The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth

CEOs regularly announce ambitious growth targets, then fail to achieve them. The reason? Too many companies are addicted to bad profits. These corporate steroids boost short-term earnings but alienate customers. They undermine growth by creating legions of detractors – customers who sully the firm’s reputation 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 in its customers' eyes. Analysis shows that, on average, increasing this Net Promoter Score (NPS) by a dozen points versus competitors can double a company’s growth rate.

While easy to grasp, this metric represents a radical change in the way companies manage customer relationships and organize for growth. Rather than relying on notoriously ineffective customer satisfaction surveys, companies can use NPS to measure customer relationships as rigorously as they now measure profits. What’s more, NPS finally enables CEOs to hold employees accountable for treating customers right. It clarifies the link between the quality of a company’s customer relationships and its growth prospects.

Based on extensive research and rich with vivid examples of organizations that have pioneered NPS in practice, The Ultimate Question offers hands-on guidance on how to:

• Distinguish good profits from bad
• Measure NPS and benchmark performance against world-class standards
• Quantify the economic value generated by customer word of mouth
• Assign accountability for improving customer relationships
• Identify core customers and set priorities for strategic investments
• Move customers beyond mere “satisfaction” to true loyalty
• Create communities of passionate advocates that stimulate innovation and growth

Practical and compelling, The Ultimate Question will help you solve your organization’s growth dilemma.

About the Author

Fred Reichheld is a Director Emeritus of Bain & Company, and in January 1999 was elected the firm’s first Bain Fellow. Reichheld joined Bain in 1977 and was elected to the partnership in 1982. His consulting work and research have focused on helping clients achieve superior results through improvements in customer, employee, and partner loyalty. In the June 2003 edition of Consulting magazine, Reichheld was included on the list of the world’s top twenty-five consultants.

Reichheld’s work has been widely covered in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Fortune, BusinessWeek, and Economist. The Economist refers to him as the “high priest” of loyalty; the New York Times declares, “[He] put loyalty economics on the map.” He is the author of eight Harvard Business Review articles on the subject, and his two previous books, The Loyalty Effect (1996) and Loyalty Rules! (2001), were published by Harvard Business School Press. He is a frequent speaker to major business forums and groups of CEOs and senior executives worldwide.