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.
Pages 51-72Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 51-61 Summary
The Area Manager spends a few days thinking about Charlie’s lessons and then calls Charlie up for a game of golf. Charlie meets the Area Manager, but instead of going golfing, Charlie drives him to a manufacturing plant. They enter the lobby, where the walls are covered with framed awards. They are all from customers and praise the service of the plant. The plant manager, Bill, arrives and greets the Area Manager and Charlie.
In the past, Charlie acted as Bill’s fairy godmother. The Area Manager announces that he is ready to learn the second secret to creating Raving Fans, so Bill tells the Area Manager to turn over the shield on the golden bracelet Leo Varley gave him. There, the second secret is engraved: “LEARN WHAT THE CUSTOMER WANTS” (54). The Area Manager is disappointed, as it seems obvious, but Bill explains that it’s more complex than he assumes.
The Area Manager, confused, asks what the point of the first rule was, as it taught him that he needed a vision. Bill says this means that you must discover the customer’s vision of what they really want and then alter your vision to incorporate it. A vision helps a business owner present something to a customer, and the customer’s vision only means something in the context of the owner’s preexisting one. Customers also don’t often know everything they want; they only know a couple of things. Customer service helps fill in those gaps and ultimately needs to know when to ignore what a customer wants. A business can’t suit every need, so when necessary, it must tell a customer to take their vision elsewhere.
The final point scandalizes the Area Manager, who interprets it as telling the customer to leave. Bill addresses this by saying that if a customer’s vision is radically different from his, then no fit is possible. His vision can only be so flexible before it becomes utterly unrecognizable.
The Area Manager admits that he thought customer service was meeting every expectation a customer may hold but then realizes that the businesses he considers service leaders operate within a defined window of service. Bill sums it up: “The customer’s vision might change your window, but if you don’t have your own vision to start with, you’ll never put the necessary limits in place” (57).
He then emphasizes that the main way to learn a customer’s vision is to simply ask them and listen very closely to what they say and what they don’t say—customers won’t always be willing to express what’s upsetting them, so he must pay attention. Before the Area Manager can do this, however, he has to learn who his customers are.
Bill explains that his factory makes computer parts and that their main customer is the computer company and, within that company, the buyer. Nevertheless, he considers anyone who interacts with his products a customer as well, from the company engineers to the stockers in his customer’s shipping bay to the accountants who process the order receipts. All these people are customers, and if he provides good service to them, they are more likely to come back for repeat business.
Pages 61-72 Summary
Bill moves on to the second part of his lesson and explains the two traps of customer listening: “Fine” and “Silence.” Bill asks the Area Manager if he has had any poor customer service experiences lately, and the Area Manager explains that he had a cold dinner at a restaurant but didn’t see the point in complaining. The service was already so poor that he didn’t think his feedback would matter. Bill says that this is a perfect example of silence. Unhappy customers may be so disappointed that they don’t bother complaining, leaving the company with no feedback.
The Area Manager goes on to explain how the previous week, he received a shipment of supplies that were two weeks late. Before he even opened the box, he knew his quality control department would reject 8% of the supplies. However, when he spoke to the salesman of this shipment, he simply said it was “fine” because he didn’t think the supplier would care. Bill says that when a customer complains, he at least knows he’s hearing the truth. When a customer is silent or says service was “fine,” then he has a problem that is going unsaid. The way to counteract this is to ask sincere questions. Most customers are not accustomed to being listened to, so businesses must be proactive in changing this expectation.
The Area Manager asks Bill about how to fit a customer’s wants into his own vision once he’s listened to customers. Bill explains, using his own business as an example. He opened his plant with a complete vision of what it would be. He was ready to merge that with the visions his customers had but was shocked to find that theirs weren’t complete; rather, they had a handful of things they zeroed in on over everything else. As he explained earlier, he had to either incorporate these into his vision or reject them. The narrower the customer’s focus, the more important that specific vision is to the customer; however, a customer service representative must recognize that the customer cares about everything, including what they aren’t focusing on.
