Product Description One Question Can Determine Your Business?s Future. Do You Know the Answer?
CEOs regularly announce ambitious growth targets, then fail to achieve them. The reason? Their growing addiction to bad profits. These corporate steroids boost short-term earnings but alienate customers. They undermine growth by creating legions of detractors?customers who complain loudly about the company and switch to competitors at the earliest opportunity.
Now loyalty expert Fred Reichheld shows how to reverse the equation, turning customers into promoters who generate good profits and true, sustainable growth. The key: one simple question?Would you recommend us to a friend??that allows companies to track promoters and detractors and produces a clear measure of an organization?s performance through its customers? eyes. In industry after industry, this "Net Promoter Score" is the single most reliable indicator of a company?s ability to grow.
Based on extensive research, The Ultimate Question shows how companies can rigorously measure Net Promoter statistics, help managers improve them, and create communities of passionate advocates that stimulate innovation. Vivid stories from leading-edge organizations illustrate the ideas in practice.
Practical and compelling, this is the one book?and the one tool?no growth-minded leader can afford to miss.
Terrific Resource for understanding your real 'referral rate' January 6, 2009 If you are involved in growing a business of any size - hundreds of people down to a one-person shop, The Ultimate Question is a great resource to understand what Reicheld calls your Net Promoter Score. We all think that people will refer us - will they actually? Have we earned the right to a referral? The Ultimate Question creates a framework for asking these questions and working on the answers.
5% content, 95% filler November 17, 2008 Unfortunately, this is another business book that would be a lot better as a 3-5 page magazine article. Reichheld starts with some good ideas such as using a more simple metric, viewing customer relationships as an entire experience instead of a set of transactions, and viewing customers as "promoters," "passives," and "detractors." He then proceeds to beat these good ideas to death with a bunch of non sequitur case examples and conclusions that aren't very helpful or actionable to anyone in a position to put this system into place.
I would say that the majority of this book is dedicated to this kidn of content that doesn't add any value. The fact that he has to constantly say how the idea of NPS is new and revolutionary should be a red flag in itself.
The book isn't a whole waste, so it still might be worth checking out. Just be careful not to buy into its own self-hype.
At some points I thought that the book might just be a huge advertisement for Bain and Satmetrix. Since NPS by its nature is very broad and general, maybe not very actionable, it's a great excuse to suggest consulting services to help you implement the system. How convenient!
The fact that they also dare to charge this amount for a book of such little actual content is also laughable.
Organization changing ideas and easy to understand October 9, 2008 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A well researched and easy to understand book, that if used with a focus to increase service quality through customer interaction and feedback will offer short cuts to success.
Food for Thought August 23, 2008 As the owner of a very small business I am not going to be implementing any type of large-scale statistical analysis to determine NPS as the book suggests - it is just too expensive for my company. However, this book does provide a lot of fodder for thinking about customer service, what your company is doing, what it could and should be doing better and how you can keep in contact with your customers to keep honest and proactive in making their interactions with your firm as positive as possible. I think that tracking your Net Promoter Score is less important than making the Golden Rule a "philosophical cornerstone" of your business. I don't know if companies like USAA, Amazon and E-Bay track their NPS, but they would be delighting their customers and receiving tons of word-of-mouth advertising from happy "promoters" even if Fred Reichheld had never written this book. The short story: I got a lot of great ideas for my company from this book.
Not Enough Content for An Entire Book May 29, 2008 The points in this book could have easily been stated in a pamphlet. The author states the same points over and over in different words for two hundred pages. The most impressive thing about this book is that the author manages to say the same thing in so many different ways. You could get the entire content of the book by reading the first two pages of the preface. I only read this book because it was given to me by my boss who insisted I read it over the weekend. I never would have chosen to read it on my own. I can't imagine how anyone could possibly need to have two points repeated so many times over so many pages. Also, what's with the "all rights reserved" symbol on the phrase "net promoter score?" Why would you bother? What's the likelihood that someone is going to steal the phrase "net promoter score..." Reading this book is like taking a road trip with a used car salesman. It's full of fluff and pushy salesman-like jargon. Also, many of the points expressed are not just off, they're completely wrong. The author presents eBay as an example of a company that is supportive of their customers and highly rated by them as having excellent customer service, when in fact eBay's weak point is that customers frequently complain that eBay sends them canned answers that have nothing to do with their questions in response to their inquiries. Also, the author outright states that there was a point in time where all businesses were small businesses and then suddenly businesses became larger and lost focus on their customers. Not only is this completely wrong it doesn't make any sense at all. There have been large and small businesses as long as there have been accounting practices. I highly discourage consumption of this book unless your boss makes you read it.
