other classics include The Greatest Salesman in the World, The One Minute Manager, and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.)

According to the authors, whatever work you do, the people you serve are central to your success. Acquiring and holding onto customers and clients is essential. Happy customers can share positive reviews with thousands of people. Likewise, disgruntled customers can write terrible reviews, can damage your reputation, and won’t hesitate to abandon you for your competitors. With one click, your customers have the power to make or break you.

The world of business has rapidly evolved since1993 when Raving Fans was published. Today, the marketplace is saturated with competitors for every type of product and service, and businesses now understand that they have to pay as much attention to their customer experience strategies as they do to their product and service offerings. Further, consumers now have more buying power and higher expectations than they did when Raving Fans was originally released. Consequently, some modern readers have argued that the principles in the book are outdated since consumers do not have to put up with poor service since they can easily move to a competitor.

However, the principles covered in Raving Fans may be more significant today than they were in 1993—due to the increase in competition and consumer buying power, businesses have to work harder to impress customers and stay ahead of the competition. Therefore, creating “Raving Fans” is essential to business survival.

Why Focus on Excellent Customer Service?

Blanchard and Bowles argue that there’s a clear distinction between satisfying your customers and exceeding the expectations of your customers. If you merely seek to satisfy your customers, they’ll only stay with you as long as you’re not worse than the competition. However, if you invest in the customer service experience to exceed expectations and build trust, your customers will be so impressed and happy that they’ll willingly contribute to your success.

This is because emotions shape attitudes and drive the decision-making process. According to the authors, if interacting with your business makes people happy, they’re more likely to become emotionally attached to you because they enjoy the feeling of interacting with you. Without this emotional attachment, they’re more likely to feel disconnected and move to another competitor if they find more value in what they have to offer.

Forming Positive Emotional Connections Keeps Customers

Research confirms that forming positive emotional connections provides enormous opportunities for growth and profitability and is key to winning customer loyalty. Further, the research reveals that customers have a wide range of underlying motivations that businesses need to identify and fulfill before they can achieve this connection. Consider the following examples:

When you align your customer service experience with your customers’ underlying motivations, you’re more likely to forge positive emotional attachments and drive customer engagement.

Providing an excellent customer service experience is essential to the growth and success of your business. The authors argue that happy customers are likely to:

According to the authors, businesses that successfully implement customer service experience strategies achieve higher customer retention rates and increased revenues.

Businesses tend to spend more on acquiring new customers than they do on investing in keeping the ones they already have. However, these customer acquisition and retention marketing statistics highlight how costly this approach can be:

Clearly, it pays more to invest in making your existing customers happy than it does to acquire new customers.

We’ve synthesized five steps to achieving excellent customer service and propelling the success of your business:

We’ll cover each step over the next five chapters.

Step 1: Define Your Ideal Customer Service Experience

You now understand why it’s important to go beyond simply satisfying your customers by instead implementing ways to delight and impress them. But it can be difficult to know where to start, what to prioritize, and what problems to solve. The first step is to envision the best possible experience that your customers can have with your business.

The Fable: What Does Ideal Customer Service Look Like?

In the fable, the Fairy Godmother takes the Area Manager to a successful department store, owned by a previous student of “The Raving Fans School.” Throughout his visit, the Area Manager receives lavish attention and experiences excellent customer service. For example, the book he wants to buy is out of stock so the customer service attendant purchases the book from another store and gift wraps it for him at no extra cost.

When asked how the store can go to such great lengths to satisfy customers, the store owner explains he created a complete vision of excellent customer service centered on looking after customer needs wherever possible. This vision informs how he interacts with his customers.

(Shortform note: The customer service attendant at the bookstore uses creative problem solving to exceed the Area Manager’s expectations. This is just one way to deliver outstanding customer service. Others include actively listening to the customer’s needs, having a positive attitude, and knowing your product well.)

One Negative Customer Experience Can Damage Your Reputation

Blanchard and Bowles argue that customer experience is the impression your customers have of your business as a whole. Your customers judge their experiences with you based on the emotions they feel during the sum total of their interactions with you. This means that if they have a bad experience during one stage of their interactions with you, their judgment of you will go down regardless of how excellent the rest of your service was. This judgment impacts their sense of loyalty to you. Therefore, a great customer experience comes from providing excellence at every stage of contact.

