Raving Fans, by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles

Customer service. Why do I feel a little uneasy when I think of the phrase? The words “customer service” might as well say “customer complaints,” “unsatisfied customers,” or “those people who want me to produce garbage just because they don’t know the first thing about good design.” Ok, so maybe I could benefit from reading a book about customer service. Maybe you could, too…

“Raving Fans” is subtitled “a revolutionary approach to customer service.” It is a fairy tale where an area manager meets his fairy godmother, Charlie (an old man whose passion for customer service is rivaled only by his passion for golf) and learns how to turn satisfied customers into “raving fans.” Charlie takes the manager to several companies that exhibit extraordinary customer service. One place is a gas station where the attendants greet every car with a smile. They check your fluids and call you by name. You never leave your car and are always promised the same price for fuel that you would find at the local competition. The premise of the book is that if your customer service is this good you will create raving fans and that will translate into a more successful business.

I found the gas station analogy very entertaining because of the experience I had last weekend. I was traveling from Colorado to Nebraska and stopped at a Conoco in North Platte. It is notorious for their high gas prices because their location is one of the few main stops on Interstate 80 between Denver and Lincoln. In the past, North Platte gas stations wouldn’t even show their price per gallon on their signs because they knew people didn’t really have any alternatives. You had to pull up to the pump to see how much they were going to stick it to you that particular day. When I took the exit, the first station was a Conoco with a big sign flashing at near strobe light regularity that their gas was $2.26 and they had “the best looking attendants.” Feeling somewhat insulted by the intrusive flashing of the sign, I passed it in favor of a Shell station a few blocks further down the road. To my disappointment, the gas at Shell was $2.49. I decided to pay the extra money and get back on the road. On our return to Colorado a couple days later, we again were ready to refuel in North Platte. This time, I decided to forgive the flashing sign and refuel at Conoco since they were still advertising $2.26. I pulled in and was shocked to see that the $2.26 price was nowhere to be seen on the pump. Since I was in a hurry again, I accepted the $2.49 price and filled my tank. When I got inside, I asked the attendant (who wasn’t good looking at all) sarcastically if I had missed the $2.26 price? As if I was the first person to ask this question, he said, “Oh, that is only on pumps one and two.” I think he mumbled something about “out of order” which seemed to be his backup answer. I was too disgusted to say anything else, so I just paid and left. It was a scam. Literally highway robbery. The gas in pump one came out of the same tank as the other pumps. Conoco, who has the prime location right off the highway, wasn’t satisfied with the usual profit they make from their inflated prices. Now they are deceiving every customer that stops there! I was so raving mad that I will never buy Conoco gas again, ever!

A gas station is probably the last place you would expect service worth raving about. Expecting the price on the sign to match the pump is about the only thing you really demand a gas station to do. What if one of the gas stations in North Platte took even the tiniest fraction of a step towards raving fan customer service? If my experience at Conoco had been even slightly positive, I would make it my only stop in the middle of Nebraska. If there was something unusually good about this location (like an unusually large selection of energy drinks, or maybe even actually good looking attendants), I might even recommend it to someone. Multiply that times the huge amount of traffic refuels in North Platte, and people would wait in line for their service!

Designers are very familiar with the idea of raving fans. Almost all of us are raving fans of Apple. We also take great pleasure in the defeat of Quark and site their terrible customer service as the reason for their failure. We know having raving fans is a great thing but we are usually looking at things from the customer side of the equation. When it comes to actually providing customer service, it is a little harder. One of the biggest challenges of customer service can be simply defining your customer. Different people in your agency probably have different definitions of who their customers are. Sometimes it is just the client. Sometimes we want to please the president of the corporation. Some of us want to please our creative directors or account executives. Some of us want to please the end consumer. Some of us want to please everybody. The challenge that this book presents, is how do we create raving fans at every one of these levels?

First, I think you have to all be on the same page about who your customer is. I think this is the conflict that has been unspoken in some offices. Instead of softening our concept of who the customer is to include our co-workers vision, we jockey and leverage ourselves in order to try and change (or belittle) other peoples definitions of the customer. Often the creative department butts heads with the account executives for this very reason. If the client wants spinning starbursts with corny themes, the account executives say “yes we can do that,” because they know that will create a raving fan. When they present the project to the designers, there is conflict because the designer doesn’t see the client as their customer. He sees the customer as the person who will finally see the finished piece. He knows that the average person will be insulted and turned off by starbursts and corny themes. Neither the designer nor account person wants to extend their vision to include the other person’s definition of the customer. This is more than just stubbornness. Usually everyone in the chain is passionate and often morally committed to doing the best job for their customers.

Once you understand who your customer is, things don’t get much easier. For example, what do you do when satisfying the customer conflicts with what you know the customer really needs? Most agencies live in a gray area where they are sometimes a vendor and sometimes a partner. As a vendor, they produce whatever their client needs. They follow instructions. Unfortunately, this isn’t the strength of most agencies. Most work best when they are advising, educating, and pushing their clients to be better. This is less comfortable to the client than when the agency simply bends over backwards for them. “Raving Fans” sort of covers this when it says, “It is important to know the services you DON’T provide.” Unfortunately, it is hard to tell a client “NO.”

It is very easy to turn customer service into a giant complex and nearly unattainable goal. No, customer service isn’t easy, but this book does give some valuable advice. According to *Raving Fans,* there are only three things that you need to do to create raving fans:

1. Discover what you want.
2. Discover what the customer wants.
3. Deliver the vision plus one percent.

If that sounds somewhat simplistic, it is. And maybe that is the valuable lesson that this book teaches. Simplify your vision of customer service to one thing: consistency. Deliver what you promise. Don’t miss deadlines. Take personal responsibility for your work. Don’t make excuses. And most importantly, do it every time. When you simplify customer service to a simple routine you will learn that creating raving fans isn’t as hard as we sometimes make it out to be.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 16th, 2006 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.