Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service

Raving Fans is a nonfiction professional development book; however, rather than being written in the instructive tone typical of this genre, it is written in a third-person narrative style. The Area Manager’s characterization is intentionally vague, allowing him to serve as a surrogate for the intended audience of the book. He has the same concerns as the likely audience and is similarly unfamiliar with Blanchard’s three secrets for creating Raving Fans. Charlie serves as an abstraction of Blanchard’s ideas as well as a device to carry the Area Manager from example to example. Because the book’s explicit purpose in using stories is to teach lessons about ideal customer service, it embodies a parabolic narrative structure.

Parables are fictional stories, often short, with implicit moral lessons; the primary purpose of the parable is to teach something to its audience. The genre’s religious connotations derive from the frequent use of parables in the Bible, such as that of the Good Samaritan. However, parables can also impart secular lessons.