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.
Themes
The Relationship Between Businesses and Customers
Raving Fans adamantly portrays customer service as part of a larger dynamic between a business and its customers rather than a one-way service to alleviate confusion or perform damage control. The need to surpass customer expectations arises from the fact that customers are the lifeblood of commerce; it can only harm a business to disregard their satisfaction. While businesses provide products or services and customer service is meant to ease this process, the text also argues that customer service is a tool to help businesses grow rather than merely operate at existing standards. The better customer service is, the happier the customer is, and the more a business thrives.
In teaching the Area Manager how to better run his customer service team, Charlie offers him three lessons: Decide What You Want, Discover What The Customer Wants, and Deliver Plus One. The first two are relevant to the concept of a business-customer relationship. Much as interpersonal dynamics require an understanding of the needs of all individuals involved, a commercial dynamic requires discerning the needs of both parties. The first rule involves establishing a vision for the company. This is often set forth by the business owner but reaffirmed and maintained by managers and other staff, and it involves not only knowing what one wants for one’s company but also developing a perfect and customer-focused image of how one wants it to look: A business owner should be able to visualize every step of the customer’s interaction with customer service from start to finish. Charlie cites this as the first rule because a business cannot effectively offer a product if its owner and staff don’t have a firm idea of what they want to provide.
After this, Charlie instructs the Area Manager to discover what the customer wants. He says the Area Manager must learn what the customer wants and deliver that to them. This second rule seems at first to be in contradiction with rule one. However, it is actually in dialogue with it. A manager or owner must have a vision to present to the customer that can be adjusted to meet their needs. As Charlie states, “First, unless you have your own vision, how can you understand the customers’? […] Second, when you find out what customers really want, what their vision is, it will likely focus on just one or two things. Your own vision has to fill in the gaps” (55). It’s a difficult balance, but it’s the one that customer service agents must constantly strive for, the work suggests. Beyond this, while Charlie emphasizes prioritizing the customer—to the point that a staff member at Varley’s goes to a different store to buy the book the Area Manager requests—he also states that there are times when a customer simply cannot obtain what they want at an individual business. This requires a manager to stay true to the business’s vision and help their customer find an alternative elsewhere.
The two lessons serve to demonstrate how a business’s customer service and the customers themselves have a symbiotic relationship—one that requires constant attention, thoughtfulness, adaptability, and care. If a business adjusts its visions—particularly for reasons that deprioritize the customer—it risks leaving its customer base confused or unsatisfied. Meanwhile, if a customer’s needs are not heard, then a business will often fail to meet them; this will quickly be reflected in customer retention and keep that business from creating Raving Fans.
The Importance of Excellent Customer Service
The second theme of Raving Fans is the importance of excellent customer service. The book suggests that even if product or service quality falters, customer service can improve the experience for a customer and ensure their retention. By contrast, middling or poor service can easily harm a business even if it excels in other respects.
The narrative that follows underscores both points. Every attempt by the Area Manager and Charlie to improve their service reinforces how essential it is to the success of a company. As the main source of customer service advice, Charlie expresses early on that the state of modern customer service is poor and implicates the Area Manager in this, saying, “Service is so awful customers expect to be abused. Cold food in restaurants, dirty public washrooms, late deliveries, rejected parts, lost orders, lazy staff—it’s all normal. […] Your customer service slogan should be: No Worse Than the Competition” (25). He asserts that the only reason that customers put up with this is because the state of service across all businesses is so poor that they believe that it is normal. He laments this and claims that not only is customer service essential but that it can be developed into a major competitive edge for businesses willing to invest time and energy in it.
Customer service efficacy is traditionally measured through customer retention. If a business has a higher level of return business, it can be assumed that customer service is satisfactory. However, a central argument of Raving Fans is that satisfying customer expectations isn’t enough; this just means that they will stick with a business as long as they have nowhere better to go. Raving Fans-level service should be so effective that it not only satisfies a customer’s expectation but also turns them into vocal fans of the business in question.
One of the ways that Charlie advises the Area Manager to accomplish this is through the final instruction in his set of three rules: Deliver Plus One. The final rule is a contraction of a full phrase, “Deliver the Vision Plus One Percent” (91). This requires consistently delivering the vision developed via the first two rules. On top of this, those in customer service should seek to improve this vision by 1% every week so that their customer service is constantly improving. In doing so, customers’ expectations will constantly be surpassed, making them not only loyal but also enthusiastic.
Empowering and Engaging Employees
With its emphasis on delivering the highest-quality customer service, Raving Fans runs the risk of overwhelming employees—particularly those in customer-facing roles, who may feel pressure to achieve an impossible standard of service. The text therefore takes steps to combat this perception, suggesting that the three secrets it outlines benefit not only the customer and the business but also the average employee.
This begins with establishing a clear vision, as defining expectations upfront gives employees a goal to work toward. This improves service, but it also sidesteps the frustration that arises when employees feel they are being judged on unclear and impossible standards. An employee at Varley’s, for example, remarks that at a prior job, she only ever received negative feedback. This was demoralizing and left her with no sense of what she was doing right, limiting her understanding of what her role entailed.
The idea of “delivering plus one” also emphasizes clear and actionable guidelines for employees. Asking staff to improve by 1% week over week keeps expectations attainable but also gives workers something to aim for, ensuring they remain challenged by their roles. By contrast, a business that demands no improvement from its employees may not merely stagnate but backslide, as bored workers are less motivated to meet existing standards.
Ultimately, Raving Fans suggests that the tension between employee and customer satisfaction need not be a tension at all, as employees are themselves a kind of “customer.” Indeed, many of the testimonials the Area Manager hears from employees suggest the parallels between the two roles. The anecdote about only receiving negative feedback, for example, echoes the idea that customer feedback skews toward extremes; much as a business should be proactive about soliciting feedback of all kinds, it should be proactive about providing feedback to its employees rather than intervening only when a problem arises. Similarly, the 1% rule aims to keep both customers and employees engaged. Just as the relationship between customers and business broadly is symbiotic, so too is the relationship between customers and employees specifically.
