From Satisfied Customer to Raving Fan

Two Strategies for Turning Your Customers into Raving Fans

Building a community of raving fans is about more than just adopting a feel-good tagline or marketing campaign. It’s about investing in a relationship using your customers’ success as the essential driving force that keeps them wanting to be your customer. By consistently exceeding customer expectations, actively listening to their needs, and delivering service that surprises and delights them, you can deepen customer loyalty and create passionate advocates for your brand—raving fans.

Raving fans deliver meaningful business value: They’re much more likely to renew their contracts and/or licenses, you may find that they’ll give you greater responsibility or larger scopes of work as the relationship continues, and they’re much more willing to give invaluable referrals that can fuel growth for your business.

As a raving fan of the book Raving Fans, I’ve seen the benefits that come from investing resources in deepening and strengthening relationships with customers firsthand, which is why it was one of the three key areas of focus I shared with the team when I joined MATRIXX as CEO. Last year, I wrote an article for Fast Company about the importance of building a culture within your organization that fosters the creation of customers who will sing your praises.

With this article, I wanted to share my experience in translating the principles of Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles’ book into real-world, meaningful engagement with customers, moving beyond simple customer satisfaction to creating this community of raving fans.

In a Mercuri survey from 2022, 99% of surveyed business executives said that “trust is important to build long-term relationships with their clients.” What stands out to me in this number is that, even as there seems to be near-universal acceptance of the importance of trust, I’ve frequently seen companies treat trust as a commodity that’s “only needed” when trying to close the deal. The problem, of course, is that’s not how relationships or trust work. Both are built over time, interaction by interaction, each engagement reinforcing and validating the positive experience that came before while setting expectations for the next engagement.

While being trusted should be reason enough to pursue this, there’s significant business value that comes from prioritizing trustworthiness. Just as in a personal relationship, a new business relationship always has an initial honeymoon phase that will inevitably end. That can take months or years, but anyone who’s been in business knows that there will be challenges to the relationship. That’s when all that investment in trust, painstakingly built and maintained, becomes the essential force driving the relationship through the challenging times.

While there are many ways to build and maintain trust, I’ve found two strategies that make trust foundational, not just transactional.

The first is showing your customer that you’re on the same team as often as you can. Your customer knows you have other customers—sometimes even their competitors—making it even more important to reinforce that you’re looking out for their best interests. A key tactic is regularly engaging even when there are no transactions immediately on the horizon. Empower your teams to build those connections early and often so that they, and you, can establish the credibility and resulting trust needed for tough times. Maybe it’s providing access to thought leadership or new ideas the customer may not have seen or have access to. Maybe it’s providing additional resources to help accelerate growth or mitigate problems. Maybe it’s just showing up and cheering their success.

Or, as we experienced recently with a customer, sometimes it’s getting the whole leadership team in the room. Recently, our team was working with a customer, and we had the opportunity to solve a very real problem for them. The catch was that we had to convince them that we were the best partner to make that possible, and they were reluctant to commit. Our solution was to bring our entire leadership team to join our local team in a meeting. Beyond showing commitment, I wanted our people to hear the concerns of our customer firsthand and, equally importantly, our customer to hear and feel connected to our people. Not only was it successful then, but the resulting foundation of trust has continued to power our relationship, ensuring clear channels of communication to address new challenges.

The second strategy for building and maintaining trust seems simple, but is often the hardest: being ready and willing to own responsibility for your team’s mistakes or missteps. In particular, balancing the need to own responsibility with the need to make sure your team feels supported, not abandoned, makes this difficult. Owning responsibility isn’t about pinning blame on your people; it’s about joining together with your customer to hear their feedback and acknowledge its validity. Making this initial effort can go a long way towards earning patience as you course-correct your side, while also creating conditions for your customer to acknowledge their own shortcomings in the relationship and ultimately paving the way to a better outcome.

For instance, several years ago we had a significant customer relationship challenge. They were unhappy, we were unhappy, and both sides were blaming the other. Our teams knew where we had shortcomings, and thanks to our early investments in building trust, once we acknowledged to the customer where we had let them down, they opened up about how they could do more to help us be successful in serving them. Today, not only are our teams working more closely than ever, our scope of work has expanded as a result of the trust and goodwill we earned by owning our responsibility.

Every salesperson knows that people don’t buy from companies, they buy from people. That’s true for the entire lifecycle, not just sales. Customer relationships must go deeper than just rendering services. By proactively building trust and by showing up and owning up, you can help your customers succeed. And when you demonstrate that kind of value, you can turn your customers into more than just references: You can make them raving fans.

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NOTE: This post was adapted from an article that appeared in Fast Company, October 27, 2023.