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Cheap Book Store - The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth
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List Price: $29.95
Our Price: $19.77
Your Save: $ 10.18 ( 34% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Harvard Business Press
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.1554
EAN: 9781591397830
Feature: ISBN13: 9781591397830
ISBN: 1591397839
Label: Harvard Business Press
Manufacturer: Harvard Business Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 210
Publication Date: 2006-03-02
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
Studio: Harvard Business Press
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Features
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ISBN13: 9781591397830
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Editorial Reviews:
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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. 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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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: The Gold Standard for Customer Loyalty
Comment: Bain consultant, Fred Reichheld, offers a fascinating and original take on customer loyalty. The Ultimate Question provides the framework by which companies can elevate beyond customer satisfaction to loyalty and profit by using a "Net Promoter Score".
While much as been written about satisfaction, the Net Promoter Score is a lever that can be used to build and sustain competitive advantage. While the point was made in the first couple of chapters the NPS concept is both powerful and practical. This book is useful not only in terms of measuring loyalty but in shaping strategy based on customer feedback and insight.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Could this be a new way to pick stocks?
Comment: On a scale from 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely), how likely is it that you would recommend XYZ Co. to friends or colleagues? I think more importantly, as the book says, you need to ask a follow up "why" question on your NPS surveys to get the real reasons. Knowing what you've done right (or wrong) can change the course and fortunes of your business.
Could you use NPS to predict and pick stocks for your portfolio? I'd imagine there are some investors out there asking the same question. I'l take a closer look at the companies profiled in the book, and hope to find some correlation. What are your thoughts?
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great book! Good Read
Comment: This book is a strong base for any company wanting to increase positive customer feedback.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Question of Honesty & Integrity
Comment: 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. I had a successful 26-year career with Enterprise (1974-2000), beginning when the company was small and fun-loving and retiring when it had become a humorless corporate bureaucracy.
As one of the early founding fathers (desert southwest), I was fortunate to have received a lucrative incentive based pay-plan that paid me way more than the company ever imagined possible; inevitably, as is the case with most companies, the decision was made to trim the payroll & split up my old operation into four little pieces; saving the corporation a few million dollars a year, annually. That's a perfectly reasonable business decision, although the manner in which they went about the process was anything but classy.
By the time I slid out the door, the company had long since lost its fun-loving spirit, morphing into what is typical for one of corporate America's finest; a cold and calculating enterprise that inevitably instilled a culture of fear throughout its far-flung domain. This became a company that its employees feared; they still paid reasonably well, but their ruthless treatment of the upper management indicated to many that they had lost their soul; honesty and integrity seemed to disappear within the upper echelon of this corporate hierarchy.
Still, to the outside world, all appeared well with the company; they still made lots of money, still provided good customer service and still had those cheesy commercials on television depicting something out of Norman Rockwell's America; everyone cheerful and good looking, taking care of their good looking customers.
But then, last fall, they started losing millions of dollars and as most companies do, started cutting back on its personnel expense. They laid off over 200 people at their corporate headquarters alone, plus thousands more companywide. As profits still sagged, morale sank to new lows. Employees couldn't understand why the company would contract its workforce so ruthlessly when over the years, it raked in billions of dollars in net profit. Company founder Jack Taylor's net personal wealth was estimated to be somewhere around $14 billion. This is how loyalty is repaid?
Then, last summer, the company was caught red-handed in a scam that was described by company officials as a "glitch". When 66,000 Chevrolet Impalas were purchased---without the passenger side airbags---the company saved nearly $12 million. Not bad; of course, they never told anybody they did that. Who wants the bad public relations?
Big mistake. Then after they'd taken a bunch of those cars out of service and sold them to unsuspecting customers, guess what? They claimed the cars were equipped with the air bags. Sorry; that's not a "glitch". That's a dishonest business practice; lying; cheating.
In the pages of this book, the author talks about "bad profits" and quotes Enterprise Chairman Andy Taylor as saying they never do that sort of thing. What a difference a few years makes; and a few less billion dollars on their bottom line. What goes around does indeed come around; huh, Andy?
Otherwise, this is a very good book; it's really not the author's fault he was misled by Enterprise; they do that a lot. However, for the sake of credibility, he might need to revise this edition.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great book on Customer Service!
Comment: This is great book on Customer Satisfaction and introduces the NPS score. I found myself thinking does my company do this? What can I do to make customer's experience better as well as what can I do internally to change how I treat and interact with customers.
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