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Raving Fans Essay

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FSE Assignment - Raving Fans
Kyle Tofflemire
Ken Blanchard’s "Raving Fans" is a book that details an interesting business approach. The protagonist, who is called “The Area Manager” is new to his job and doesn’t know where to start. Luckily, he’s visited by a person (or being) known only as “Charlie”. Charlie’s purpose is to show The Area Manager the three "magic secrets" to make what he calls raving fans, the ultimate in customer service. Charlie emphasizes that satisfying customers isn’t good enough nowadays, and that the best way to be a successful is to create raving fans. Be different, be better. Throughout the book, Charlie teaches The Area Manager about the mysterious "three secrets" by taking him to different businesses that use …show more content…

This makes it an important skill to be able to see what they really mean. For example, if a customer is silent, it is important you recognize it and start to ask more sincere questions so that the customer opens up, and informs you what they want. The third and final secret to creating raving fans is learned from Andrew, the manager of a chain of gas stations. The secret is “discover what the customer wants – deliver plus one”. This means that it's important to always deliver, no matter what. Consistency is the key. The "plus one" part refers to slowly improving your service so that it’s easy to stay consistent. There's no point in trying to deliver a service that is too big to consistently be there. If you improve by one percent per week, it will make a huge difference after only a year. Customers will become a raving fan if they know they can come back and count on the same great service. A concept we learned about in Business Leadership that relates to the main point in this book is control systems. We looked at the importance of control in management and learned about various different systems. In this book, systems are shown to greatly help customer service. Systems are predetermined ways to get a specific result and still ensure consistency. Andrew, the plant manager said “Systems give you a floor, not a ceiling”. Thus, a system is the sort of thing you build on, a starting point. An external control measure, for example, involves

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