This week, we launched our Raving Fan program at Livewire, and I wanted to share how we approached it in the hopes that you might want to shamelessly copy and steal everything (CASE) for your company (kidding, of course. Mi casa es su casa). In case you aren’t acquainted with the term, a Raving Fan refers you to their friends, mentions staff by name in reviews, forgives small mistakes, and is a repeat customer. The more Raving Fans, the fewer new customers we need to scratch out of the hard ground and the better our industry becomes.
Huge kudos to our COO, Stacy Hicks, for spearheading the creation of a one-pager (see image below) connecting each person’s role to Raving Fan creation.
One of the biggest pitfalls we’ve seen with Livewire’s other initiatives is that as much as we might want to drive everybody chipping in and rowing in the same direction, unless somebody can connect their role to moving the needle on the final product, it can easily unravel when they don’t quickly see the value. This is where most initiatives go to die.
We wanted to do something where we could say to each person, no matter their role (accounting, project management, sales, purchasing, or installation), “This is how you can make a difference in our Raving Fan factory and we can’t do it without you.”
We further extended the “what’s-in-it-for-me” energy by creating wallet cards (see below) with a QR code link to our Raving Fan dashboard, where everyone can see how we’re doing at a glance.
I kicked off the Raving Fan launch by telling a story of my own. In this case, it was a yarn about an angry customer and his ex-wife at 5:00 PM a few Fridays ago. You can read all about that here. I used it to say “Hey, look, we all have a choice in the moment to run toward the fire or push it off on others. Either one is fine, but one of those choices is the difference between merely adequate and a job that’s going to create a Raving Fan.”
I then turned around and asked the entire company to tell stories about how their colleagues have created Raving Fans. We have physical pins where we publicly praise each other for living our core values, so it was easy to tweak the formula a little. It was a little slow to start. Granted, our meetings are Wednesday mornings at 7:00 AM, so that could have had something to do with it. Eventually, everybody got into the spirit, and before long, stories were flying back and forth across the room with people praising and pinning each other. It’s always amazing to me how low-cost and high-yield recognition can be, especially when it’s peer-to-peer.
Related: The Raving Fan Factory
We’re now a good four days post-launch. We challenged each of our employees to grow our fan score and keep it above a lagging average of 10 for the entire quarter. If we achieve that, we’ll all go as a team to a fun indoor mini-golf place called Hotel Green in Richmond, where everyone’s been clamoring to go.
The Raving Fan Factory initiative is up to us, but by talking about it, socializing it, and asking one simple question, “How many Raving Fans did we create last week?” in our departmental meetings, I think we’re off to a good start. I’ll keep you posted as we go along.
What are you doing to create Raving Fans inside your business?
Stay frosty, and see you in the field.