Before the Area Manager and Charlie leave, Bill leaves them with a final message about caring for staff. He assigns raises to staff through individual Raving Customer scores tied to each person’s customer base, be they inside or out. When they receive good reports, they get rewards, as it is important to keep people doing that over and over.
The Area Manager and Charlie finally leave for the golf club. The Area Manager reflects on what he has learned and then tells Charlie he has to take a few days to dwell on it.
The next day at work, the Area Manager calls all his managers into a meeting to focus on talking to customers, which they then spend the next three days doing. Though they only turn up three complaints, the Area Manager is disappointed to find zero Raving Fans. He realizes that he needs the third secret and calls Charlie.
Pages 51-72 Analysis
This section of the book packs in a significant amount of information about improving customer service, as it involves the lesson most focused on the customer—to learn what the customer wants—which is the focal point of service. Bill offers a series of crucial pieces of advice. Per usual, Charlie takes a back seat, allowing the business owner to demonstrate how his secrets created Raving Fans. Charlie ultimately acts as a vehicle between parables for the Area Manager, who learns something new in each setting. This sort of guide figure is a common device in didactic genres like parable or allegory—e.g., the ghosts in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol or Virgil in Dante Alighieri’s The Inferno.
Bill’s first lesson for the Area Manager is to know who his customers are. This requires broadening his scope of what a customer is, as Bill says: “Everyone from the original purchasing agent to the end user is a customer and your vision had better include every single one of them or you’ll never create Raving Fans” (60). Like Varley’s and Sally’s, Bill promotes a multifaceted approach to customer service, urging the Area Manager to consider more than a few simple products or services he can provide to whoever appears to be his direct customer base. When every step of the sales process is positive, then Raving Fans-level devotion can occur.
This lesson further emphasizes The Relationship Between Businesses and Customers. Bill describes the relationship between a business’s vision and the customer’s vision as a delicate one, noting that the former must be adjusted to the latter once the question of who the customer is has been answered. A business owner or manager must be willing to focus on what the customer claims to want—but only so long as it doesn’t fall completely outside the scope of their vision. Bill tells the Area Manager to recall everything that Sally’s offers as a grocery store, but he explains that she doesn’t offer everything that some stores do, such as rug-cleaning machines, fresh fish, or film development. He simply states, “If you want those services though, you have to go elsewhere. They are not part of her vision” (56). This instruction works to mitigate any overwhelm that the second secret might inspire in readers. While pleasing more people is important, having firm boundaries about what one offers enables one to do this. Excelling within the scope of one’s vision, not trying to suit every possible whim, makes Raving Fans. When a business exceeds expectations in its chosen field, then customers will be happy.
This leads into a discussion about listening to customers, which Bill admits is difficult and nuanced. The Area Manager, like many people, has experienced bad service and products before and has been unwilling to vocalize this; in keeping with Charlie’s assertions at the beginning of the book, his expectations are so low that he’s grown used to it. Because of this, Bill asserts that The Importance of Excellent Customer Service requires going beyond acknowledging the problems that are voiced—businesses must be on the lookout for what isn’t being voiced. Instead of being satisfied with solving the issues at hand, a customer service agent must ask the questions that get people to talk and to be honest about what’s not satisfying them. Like many of the lessons, Bill suggests that proactivity and sincerity are crucial in providing the best service and creating Raving Fans.
Like Leo and Sally, he also demonstrates how caring for staff accomplishes this task, developing the theme of Empowering and Engaging Employees. He explains his system for offering raises and rewards and then sums it up by saying, “If you don’t look after your people, they won’t look after your customers” (68). This balanced approach helps keep customer service from being wholly focused on the customers at the expense of staff, which is an unsustainable model. Ultimately, the section models how to integrate the business’s vision and the customer’s needs, which leads into the final secret to be discussed in the third section: how the Area Manager, and any customer service representative, can individually motivate themselves to be better each day.
