The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth by Fred Reichheld

From the Publisher

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.

The Washington Post

Among management books, this one's a keeper.

Publishers Weekly

Almost everyone appreciates the importance of customer satisfaction in business, but this book takes that idea to two extremes. First, it claims that customer satisfaction is more important than any business criterion except profits. Second, it argues that customer satisfaction is best measured by one simple question, "Would you recommend this business to a friend?" Pressure for financial performance tempts executives to seek "bad profits," that is, profits obtained at the expense of frustrating or disappointing customers. Such profits inflate short-term financial results, Reichheld writes, but kill longer-term growth. Only relentless focus on customer satisfaction can generate "good profits." One unambiguous question, with answers delivered promptly, can force organizational change, he claims. Reichheld makes a strong rhetorical case for his ideas, but is weaker on supporting evidence. The negative examples he gives are either well-known failures or generic entities like "monopolies," "cell phone service providers" and "cable companies." When presenting statistics on poor performers, the names are omitted "for obvious reasons." On the other hand, the positive examples are named, but described in unrealistically perfect terms. Believable comparisons of companies with both virtues and flaws would have been more instructive. (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

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