Answering the Ultimate Question: How Net Promoter Can Transform Your Business

Fred Reichheld's 2006 book The Ultimate Question—that question being, "How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?"—challenged the conventional wisdom of customer satisfaction programs. It coined the terms "bad profits" and "good profits" and pointed to a faster, much more accurate way of gauging customers' real loyalty to a company, introducing a quantitative measure (the Net Promoter Score) for establishing a baseline and effectively tracking changes going forward. Richard Owen and Laura Brooks are co-developers, along with Reichheld, of the methodology behind answering the question. In this book, Owen and Brooks tell how—based on a variety of real case studies—to actually embed Net Promoter discipline in organizations of all types.

Answering the Ultimate Question builds on the link between Net Promoter Scores and business growth and profitability. Combined with an operational discipline to increase Promoters and reduce Detractors, Net Promoter represents a potential win-win for businesses and their customers. The Net Promoter Score offers a near-real-time metric closely coupled and correlated with precipitating actions. Instead of waiting months for long, drawn-out surveying, analysis, and interpretations, Net Promoter will affect real, positive change for those organizations that apply it correctly. Drawing on illustrative case-study findings from the more than eighty companies for which the authors have helped to put Customer Experience Management and Net Promoter disciplines in place, this book is designed to help apply Net Promoter correctly, and foster growth and profitability in any organization.

About the Authors

Laura L. Brooks, Ph.D., is widely regarded, along with Fred Reichheld, as the co-developer of the Net Promoter Score. Years of research, collection of recommend scores to the Net Promoter question (How likely is it that you would recommend Company X to a friend or colleague?), and understanding follow -onpurchase behavior across multiple industries led Brooks and Reichheld to discover the power of Net Promoter. Since the publication of Reichheld’s seminal article on Net Promoter in Harvard Business Review in 2003, Brooks has worked with leading companies to create effective Net Promoter programs. As a consultant and practitioner, she has extensive experience in advising organizations in the areas of employee opinion surveys, organizational development, customer satisfaction, management development, team building, quality, job evaluation, and designing compensation strategies.

Before joining Satmetrix as vice president of research and business consulting, she worked as a project director and manager for several consulting firms that specialized in statistical and psychological tools for measuring customer satisfaction and employee performance. Brooks has published on inter-rater reliability and validity in behavioral research methods in computers and also has participated in the survey-specific portion of the Malcolm Baldrige Award. She holds a Ph.D. in industrial/organizational psychology from Rice University and a B.S. in psychology from Duke University.

Richard Owen arrived in the United States from Great Britain to attend graduate school at the MIT Sloan School of Management after several years as a management consultant with KPMG. Pure luck and lack of work opportunities led him to join a struggling Dell Computer Corporation in 1992, where his greatest hope was that the company would survive longer than his work visa. Things turned out ever so slightly better than expected. During eight years at Dell, he had the opportunity to participate in the reengineering of the company’s supply chain and the launch of numerous international businesses, and he found himself as a vice president and general manager in Dell Japan. In the late 1990s he was responsible for Dell’s Internet business worldwide and saw it grow to 50 percent of the company’s total revenue.

Owen left Dell in 2000 and moved to California to head up AvantGo, a mobile technology company that he took public on the Nasdaq market and that was subsequently sold to Sybase. He joined Satmetrix, a technology and services company in California, in 2003 as CEO. Owen has a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and economics from the University of Nottingham, England.