Raving Fans is a book written by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles about creating customers that rave about you in a good way.

The book combines 3 common lessons about building your fans. By putting them together it will create that loyalty you look for and even get free advertising by way of word-of-mouth.

What I really liked about this book is that it wasn’t written how I expected. It’s a story about an area manager who gets assigned a fairy godmother who helps teach him these three lessons. I was expecting more of a narration style saying “you should do this” or “you should do that”. Writing it as a story allows you to connect with the character. When something so simple finally clicks you don’t feel dumb as the conversation wasn’t to you. It was to another character in the book and for them to understand, meanwhile you are passively learning about this same thing.

Decide what you want

The first is deciding what you want. Do you want to be the most profitable business in niche? Do you want to have the bets customer service? Before you can move on you must know what you want your business to be. Without the vision your customers will drive your business into what it becomes.

Discover what the customer wants

The second is knowing what your customers want. How can your customers be a fan if you are solving the wrong problems? If they find speed more important than quality you probably shouldn’t spend a few hours determining the right font to use. If it was reversed, you definitely want to spend the time to get font just right. If your customer wants something you don’t want to provide you may have to let them go. You can fire a client or even better have them work with someone else on that one project.

These days when you go buy a computer they are all pretty close to the same. Sure the name on the case is different but spec wise they are similar. What really sets Dell apart from HP is their customer service. Years ago when doing IT, it was always a good experience working with the local technicians that Dell outsourced to. HP on the other hand was a pain. After going through all the steps HP would finally send us a box to ship it back to them. One particular laptop that I sent to HP was there for over 6 months just sitting there.

Deliver plus one

The third lesson is delivering on expectations plus one percent. We all like to go above and beyond for our customers but when we go to far beyond bad things happen. In the book they use an example of a gas station who will also wash your windshield. At one point they started doing all the windows because what customer wouldn’t want that right? The issue was that this gas station hadn’t yet mastered the windshield so they missed a spot. So they went above and beyond but failed at the expected part. Unfortunately we remember problems better than praises. So, this once percent is about doing just a little more. You start out pumping the customers gas. Once you have that mastered move on to washing the windshield. When you have that process down add something else, like the rear windshield, air up the tires or anything else. Just don’t do it all at once because it improves the likeliness you fail at some part due to the sudden increase of responsibility.

By the way, Barnes and Noble is selling this book for $1.99.