The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth and over 360,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle – Amazon’s new wireless reading device. Learn more

 

or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
 
Express Checkout with PayPhrase
What's this? | Create PayPhrase
Sorry!
X
More Buying Choices
123 used & new from $4.00
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
 
   
The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth
 
 
Share your own customer images
Search inside this book
Start reading The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don’t have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here.
 
  

The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth (Hardcover)

~ Fred Reichheld (Author) "Too many companies these days can't tell the difference between good profits and bad..." (more)
Key Phrases: bad profits, customer promoters, more promoters, Net Promoter Scores, American Express, Golden Rule (more...)
3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (69 customer reviews)
List Price: $29.95
Price: $17.51 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details
You Save: $12.44 (42%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Want it delivered Friday, November 13? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details
54 new from $6.99 65 used from $4.00 4 collectible from $19.95

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
  Kindle Edition $14.01 -- --
  Hardcover $17.51 $6.99 $4.00
  Audio, Download Offsite Link $15.73 or less with new Audible membership

Frequently Bought Together

The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth + Answering the Ultimate Question: How Net Promoter Can Transform Your Business + The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value
Price For All Three: $49.49

Show availability and shipping details

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value

The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value

by Frederick F. Reichheld
4.7 out of 5 stars (27)  $12.21
Loyalty Rules: How Today's Leaders Build Lasting Relationships

Loyalty Rules: How Today's Leaders Build Lasting Relationships

by Frederick F. Reichheld
4.1 out of 5 stars (13)  $12.89
The Ultimate Question

The Ultimate Question

by Fred Reichheld
4.0 out of 5 stars (4)  $19.77
Chief Customer Officer : Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action

Chief Customer Officer : Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action

by Jeanne Bliss
4.9 out of 5 stars (15)  $18.45
Customer Loyalty: How to Earn It, How to Keep It

Customer Loyalty: How to Earn It, How to Keep It

by Jill Griffin
5.0 out of 5 stars (22)  $15.61
› Explore similar items

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.


Review

Among management books, this one's a keeper. -- The Washington Post
See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

More About the Author

Frederick F. Reichheld
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

› Visit Amazon's Frederick F. Reichheld Page
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Search Inside This Book:
Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
Too many companies these days can't tell the difference between good profits and bad. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
bad profits, customer promoters, more promoters
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Net Promoter Scores, American Express, Golden Rule, Community of Promoters-By Listening, One Goal, Four Seasons, Andy Taylor, The Rules of Measurement, Southwest Airlines, Design Winning Customer Strategies, Can Drive Growth, The Measure of Success, The Enterprise Story-Measuring What Matters, Organization That Creates Promoters, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Inner Circle, The Vote, Pat Flood, United States, General Electric, Six Sigma, The Consumer Tax Group, Tell Dell, Feargal Quinn
New!
Concordance | Text Stats
Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Search Inside This Book:
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 1 book:
 
1 book cites this book:

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth
92% buy the item featured on this page:
The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth 3.9 out of 5 stars (69)
$17.51
Answering the Ultimate Question: How Net Promoter Can Transform Your Business
3% buy
Answering the Ultimate Question: How Net Promoter Can Transform Your Business 5.0 out of 5 stars (5)
$19.77
The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value
2% buy
The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value 4.7 out of 5 stars (27)
$12.21
The Ultimate Question
2% buy
The Ultimate Question 4.0 out of 5 stars (4)
$19.77
Explore similar items

Tags Customers Associate with This Product

 (What's this?)
Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
 
(11)
(8)
(8)
(5)
(5)
(4)
(4)
(3)
(3)
(1)
(1)
See all 34 tags...

Your tags: Add your first tag
 
See most popular tags
 

Customer Reviews

69 Reviews
5 star:
 (36)
4 star:
 (11)
3 star:
 (7)
2 star:
 (6)
1 star:
 (9)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.9 out of 5 stars (69 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
70 of 87 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Net Promoter is misleading and potentially dangerous, May 7, 2006
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.
Comment Comments (2) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Don't sell to the stupid rich - make your customers happy so they sell for you , July 13, 2006
By M. McDonald (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
The comic Steven Wright used to say, sell to the stupid rich because they have the money and they do not know how to copy your ideas. While that sage advice makes for good comedy its hard to measure and implement as strategy.