According to one customer loyalty report, 63% of consumers confirmed they’d consider moving to a competitor after a single bad experience.

However, the impact of a single negative customer experience doesn’t simply end with the loss of current revenue. Consumers are quick to vent their frustrations in public ways and these complaints rarely go unnoticed. Consider these statistics:

Therefore, a single negative customer experience doesn’t just result in the loss of existing customers, but also damages your reputation and has detrimental effects on your ability to acquire new customers.

How to Define the Ideal Customer Experience

To define your ideal customer experience service, the authors suggest that you consider every interaction customers may have with your business from your customers’ point of view. Next, you need to create a vision of how you want to serve your customers at each of these interaction points.

Shortform Exclusive: The Customer Journey Map

Blanchard and Bowles don’t offer practical steps to define your customer service experience vision. To help focus your vision, consider creating a customer journey map that details the actions your customers take during their entire engagement with your business.

First, create a chart and list each interaction step horizontally on your first row. This is an example of a few of the journey steps for a small offline store:

Step 1: Customer arrives at your store Step 2: Customer searches for a specific product Possible Step: Customer seeks product information Step 3: Customer purchases the product

Next, list these questions down the first column of your chart:

  1. What potential problems or hurdles can I eliminate?
  2. How can I make the process easier or more intuitive for them?
  3. How can I engage with them so they feel valued?
  4. How can I differentiate my customer experience service from what my competitors offer?
  5. What can I provide here to really impress my customers?

You’ll end up with a chart that looks like this:

raving_fans_customer_journey_map.png

You may need to create multiple maps depending on how you operate. For example, if your customers interact with you both online and offline, it might be useful to create separate maps for both experiences. In addition, if you offer multiple products and services, your customers may take different journeys depending on what they want to achieve. Ensure you consider every variable and channel to create a complete inventory of all possible steps your customers can take.

Use the chart(s) you’ve created to brainstorm ideas on how you can provide excellent service throughout each interaction. For now, just focus on your ideal experience—don’t worry about what you can realistically achieve (we’ll cover that in Step 3).

This is a simple example of a partially filled-out customer journey map for a small offline store. Note that the emphasis is on the ideal way the store would please their customers—not on whether the ideas are currently achievable.

Step 1: Customer arrives at your store Step 2: Customer searches for a specific product
How can I eliminate potential problems or hurdles? -Free parking

-Clearly displayed opening times & store policies

-Accessibility options for strollers & wheelchairs

-Products clearly priced

-Staff to stock shelves during quiet times to keep aisles free & clean

How can I make the process easier or more intuitive for them? -Plenty of parking space -Organized product placement

-Clear signposting

How can I engage with them so they feel valued? -Have someone welcome them in person

-Provide feedback stations at every step

-Suggest substitutions for out of stock items
How can I differentiate my customer experience service from what my competitors offer? -First impression: Clean & Organized -Fresh produce

-Fully stocked shelves

-Happy staff on the aisles

-Free samples for cheese/fresh produce sections

What can I provide here to really impress my customers? -Free supervised child care

-Complimentary drinks

-Offer a concierge service

-Arrange to order the items not currently carried & organize delivery

-Offer custom shopping lists based on the customer’s recipe ideas

For further ideas and inspiration, these companies offer the best customer service according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

Once you’ve created your vision of what you want to offer, you’ll have a list of specific ways that you can create excellent customer service experiences. You’ll also have a good idea of where you need to make improvements.

Exercise: Define Your Expectations of Customer Service

Identifying how you perceive and label the service you receive from other businesses will help you to view what your business offers from a customer’s perspective.

Step 2: Discover Your Customers’ Ideal Service Experience

After defining excellent customer service in Step 1, you may assume that you have a clear understanding of what your customers want. But how can you really know what your customers want without asking them? After all, you wouldn’t invest the time and money to release a product or service before testing the market for it.

This next step of the process will allow you to clearly see how you’re currently impacting your customers—are you meeting their expectations or are there things you need to improve? In addition, we’ll focus on understanding the differences between both your external and internal customers: who they are and what their motivations are. Ultimately, you’ll find out what it’ll take to make all of your customers happy.

