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. 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.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From 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 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
Among management books, this one's a keeper. -- The Washington Post
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
The Ultimate Question is compelling to read. Alright, so I listened to it. Then I went out and bought five more copies for the senior people on my team. This question (and the supporting elements) have already begun to ripple out and have an impact upon our organization. Would you refer us to your friend or family member? It places accountability upon the person being asked at a completely different level. Talk about amping it up.
The second, and in many way more important element, is tracking this effort with the same level of dilligence and seriousness of your accounting or financials. Actually making this a metric you track with results that work their way toward forecasted revenue is huge. It justifies the effort of trying to track it in the first place.
And of course at the end of the day we get to delight our customers which is why most of us started our businesses in the first place. We're learning what we can do better and reacting to it more quickly...probably because we respect the NPS system more than we ever did our customer satisfaction surveys.
I can only imagine how our organization and our work product will be over the long term.
An excellent cornerstone element!
The second, and in many way more important element, is tracking this effort with the same level of dilligence and seriousness of your accounting or financials. Actually making this a metric you track with results that work their way toward forecasted revenue is huge. It justifies the effort of trying to track it in the first place.
And of course at the end of the day we get to delight our customers which is why most of us started our businesses in the first place. We're learning what we can do better and reacting to it more quickly...probably because we respect the NPS system more than we ever did our customer satisfaction surveys.
I can only imagine how our organization and our work product will be over the long term.
An excellent cornerstone element!
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is the best book I have ever seen in terms of providing the simplest way to measure the satisfaction level of a customer. Not only does the ultimate question provide that, it also is quick/easy for clients to complete. That is also important. There is lots of data to support the effectiveness of the ultimate question, which adds to its credibility. I have successfully used this methodology in our business and have received good feedback.
120 of 155 people found the following review helpful
By G. R. Merz
Format:Hardcover
Frederick Reichheld's latest effort to enlighten CEOs and other business leaders is at its best mildly entertaining, but at its worst it is misleading and could result is some very costly and wrong decisions by potential users.
There are several critical weaknesses of this work-I will only mention a few.
First, there are many contradictions, reversals and logical inconsistencies throughout the book. Examples abound and can be discovered by anyone who spends a modicum of time with the book. Among the biggest is the reinterpretation of the satisfaction measure used by Enterprise Rental Car as a measure of net promoters (p.63). This is very confusing because earlier in the book the reader is led to believe that one needs to measure "recommendation" not "satisfaction" because Mr. Reichheld alleges that satisfaction is unrelated to revenue or profit growth. So why does the satisfaction measure works for Enterprise? More astounding Mr. Reichheld continually uses the Enterprise case throughout the book as justification for using the NPS measure.
Second, the entire premise of the Net Promoter approach is unsupported by third party peer-reviewed research articles in psychology, marketing research, or social science journals. All of the support provided in the book is based upon Mr. Reichheld's claims of research conducted by the firms he works with (Bain and Satmetrix) none of which has been reported in the aforementioned scientific publishing outlets. In fairness, the Net Promoter idea was originally promoted in a Harvard Business Review article, but HBR is not a research journal and its articles are not peer reviewed. Publication in HBR is somewhat equivalent to publication in Business Week or Fortune, and certainly does not qualify as scientific review.
Third, Mr. Reichheld confuses cause and effect with correlation. Recommendation is an effect not a cause. It occurs because something else (like a satisfactory experience) causes it to occur. Yet throughout the book, Mr. Reichheld continuously claims that recommendation's correlation with sales growth proves that it is a driver of growth. Correlation is simply a measure of association that says nothing about cause and effect. Consider the correlation between the number of churches in a community and beer sales. They are probably correlated but does one cause the other? More likely there is a third factor that is causing both to move together-like population growth. The same is true of the Net Promoter measure-it is likely being caused by something else-like satisfaction. Its correlation with sales growth is spurious and is not causal. If one examines the evidence provided by Mr. Reichheld in Appendix A this confusion of cause and effect is even more apparent-in every case shown, the time periods for the sales data predates the time periods when the Net Promoter Scores were collected. So what is causing what?
Fourth, the recommendation measure advocated by Mr. Reichheld is not a measure of "word-of-mouth" despite his claims to the contrary. Anyone who spends a nanosecond reading the question can see an obvious flaw in the interpretation of the measure. Reichheld's recommendation scale is basically a "unidirectional" scale-the scale is bounded by a positive (+) position (the "extremely likely" label) and a neutral (0) position (the "not at all" label) not a negative position. Nevertheless he interprets the scale as though it was actually measuring recommendation in a bi-directional manner by assuming that those who answer 0-6 are "detractors" who will spread negative "word-of-mouth" comments to others-but do they? Perhaps some of the respondents are detractors who answer at the lower end of the scale because there is nowhere else for them to answer, but it is also likely that some are truly advocates, just not extreme advocates. Mr. Reichheld claims this is a logical interpretation of what respondents mean-but is it true?
One final point concerns the claimed accuracy of the Net Promoter measure. In his classification of respondents Mr. Reichheld basically rescales an 11 point scale (0-10) into a three point scale (-1, 0, +1). By doing this the information content of the measure is reduced. The net effect of this, as any elementary statistics student can tell you, is that your confidence intervals are increased and your statistical power is reduced dramatically. This means that if the hapless reader of this book were to use the Net Promoter measure to assess the true value of their customer base they would be unable to detect any changes that would occur in an accurate way. For instance for a sample of about 750 customers, a user of the Net Promoter measure would be able to detect a %5 increase less than 10% of the time. A decision maker contemplating million dollar investments would do better by flipping a coin than relying upon a measure with these kinds of properties.
There are several critical weaknesses of this work-I will only mention a few.
