43 pages • 1 hour read
Ken Blanchard, Sheldon BowlesRaving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Foreword-Page 50Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Foreword Summary
Harvey Mackay, a businessman and writer, explains that successful businesses share a focus on customer service. This is a widely accepted tenet in theory, but it is relatively rare in practice. Mackay attributes this to the lessons managers learn in business school, which treat customers as a monolith to manipulate via clever advertising. Nevertheless, Mackay sees signs of a shift. The quality of consumer goods has reached a point where further improvement will lead to diminishing returns for businesses. By contrast, improvement in customer service could yield substantial rewards.
Mackay introduces the book’s coauthors, Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles, who he says have distilled the practice of customer engagement to a few core principles. Mackay knows both men personally—Blanchard mentored him in the writing of his own book, and Blanchard, Bowles, and Mackay were all involved in the Young Presidents’ Organization—and vouches for their expertise. Mackay considers Raving Fans so important that he plans to give copies to all his employees.
Pages 18-23 Summary
A freshly promoted Area Manager for an unnamed business is worried about his new responsibilities. He has assured his company president (“the President”) that he will focus on total quality for his department only to be told that his focus is too broad. The President reminds him that the company is built on customer service, something the Area Manager’s predecessors forgot; if they had remembered that, then maybe they would still hold their positions. This increases the new Area Manager’s panic.
Amid his crisis, a man suddenly appears on the couch in his office. He is holding a golf bag and dressed in sports clothes. The Area Manager demands that the stranger explain himself. He introduces himself as Charlie, a fairy godmother who specializes in customer service. He claims he has come to the Area Manager to teach him the secrets to securing “Raving Fans,” the ultimate goal in customer service.
The Area Manager doesn’t believe Charlie, who offers to go play a game of golf with him. To get him out of his office, the Area Manager accepts his offer. On the way, Charlie explains that the standards of customer service are extremely low and so universally poor that customers don’t notice that the situation is dire. He mentions that the Area Manager’s company is particularly bad and that he is there to help fix it. The Area Manager is uncertain, but he agrees that the company’s customer service is poor.
Pages 23-36 Summary
Charlie and the Area Manager arrive at the golf course and begin playing. Charlie secretly empowers the Area Manager’s golf swing, leading to a very successful game. This convinces the Area Manager to listen to Charlie’s advice.
Charlie tells the Area Manager that he needs to create Raving Fans to be successful. Service is so poor that customers expect to be mistreated. He says that the Area Manager’s slogan should be, “No worse than the Competition” (25). He explains that satisfied customers aren’t enough; they need to be actively enthusiastic and rave to others about the quality of a company’s customer service. He says that achieving this requires learning the three magic secrets of creating Raving Fans. To explain what he means, he takes the Area Manager on a trip to several other businesses that Charlie has helped before.
Charlie directs the manager to drive to a mall and enter Varley’s department store. This independent store can compete with large national chains thanks to its customer service. When the Area Manager enters, a greeter pins a white carnation on his lapel and informs him that they have free coffee to offer. When they visit the restroom, they find it is kept in stunning condition. Charlie advises the Area Manager to buy his wife a book, and when the staff informs him that this book isn’t in stock, they also ask the Area Manager to wait while they leave to store to buy it elsewhere at no extra cost.
Charlie brings the Area Manager to meet the owner of the store, Leo Varley. His desk is in the center of the shop floor and features a sign that welcomes anybody who would like to speak to him. Leo Varley explains that he wants to be involved in the day-to-day running of the store and that he’d be too far removed if he had a separate office. The Area Manager asks Leo how he can afford to hire greeting staff and give away free carnations and coffee. Leo replies that he can’t afford not to do it; these are parts of the shop’s central ethos and what he wants in his business.
He gives the Area Manager a gold bracelet with the first rule of creating Raving Fans engraved on it: “DECIDE WHAT YOU WANT” (34). This initially confuses the Area manager, and Leo says that Charlie will elaborate.
On the way out of Varley’s, Charlie and the Area Manager stop to speak to a member of staff. She explains that she enjoys working there. She prefers it to her old job, where she was treated like a machine and the only feedback she received was criticism. Now, she is rewarded for good customer service, which encourages her to go the extra mile.
Pages 37-50 Summary
Charlie, using his supernatural powers, reminds the Area Manager that he has to do some grocery shopping and directs him to a store called Sally’s Market. In the parking lot, a valet greets them, parks their car, and informs them of in-store offers. When they enter the store, Charlie gets his shoes shined, and the Area Manager is assisted by a member of the staff who puts his grocery list into a computer system. This arranges his list by order of where the products appear in the store so that he can map his route through the aisles more efficiently. It also offers healthy alternatives and shows a range of special offers.