External vs. Internal Customers

When the authors talk about your customers, they’re not just talking about the people who buy your products or services. Even if you’re a freelancer or sole owner, your business has many internal and external customers or stakeholders.

External customers are the people who see your business as a provider of something they buy. They’re the people that you create your products and services for and bring in revenue.

Internal customers participate in your business and are invested in your success. They include your team members, departments within your business, suppliers, and manufacturers.

Some experts disagree with the authors’ suggestion that all parties invested in the success of your business should be classified as internal stakeholders. Here’s a more typical classification of stakeholders:

Internal Stakeholders:

External Stakeholders:

Further, many experts classify each stakeholder according to how much they contribute to your business, and whether they are directly or indirectly impacted by the success of your business. These classifications are useful to know when considering who to approach for feedback.

The Fable: Ask Your External Customers What They Think of Your Service

In the fable, once the Area Manager defines his vision, his Fairy Godmother takes him to meet the owner of a manufacturing plant to discuss the second secret to creating “Raving Fans”: Discover Your Customers’ Ideal Service Experience.

The owner insists that your vision needs to include everyone involved in the creation, marketing, and distribution of the product, as their input impacts the service your customers receive. When the Area Manager asks him to explain how to find out what customers want, the owner tells him to simply ask, and then to listen both to what they say and don’t say.

(Shortform note: Up until this point in the fable, the authors focus on business-to-consumer relationships. The manufacturing plant is the first example in the book that demonstrates the principles in a business-to-business context. The diversity of businesses in the fable clearly illustrates how different types of businesses can benefit from the “Raving Fans'' principles.)

Find Out What Your External Customers Want

The authors emphasize that customers will often say one thing and mean another, and they stress that you need to look beyond what they say to figure out what they want. In particular, the words “fine” or “okay” indicate that they weren’t that impressed with you but don’t want to make a fuss. Perhaps they believe that you don’t really care about what they think. This type of bland response indicates a problem with how they’ve experienced your product or service. Remember, your customers are always judging you and will certainly be aware of the problems even if they choose not to complain.

(Shortform note: This type of response doesn’t always indicate a problem with your service. Customers often find it difficult to articulate what they want both to themselves and to others. For example, a customer is trying to be healthy so orders a salad, but this customer really wants a burger. Or, a customer doesn’t know what to eat and relies on the restaurant to fulfill a need that hasn’t been specified. In both cases, when asked how the meal was, the bland responses could imply dissatisfaction with the meal or the service, but they could also imply that the customer doesn’t know her own feelings.)

As well as listening to what they say, you must pay the most attention to their silence. Silence from a customer often expresses dissatisfaction. In short, the authors stress that all feedback you receive provides insights, and all feedback you don’t receive also provides insights.

Shortform Exclusive: Feedback Framework for External Customers

Blanchard and Bowles don’t provide actionable steps to obtain feedback or interpret customer silence, and this frustrates some readers. The authors also don’t acknowledge that consumers are picky about how they spend their time and can be reluctant to respond to feedback requests. With these points in mind, we’ve created a framework to help you plan your approach to collecting feedback.

Aim to collect feedback from people who have an interest in purchasing products and services from your company—people who have previously interacted with your business or plan to do so. What you want to know:

Segment your existing and potential customers (by interests, purchase history, and so on) and only ask relevant questions. (For example, don’t ask a customer what they thought of your offline store if they’ve only interacted with you online.)

Ask open-ended questions specifically related to steps on your customer journey map—don’t rely on your customers to provide the necessary context for you. Without linking your questions to specific steps, you may find it difficult to interpret and judge the feedback you receive. (For example, the general question: “What did you think of our service?” elicits the response: “Slow and irritating.” You don’t know what step of the process they are complaining about. A better question: “What did you think of our checkout process?”)

Incentivize customers to respond to your feedback requests.

