Raving Fan Customers: Creating Customer Focused Teams

What is a Raving Fan Customer?

I first saw this term used in the book Raving Fans by Ken Blanchard. A “raving fan customer” is a customer that is excited about the company’s service delivery and product way beyond normal. Raving fan customers remain loyal given price pressure from a given service’s competition. These customers would go through a lot to get the company’s service. Even a price increase would keep these raving fans loyal buyers. Raving fan customers would wait in long lines; pay extra shipping fee; all for the service or product that their favorite company offers.
For more information about creating raving fan customers click here.

Raving Fan Customers: Creating Customer Focused Teams

What is a Customer Focused Team?

The word “team” is overused in business; it gets applied to any group of humans in a work setting. However, when you define a team as everything, you end up with nothing.

The best and most concise definition for corporate teams I have found comes from The Wisdom of Teams by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith. They define a team as “a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.” The crucial words are “common purpose” and “mutually accountable.” Without these, you don’t have a team.

In addition, for a team to exist there has to be adversity, challenge and tension between the team and attaining a common purpose. No adversity and challenge means no team. You do not need teams for easy tasks. Tough challenges and high performance standards, such as those associated with customer service, quality and profitability are essential for teams to come together and coalesce. Having customers consistently be raving fans of the company’s service is certainly a challenging and lofty goal.

For more information about customer focused teams click here.

Final Thoughts

I hope the above insights are valuable to you and your workgroups. They have been valuable to me as I seek to establish a high performance team in my office. I invite you to share your experiences in building high performance teams.  Please write to me: bhodes@cmiteamwork.com with your experiences.

The Fifth Rule About Teams

5. Teams develop in stages. It is good for participants to be aware of these stages because they normalize the experience of growing and developing into a high performance team. The stages are as follows:


Stage A - This is the birth of the group and there is typically some excitement and anticipation about the potential and possibility of the group.

Stage B - This is when reality sets in about how group life can be demanding and hard work. It is no longer fun and there is finger pointing between employees. Mutual accountability by most is seen as an empty concept and team members look at who to blame. This is where most teams die and where there is the need for the most support and focus. Commitment needs to be generated to work through the issues. This is also where the employee’s love of the game is needed and counted. For most groups Stage B is where the real work counts and is necessary.

Stage C - Getting behind the game stage. This is when everyone begins to align behind the group performance and what needs to happen in order to allow the group to succeed. Real group performance results are for the first time seen.

Stage D - This is the high performance stage, where the team is really using its group structure to produce some remarkable results.

For help transitioning to Stage D, click here.

The Fourth Truth About Teams

4. In sports different games constitute different types of teams. Soccer, because of the nature of the game, will require a different type of team than baseball. Work related teams are similar. Depending on the work output of the team and the dynamics of the workplace the type of work team that is required is different. The rules and dynamics that govern the work team will also be different.

For help picking the right team for your project click here.