First, there are many contradictions, reversals and logical inconsistencies throughout the book. Examples abound and can be discovered by anyone who spends a modicum of time with the book. Among the biggest is the reinterpretation of the satisfaction measure used by Enterprise Rental Car as a measure of net promoters (p.63). This is very confusing because earlier in the book the reader is led to believe that one needs to measure "recommendation" not "satisfaction" because Mr. Reichheld alleges that satisfaction is unrelated to revenue or profit growth. So why does the satisfaction measure works for Enterprise? More astounding Mr. Reichheld continually uses the Enterprise case throughout the book as justification for using the NPS measure.
Second, the entire premise of the Net Promoter approach is unsupported by third party peer-reviewed research articles in psychology, marketing research, or social science journals. All of the support provided in the book is based upon Mr. Reichheld's claims of research conducted by the firms he works with (Bain and Satmetrix) none of which has been reported in the aforementioned scientific publishing outlets. In fairness, the Net Promoter idea was originally promoted in a Harvard Business Review article, but HBR is not a research journal and its articles are not peer reviewed. Publication in HBR is somewhat equivalent to publication in Business Week or Fortune, and certainly does not qualify as scientific review.
Third, Mr. Reichheld confuses cause and effect with correlation. Recommendation is an effect not a cause. It occurs because something else (like a satisfactory experience) causes it to occur. Yet throughout the book, Mr. Reichheld continuously claims that recommendation's correlation with sales growth proves that it is a driver of growth. Correlation is simply a measure of association that says nothing about cause and effect. Consider the correlation between the number of churches in a community and beer sales. They are probably correlated but does one cause the other? More likely there is a third factor that is causing both to move together-like population growth. The same is true of the Net Promoter measure-it is likely being caused by something else-like satisfaction. Its correlation with sales growth is spurious and is not causal. If one examines the evidence provided by Mr. Reichheld in Appendix A this confusion of cause and effect is even more apparent-in every case shown, the time periods for the sales data predates the time periods when the Net Promoter Scores were collected. So what is causing what?
Fourth, the recommendation measure advocated by Mr. Reichheld is not a measure of "word-of-mouth" despite his claims to the contrary. Anyone who spends a nanosecond reading the question can see an obvious flaw in the interpretation of the measure. Reichheld's recommendation scale is basically a "unidirectional" scale-the scale is bounded by a positive (+) position (the "extremely likely" label) and a neutral (0) position (the "not at all" label) not a negative position. Nevertheless he interprets the scale as though it was actually measuring recommendation in a bi-directional manner by assuming that those who answer 0-6 are "detractors" who will spread negative "word-of-mouth" comments to others-but do they? Perhaps some of the respondents are detractors who answer at the lower end of the scale because there is nowhere else for them to answer, but it is also likely that some are truly advocates, just not extreme advocates. Mr. Reichheld claims this is a logical interpretation of what respondents mean-but is it true?
One final point concerns the claimed accuracy of the Net Promoter measure. In his classification of respondents Mr. Reichheld basically rescales an 11 point scale (0-10) into a three point scale (-1, 0, +1). By doing this the information content of the measure is reduced. The net effect of this, as any elementary statistics student can tell you, is that your confidence intervals are increased and your statistical power is reduced dramatically. This means that if the hapless reader of this book were to use the Net Promoter measure to assess the true value of their customer base they would be unable to detect any changes that would occur in an accurate way. For instance for a sample of about 750 customers, a user of the Net Promoter measure would be able to detect a %5 increase less than 10% of the time. A decision maker contemplating million dollar investments would do better by flipping a coin than relying upon a measure with these kinds of properties.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Core of success
The Ultimate Question develops a path direct at the heart of success, get at the core by listening to customers and providing superior value and evolution of products and services... Read more
Published 2 months ago by bkforester
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very insightful...
NPS...
Didn't know it and this book summary "put the dots over the i's"
Read it ant then you'll get the book for sure.
Easy to read and comprehend.
M3
Didn't know it and this book summary "put the dots over the i's"
Read it ant then you'll get the book for sure.
Easy to read and comprehend.
M3
Published 15 months ago by IQM3
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Ultimate Question
Having read and learned from Mr. Reichheld's first book, The Loyalty Effect, this book proves how extremely effective one customer question can be in cultivating and retaining... Read more
Published 19 months ago by Earl Hogan
5.0 out of 5 stars
Right to the Point
The "Ultimate Question" really takes aim at best practices for insuring customers have a high quality experience with the business they deal with. Read more
Published 22 months ago by Hal Tearse
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent read!
This is a great book for anyone interested in understanding net promoter score and how to capture customer loyalty. Read more
Published 23 months ago by Lindsey B. Donat
5.0 out of 5 stars
Concept: 5 Starts
It's hard to deny the power behind the "Ultimate Question". It's a simple question you can use to survey your clients, and more importantly, align the company with. Read more
Published on May 23, 2011 by Adam Temple
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ultimate Question Inspiring
This is one of the great business books of our time. Very easy to follow and extremely logical. Any business can implement the ideas discussed here.
Published on April 17, 2011 by Case
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Ultimate Question; Radable for recreation as well in professional...
The Ultimate Question by Fred F Reichheld is a book that will give pleasure in reading when red by a person that enjoys succes stories about interessting company's
after... Read more
after... Read more
Published on March 18, 2011 by Ian Reijnders
5.0 out of 5 stars
Love this CD Set
I would recommend buying both the book and the CD. Reichheld has it pegged with NPS. Any company focused on sustainable growth should know their NPS and better yet, how to improve... Read more
Published on March 9, 2011 by Joshua Cryer
5.0 out of 5 stars
The book the Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth
I received the book, The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth, and the book was in wonderful shape and at a fourth of the cost. Never pay full price again. Read more
Published on February 14, 2011 by Joseph Lucero
Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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