Your approach to collecting feedback will depend entirely on how you operate. Do your customers interact with you online, offline, or a mixture of both? Here are some ideas to get you started:

Offline Online Indirect
Face to face interviews Email surveys Social media monitoring
After-sales personal phone calls After-sales personal email Service reviews & testimonials placed online
Feedback leaflets in-store Feedback forms built into the site Prior feedback, complaints, & questions from customer support logs
Mailings Online forums with feedback features Interviews with people in direct contact with your customers, like support/sales teams
Focus groups Live chat feedback Monitoring what customers say about your direct competitors
Customer polls & surveys
Usability tests

Identify Your Internal Customers

Once you know what your external customers want, turn your attention to your internal customers. Blanchard and Bowles argue that when your internal customers are happy they’re more likely to take the necessary steps to ensure that your external customers are happy. Identifying what both internal and external customers want is essential to the success of your business.

Shortform Exclusive: The Customer Journey Map

While the authors stress the importance of identifying your internal customers, commonly referred to as stakeholders, they don’t offer advice on how to do this. Here’s a practical way to immediately define the stakeholders that contribute to your customer service experience.

Look at the steps you plotted on your customer journey map from Step 1. Now, for each step, list all colleagues, teams, and departments that directly contribute to the service experience you intend to offer. Refer back to the example journey map for the offline store—note that the first column is now used to identify areas of responsibility and contribution:

Who contributes to the customer service experience in this step? Step 1: Customer arrives at your store Step 2: Customer searches for a specific product
  • Who manages the parking? Who interacts with the customer here?
  • Is the marketing team responsible for displaying store policies?
  • Who designs the shop layout & manages accessibility?
  • Who manages restocking?
-Free parking

-Clearly displayed opening times & store policies

-Accessibility options for strollers & wheelchairs

-Products clearly priced

-Staff to stock shelves during closing or quiet times to keep aisles free & clean

The Fable: Ask Your Internal Customers What They Think of Your Service

Throughout the fable, the Area Manager is greeted and served by genuinely happy and capable employees. His conversations with the owners of these businesses reveal a key piece of advice: How you treat your employees directly impacts how they treat your customers. In other words, happy employees are more willing and able to make customers happy.

(Shortform note: Why should you treat your employees like customers? A study on why employees quit their jobs reveals that lack of motivation and engagement impacts your employees’ sense of loyalty and reflects in the work they produce up until their departure. Many experts agree that businesses can turn this around and encourage commitment to their company’s mission by assessing and meeting the needs of their employees in the same way that they attempt to meet the needs of their customers.)

Find Out What Your Internal Customers Want

The authors insist that the objective of the feedback process for your internal customers is identical to that of your external customers—you want to know what will make them happy. Specifically, what improvements need to be made to create a positive work environment that brings out the best in them?

Shortform Exclusive: Feedback Framework for Internal Customers

Blanchard and Bowles don’t provide insights on how to organize and assess feedback to complete this step. However, they clearly state that the goal here is to define what your internal customers need to feel happy and satisfied at work. Let’s narrow down the characteristics of a positive work environment:

For each of the areas listed above, ask if your internal customers:

The feedback you receive will allow you to have a deeper understanding about what motivates and satisfies your employees.

Organizations are increasingly aware of the value that effective feedback processes can provide, and how important it is to examine both how they give and receive feedback within the workplace. Here’s further reading to help you manage your feedback process:

Once you’ve collated the feedback from both your external and internal customers, you’ll have a clearer idea of how your current service is impacting your customers. You’ll also be more aware of specific improvements that need to be made.

Exercise: Identify Obstacles in Your Workplace Environment

Your team may face a variety of obstacles that prevent them from performing their best. Identifying these obstacles is the first step towards creating a positive workplace environment.

Step 3: Integrate Your Vision With Their Needs

Now that you’ve got a clear idea of how you’re currently impacting both your internal and external customers, it’s time to integrate your definition of excellent customer service in response to the feedback you’ve received from your external customers. All of the possibilities for improvements can quickly become overwhelming, so we’ll focus on setting boundaries before we work on refining your vision.

Choose Which Customers You Serve

You’ll discover that there are some things your customers want that will be too difficult to accommodate. The authors recommend that you set boundaries on what you’re willing to offer—it’s more productive to limit yourself by accepting that you can’t please everyone and to instead focus on doing fewer things exceptionally well. The vision you created in Step 1 will be useful in helping you to judge what customer needs you’re willing to fulfill and what needs you won’t attempt to fulfill. This is why it’s important to define your own vision of excellent customer service before defining the customers’ vision.

