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Raving
Fans
By Ken
Blanchard & Sheldon Bowles
William Morrow & Co., 1993 - 138 pages
First off, the book
basically talks about customer service and how companies need
to offer exemplary service to create Raving Fans, as the
authors title it. I was simply hoping to get one good
idea/thought out of the book and I did.
It was EXCEPTIONALLY easy to read, as I read the 132
pages in about 2.5 - 3 hours total.
The book has a lot of dead space and big font so you
aren’t getting tons of “filler.”
The authors try to focus on one business issue and
address it succinctly.
This book is good and bad
depending on what you expect to get out of it.
It is good because (1)
anyone can read this book (2) customer service is horrible in
today’s environment so it is timely (3) The book provides
great illustrations and (4) The authors get the point across.
Having said that, they never
talk about the business implications of what the characters
do. They say that
customers love their service or product but they negate to
talk about the cost implications.
Business is about making money, not being loved by
everyone.
Yes, our economy is very
much about selling an experience to someone but there are cost
implications to having carpeted floors in grocery stores and
full service gas stations that don’t price their gas more
expensively. There
are implications to buying a product at another store and
selling it at the exact same price to your customer (what
about the price of labor?)
At the end of the day
profits pay for the labor, rent, etc.
Businesses have to make money and this part is really
neglected in this book.
I love that they focus on
the customer and finding out what their needs are but they
negate to mention where people are in the food chain.
What does the customer value the most?
Is your business positioned to offer it?
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