Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service

Raving Fans is a nonfiction professional development book; however, rather than being written in the instructive tone typical of this genre, it is written in a third-person narrative style. The Area Manager’s characterization is intentionally vague, allowing him to serve as a surrogate for the intended audience of the book. He has the same concerns as the likely audience and is similarly unfamiliar with Blanchard’s three secrets for creating Raving Fans. Charlie serves as an abstraction of Blanchard’s ideas as well as a device to carry the Area Manager from example to example. Because the book’s explicit purpose in using stories is to teach lessons about ideal customer service, it embodies a parabolic narrative structure.

Parables are fictional stories, often short, with implicit moral lessons; the primary purpose of the parable is to teach something to its audience. The genre’s religious connotations derive from the frequent use of parables in the Bible, such as that of the Good Samaritan. However, parables can also impart secular lessons. Raving Fans embodies this storytelling method, as the main character navigates a series of simplistic plot beats expressly designed to deliver lessons about customer service.

Parabolic narratives usually have one of three structures: similitudes (which draw their analogies from recurring facets of everyday life), a traditional parable (which uses a more extended and often unusual narrative as a kind of allegory for its message), and exemplary stories. This book falls into the third category, as it depicts “exemplary” individuals or businesses as role models for the main character (and thus the audience). Charlie brings the Area Manager to visit several businesses that encapsulate the ideal of Raving Fan’s service, and the Area Manager enjoys a positive firsthand experience in every setting. These examples are intended to be easier to internalize than abstracted advice, but they are also not symbolic in the way that similitudes and traditional parables are; the examples are both drawn from and about business.

Parables are usually brief, so they often feature in children’s stories, as books for young readers are often short, easy to understand, and explicitly didactic. However, red helicopter by James Lee is another nonfiction title that uses parables to provide advice on leadership in business.