When given free rein, customers will suggest unrealistic features that they believe will improve their customer service experience with your business. But you won’t be able to meet every demand and please every whim. And if you attempt to do so, you’ll either burn out, lose revenue, or end up with a generic service experience. However, the idea of ignoring certain requests and missing out on potential sales can be uncomfortable for businesses to consider.

Seth Godin (author of Purple Cow) insists that businesses need to be clear about who they intend to serve. He argues that identifying your smallest viable audience will help you to focus and refine what you offer. In other words, you’re more likely to create an excellent service experience if you’re clear about who your customers are.

Shortform Exclusive: The Customer Journey Map

Define Your Customer Service Priorities

Compare your vision from Step 1 with your external customer feedback from Step 2. For each step of the customer experience journey answer these questions:

By the time you’ve completed the comparison, you should have a clearer vision of what type of customer you intend to target, what needs to fulfill, and what your priorities for creating an excellent customer service strategy should be.

Exercise: Build a Customer Persona

Building detailed customer personas for each segment of your customer base helps you to define your customer service experience priorities. In addition, it reminds you to base your decisions on the wants and needs of real people, which enables you to connect to the real customers these personas represent.

Step 4: Build Effective Systems to Ensure Consistency

You now have a clear picture of the customers you want to serve and what type of customer service experience you want to provide. Your feedback from internal customers in Step 2 gave you a clear idea of what you’re currently working with and where improvement is needed. The next step is to create a complete picture of the systems you need to build to bridge the gap between where you are and where you want to be.

The Fable: Create Flexible Systems and Guidelines

In the fable, once the Area Manager collates his feedback and discusses possible improvements with his team, his Fairy Godmother introduces him to the owner of a successful full-service gasoline station. The owner explains that he is consistently able to offer an incredible service thanks to the flexible systems and training procedures he has in place—the systems set the guidelines but also allow his team members to understand how much flexibility they have to act autonomously and better serve his customers.

The Key to Giving Employees Autonomy

The owner of the gas station has hit on one of the key features of companies that stand the test of time. According to the research of Jim Collins and Jerry I Porras, documented in Built to Last, the most successful, long-lasting companies have systems to ensure that every employee understands the company’s core philosophy and can be trusted to work autonomously. The following example from the book shows how to implement the gas station owner’s customer service strategy:

Nordstrom’s employee handbook tells employees the core philosophy (“to provide outstanding customer service”) and gives them plenty of leeway to act as they see fit by giving only one rule: “Use your judgment in all situations.” They reward employees aligned with the core philosophy of outstanding customer service with big store discounts. Employees who are unpleasant towards customers get sent home for the day.

Create a Positive Work Environment

The authors don’t offer any advice on how to judge and incorporate the feedback received from internal customers in Step 2. Further, the only advice they offer for getting your entire team on board with your customer service experience strategy is that all team members should know what the desired end results of the systems in place are, and that the system of rewards and promotions should be linked to how well they execute this strategy. Therefore, we’ll provide clarity on how to achieve a positive and cohesive workplace culture.

Create Cohesion Within Your Workplace

Your customer service experience vision determines how you assess the feedback you receive from your colleagues and prioritize necessary improvements. It simply won’t be possible to fix all of the flaws in one go. However, involving all of your team members in your vision will go a long way towards creating a positive work environment that’ll ultimately benefit both your team and your customers.

Include Your Team

Don’t restrict your vision by excluding your team—collaborate with colleagues across different departments and from different levels of your business to discuss viable possibilities. Inclusion in the process will encourage and motivate team members to work towards this vision.

Clearly Define the Guiding Principles That Underpin This Vision

Guiding principles serve as a reminder of your vision and can be easily communicated to remind your team what you’re all working towards. In essence, they are a set of operating principles that steer your team to make decisions that are in line with your vision. When creating your principles, consider if they:

Communicate Your Vision

Ensure that your entire company works together towards the same goal by regularly communicating your vision and guiding principles. Once your team members share your vision and see the improvements you all intend to work towards, you’ll see a shift in your work environment. This will inevitably have a positive impact on the customer service experience you provide.

(Shortform note: Further reading on how to align relevant stakeholders operating outside of your organization: 8 Tips for Managing Multiple Stakeholders.)