The Ultimate Question -- a follow-up to Reichheld's book on Customer Loyalty is a clear statement of a readily implementable concept for those looking to become more customer centric. The premise is simple, your company will grow if your customers are so satisfied that they will recommend your service to others. Now that is common sense, but what Reichheld has done is to create a definitive metric to measure and therefore help manage this source of organic growth.

The book is well structured and includes some detailed case discussions about companies that are using this concept to create growth in their core business. I call these case discussions rather than case studies because the cases focus more on what is working rather than the challenges of implementing these concepts.

One weak point about the book is that it works very hard to brand Net Promoter Score (NPS) and "The Ultimate Question." This gives the book a marketing flavor with repetition and some hype around these concepts and terms. In addition to this, the book is a soft infomercial for Bain Consulting and Satmetrix who are the companies involved in bringing this to market. This is unfortunate as it gives the ideas a glaze of marketing glitz. This is the primary reason why the book is not a 5 start recommendation.

Part 1: Why the ultimate question works?

The three chapters here discuss the challenges associated with generating growth in your core business and the difference between good and bad revenue. Good revenue is from customers who will use your services year after year, expand their relationship over time and recommend you to others. Bad revenue is from customers who view your as a transaction, something to be bought once and they will move on for a better deal.

The fact that good vs. bad is not an issue of market segmentation, but more a function of how you sell and serve customers is a big insight that many executives overlook.

Finally, the first part discusses the New Promoter Score and why it is a simple and powerful way to understand where you stand.

Part 2: How to measure responses?

This section starts with a discussion of how Enterprise Car Rental has used the NPS concept to drive their business. This is a good case that shows how NPS influences every part of the organization and its operation. The rest of the second part discusses how you address NPS from a measurement and execution standpoint.

Part 3: Becoming good enough to grow

This part puts the ideas behind NPS into action by discussing the strategic, organizational and client service initiatives for growth. Unfortunately this section falls a little flat in terms of providing insight and new ideas. The direction here is largely focused on doing traditional segmentation and service design, employee rewards and organization structures. The old adage of hire good people, align rewards, measure and manage are true but I was hoping for more.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars NPS, finally a customer service score I can use, May 15, 2007
By Eric Bauswell (Santa Clara, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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!
Comment Comment (1) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)


Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars A Question of Honesty & Integrity
In all fairness to the author, Fred Reichheld, when this book was first published three years ago, one of his "model" companies was the squeaky clean, Enterprise Rent-a-Car. Read more
Published 22 days ago by Larry Underwood

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book on Customer Service!
This is great book on Customer Satisfaction and introduces the NPS score. I found myself thinking does my company do this? Read more
Published 7 months ago by JoshDC

1.0 out of 5 stars Don't Bother
Like a lot of business books out there today, this book would have been better as just a longer article or case study. Read more
Published 9 months ago by someday is today

5.0 out of 5 stars Terrific Resource for understanding your real 'referral rate'
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... Read more
Published 10 months ago by B. Griffin

2.0 out of 5 stars 5% content, 95% filler
Unfortunately, this is another business book that would be a lot better as a 3-5 page magazine article. Read more
Published 11 months ago by J. Nguyen

5.0 out of 5 stars Organization changing ideas and easy to understand
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.
Published 13 months ago by Alan H. Waitt

3.0 out of 5 stars Food for Thought
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... Read more
Published 14 months ago by Elisabeth Forrest

2.0 out of 5 stars Not Enough Content for An Entire Book
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. Read more
Published 17 months ago by J. Pruitt

4.0 out of 5 stars Closed Loop
I recently read a book called, The Ultimate Question, Driving Good Profits and True Growth by Fred Reichheld. He also wrote the the Loyalty Effect. Read more
Published 21 months ago by Jim Estill

1.0 out of 5 stars Irritating
If any of my employees are caught reading this tripe I fire them on the spot. This book is worthless and I think the reasoning behind why is superbly laid out by the other... Read more
Published 21 months ago by afrowoman

Only search this product's reviews


Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   

Product Information from the Amapedia Community

Beta (What's this?)

Look for Similar Items by Category

Look for Similar Items by Subject

Search Books by subject:





















i.e., each book must be in subject 1 AND subject 2 AND ...
 

Feedback

If you need help or have a question for Customer Service, contact us.
 Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
Is there any other feedback you would like to provide?

Your comments can help make our site better for everyone.


Your Recent History

 (What's this?)

After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.