The owner of the grocery store, Sally, invites the Area Manager and Charlie for coffee. She has an existing relationship with Charlie, who helped her develop her customer service strategy eight years ago. She reiterates the first rule for creating Raving Fans and then she shares what the Area Manager must do when deciding what he wants: “Create a vision of perfection centered on the customer” (47).
She offers context about how this rule altered the direction of her business. When she met Charlie, her store was struggling, and she was close to bankruptcy. She was ashamed of her store, but when she learned the first rule of creating Raving Fans, she sat down and envisioned the perfect store. Once she had that vision, she built her store around it. This led to her putting in extra effort to surpass customer needs and expectations, and her business thrived.
The Area Manager leaves the store with Charlie, eager to learn the second secret for creating Raving Fans. Charlie says he’ll share it soon and then vanishes. The Area Manager spends the next few days reflecting on his lesson and trying to imagine the best customer-centered experience. Charlie rings him a few days later for a game of golf.
Pages 18-50 Analysis
The first section of the novel introduces the primary characters, the protagonist’s major conflict, and the narrative structure of Raving Fans. Though it is a book offering business management advice, it utilizes a fictionalized style to impart the lessons the authors seek to teach in a more practical and engaging way. This begins with brief sentences meant to capture the Area Manager’s emotions shortly after his promotion: “Panic. Palpitations and Panic. He was aware of sweaty palms and cold feet as he wandered around his new office, the Area Manager’s office” (18). Like many works of fiction, Raving Fans begins in media res as a way of quickly capturing readers’ attention; people must keep reading if they want to learn why the Area Manager is panicking. The opening also establishes how desperate the Area Manager is for a solution. This is vital to the unfolding plot, as it leaves him more willing to accept the help that Charlie offers despite the fantastical nature of his “fairy godmother” status and magical powers.
Charlie is depicted as a bit sly in the beginning, but his subterfuge serves a practical and benevolent purpose: making the Area Manager trust him and thus accept his advice. He magically improves the Area Manager’s game of golf to put him in a better mood, and he only answers questions or offers information in a way that suits him. Once the Area Manager is willing to participate in Charlie’s journey toward better customer service, they can embark on the more parabolic aspect of the narrative, which involves interacting with the businesses to whom Charlie has already given Raving Fans advice. From this point on, Charlie is relatively straightforward in his dealings with the Area Manager.
What both Varley’s and Sally’s Market have in common is immediate engagement from staff. At Varley’s, the Area Manager receives a flower pinned to his lapel and an offer for free coffee; meanwhile, the staff at Sally’s offers a valet service and helps organize the best route and selections for his shopping trip. This relates to Charlie’s lessons on proactivity and engaging with customers directly, emphasizing the theme of The Relationship Between Businesses and Customers. Instead of treating customer service as a last resort for customers in need, they reach out to the customer first, establishing a dynamic that is open and positive.
This general relationship is personalized through the interactions with Leo Varley and Sally. Leo embodies accessible customer service by placing his desk within reach—literally—of all his customers; this contrasts with more opaque or inaccessible customer service practices that may harm customer retention. Leo’s decision is so striking to the Area Manager that he asks, “Is this the first secret of creating Raving Fans?” (32). As the Area Manager represents commonplace standards or expectations of customer service, his surprise shows that the lessons of Raving Fans are above and beyond the norm. Nevertheless, Leo and Charlie react with nonchalance, as if this level of accessibility should be the norm, thus tonally reinforcing The Importance of Excellent Customer Service.
When Leo and Charlie introduce the first actual secret—to decide what one wants—the lesson seems confusing at first. However, Charlie explains that having customer service standards that seem unnecessary and specific, like having a greeter or working on the shop floor, is part of Varley’s greater vision: to offer the customer a wonderful shopping experience with useful customer service within reach. Sally further emphasizes this. Her business practices may seem outlandish—having a valet for a grocery store is something with which few people are likely familiar. This aligns with the book’s parabolic style, which uses exemplary, sometimes unrealistic figures to demonstrate what behaviors or standards people should strive for. Sally is highly enthusiastic about the customer service style that has allowed her business to thrive, which derives from the fact that it’s about more than just customer service. It’s a comprehensive approach to improving each facet of a business. Sally reaffirming what she wanted from her store made her feel better and heightened the customer experience.
As the authors note throughout the book, establishing a clear vision also helps with Empowering and Engaging Employees. In Varley’s, a staff member stops the Area Manager to say how she was disregarded by her old managers: “[M]y bad attitude was reflected in the way I treated their customers. It’s the exact opposite at Varley’s. Now I help people and enjoy doing it. […] It’s nice to do a good job and be recognized for it” (35-36). This demonstrates how the book’s emphasis on excellent customer service extends beyond merely what a business does for customers; it entails improving a business at every level to benefit everyone. Sally’s employees are equally enthusiastic and helpful, indicating that Sally supports them and offers the encouragement they need to rise above standard levels of customer care.