Consistent Delivery Creates Credibility

During this stage, Blanchard and Bowles insist that you focus solely on making changes and improvements that you can consistently meet. Your customers don’t want false promises from you. If you make promises that you fail to meet, they will judge you harshly for it. The only way to build customer trust is to start small and focus on achieving consistent delivery of each new improvement before introducing additional changes.

To achieve consistency, work with your team to define your goals and build systems that guarantee you deliver what you promise every single time. These systems also need to be adaptable so that they can evolve for continuous improvement (we’ll cover that in Step 5). The authors argue that systems and training procedures are at the core of every successful customer service experience strategy. Your consistency will create credibility, foster high expectations, and help to build your base of loyal customers.

Build Systems to Achieve Consistency

While Blanchard and Bowles stress the importance of creating effective systems to achieve consistency, they don’t provide any practical advice on how to do it. Therefore, we’ve adapted an effective goal-setting process from Measure What Matters to help your team work together to define goals and create the systems you need.

Using this process to define both your long-term and short-term goals will ensure that all of your team members are:

By the time you’ve completed this step, you’ll be working in alignment with your team towards achieving a clear objective: consistently delivering an excellent customer service experience to your customers.

Exercise: Start Small and Build on Your Strengths

Creating new systems and procedures can seem like a daunting task. Start small by determining what systems are currently working and build on your strengths.

Step 5: Exceed Customer Expectations

You now have a clear idea of the systems you need to create so that you can move towards achieving your ideal customer service experience. In addition, you understand that you’re more likely to achieve the high standards you’ve defined for yourself if you work on achieving consistency one small step at a time. Now, focus on making continual improvements and remaining flexible so that you can adapt to your customers’ ever-evolving needs. Finally, we’ll define what it means to exceed your customers’ expectations to win customer loyalty.

The Fable: Always Deliver More Than Your Customers Expect

In Raving Fans, the owner of the successful gasoline station explains how to continually surprise and delight your customers: Always deliver more than you promise. To achieve this, you must never think that you have achieved the perfect service. Instead, you must always be focused on making incremental improvements that bring value to your customers.

The Area Manager explains the process of making small, continual improvements to his team. His colleagues embrace creating “Raving Fans” as a core value, and work together to create an excellent service for their customers. As a result, their base of loyal customers grows exponentially, and the Area Manager is eventually promoted to President of the company.

The gasoline station owner’s insight that you need to evolve your customer service to meet customers’ changing desires may be even more critical than it was when the book was published in 1993: New technology continues to raise consumer expectations. Due to the rise of social media and tech giants like Google and Amazon, consumers now expect increased efficiency (immediate responses, fast delivery with zero shipping costs), and a more personalized service—they expect you to remember their specific preferences and treat them as individuals, not customers.

Continue to Adapt to Your Customers’ Needs

To achieve an excellent customer service experience, the authors argue that you need to accept that your work will never be done. Customer expectations are ever-evolving, so you’ll have to stay aware and continually work on small improvements that you can implement quickly and deliver consistently. To achieve this, your systems need to remain flexible enough so that you can quickly respond to customer demands and adapt as necessary.

Here are the main features you need to build into your systems to ensure you stay up to date with your customers’ demands.

Surpass Customer Expectations

The authors claim that the final key to providing an excellent customer service experience is to exceed your customers’ expectations every time they interact with you. In other words, once you’ve built the necessary experience and resources to consistently deliver high standards, you need to deliver more than your customers expect. You can achieve this by pre-empting your customers’ needs. Or you can think of little ways to surprise and delight your customers so that their experiences of you are above and beyond positive. If you build this final step into your strategy, you’ll not only win your customers’ continued loyalty, but their support and advocacy too.

Excellent customer service can include offering free products and services. However, to shift the way you approach this step and to inspire new ideas, remember that each of your customers is a unique person—people tend to connect more to genuine acts of kindness and empathy. The simple act of taking the time to listen to and engage with a customer can brighten their day. Consider these memorable examples:

Exercise: Delight Your Customers in Small Ways

Exceeding expectations doesn’t always mean providing freebies. There are a multitude of small things you can add to your service to keep your customers coming back.