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.
Key Figures
The Area Manager
The Area Manager is the protagonist of Raving Fans. At the beginning of the book, he is in a state of panic. He has recently been promoted to his new position and is worried about proving himself. He promised his company’s president that he would strive for quality in his department; however, the president isn’t impressed with his initial efforts, telling him his ideas have too narrow of a focus. The president also reminds him that the company was built on customer service, a legacy that the previous Area Managers didn’t live up to, costing them their jobs. This conflict drives the narrative that follows and lays the groundwork for the exploration of both The Importance of Excellent Customer Service and The Relationship Between Businesses and Customers.
The Area Manager is chiefly a stand-in for the authors’ intended audience. This can be inferred because he is drawn in the broadest possible terms, with very few defining personal traits or needs other than to succeed professionally; he lacks even a name—something that most of the secondary characters have. This allows readers who may want to emulate him or learn the same lessons he does to project their own personalities or concerns onto him. Likewise, the Area Manager’s character arc consists of learning the lessons that Charlie teaches him, which is presumed to be the ultimate goal of someone reading this book.
The Area Manager does receive a certain level of characterization to allow him to react and move through the plot: He is somewhat anxious, curious, and easily confused by Charlie and his supernatural powers. Over time, he grows to respect Charlie and is very open to his ideas about Raving Fan service. The Area Manager is also thoughtful and inquisitive, eager to talk to business owners about their customer service and the three secrets of creating Raving Fans. That said, these characteristics act more as plot devices than traits; they allow for the story to move forward with its parabolic structure, using basic characters and clear, short storylines to impart a lesson. Ultimately, he learns to apply the three ways of creating Raving Fans to his own work, and this leads to him receiving his boss’s approval and excelling in his workplace, providing a pattern for readers to follow.
Charlie
Charlie is a secondary character in the book and the Area Manager’s guide through the world of customer service. He appears to the Area Manager in his time of crisis to inform him that he’s his fairy godmother and is there to introduce him to the secrets of creating Raving Fans.
Initially, Charlie is unnamed. As a supernatural creature, he doesn’t use names in the same way humans do and actually forgets about the concept altogether. When the Area Manager prompts him, he relents and says to call him Charlie. This establishes Charlie as an elusive and quirky character—one meant to engage readers’ interest. For that reason, he often serves a comedic function, as when the Area Manager asks how he can be a fairy godmother if he is a man. Charlie acknowledges that “Fairy Godmothering” is traditionally a female job but that the Celestial Equal Opportunities legislation has created a gender balance quota that he was hired under.
Charlie has several supernatural abilities. He can appear and disappear at will. He can read the Area Manager’s mind and communicate telepathically. He’s also immortal, can teleport long distances, and much more. In terms of nonmagical traits, he’s a passionate and adept golfer who is constantly asking the Area Manager to join him for games of golf, the first of which he uses to convince the Area Manager to learn about Raving Fans-level service. Much of the book’s humor is built around Charlie’s obsession with golf, which mirrors the interests of its coauthor, Kenneth Blanchard.
Charlie’s true purpose, however, is implied to be helping businesses, as several supporting characters appear to expect Charlie to visit and often credit him with helping them reach success. He functions in some way as a sage or guardian angel rather than a fairy godmother, as he protects businesses from ruin and provides advice on how to improve rather than primarily granting wishes.
Charlie is a static character, as he is unchanging through the narrative; he exists solely to help the Area Manager develop professionally. However, the dedication of the book indicates that he is a conglomeration of people the authors have known who exemplify Raving Fans-level customer service. The people are referred to as “Charlies,” so the fairy godmother is a symbol as much as he is a character.
The Raving Fans Businesses
Charlie brings the Area Manager to several businesses to teach him about the three secrets to creating Raving Fans. Each of these businesses is owned and operated by someone whom Charlie has helped in the past. The businesses are plot points in the Area Manager’s path to improvement, as they are examples of peak customer service that demonstrate everything Charlie is trying to teach.
Varley’s department store is the first stop on Charlie and the Area Manager’s journey. It is an independent store that exists in the same mall as (and in direct competition) with larger, national chain stores. When Charlie and the Area Manager first enter this location, an older gentleman in a blue pinstripe suit warmly greets them. He pins white carnations to their lapels and tells them about an offer of free coffee. When the Area Manager asks for a book that Varley’s doesn’t currently have in stock, the sales assistant serving him goes so far as to leave the shop and source the book from another shop at no additional cost. This subplot communicates Charlie’s lesson about having a vision; Varley’s vision, as a business, is to provide the above-and-beyond service that they have just experienced. The grocery store that the Area Manager and Charlie visit next, Sally’s Market, offers services like valet parking and grocery lists organized by store layout to underscore the same message.
The Area Manager learns the second secret, to learn what the customer wants, at a plant that manufactures computer parts. Unlike the other businesses that the Area Manager interacts with, this one has little direct relevance to his day-to-day life. This allows the message itself—the most customer-centric of the three lessons—to take center stage as the plant owner, Bill, explains how to balance one’s own vision against the customers’ desires. It also subtly underscores one of Bill’s points: that no business can be all things to all people, so customer service sometimes entails directing a customer elsewhere.
Finally, Charlie and the Area Manager visit a gas station where the owner, Andrew, reveals the third secret: to “Deliver the Vision Plus One Percent” (91). The focus here is on incremental improvements and tangible results, which the text underscores by rendering one of its prior metaphors, the “window” of a business’s focus, literal: One of the services the gas station provides is window-washing.
