Unfortunately, this is another business book that would be a lot better as a 3-5 page magazine article. Reichheld starts with some good ideas such as using a more simple metric, viewing customer relationships as an entire experience instead of a set of transactions, and viewing customers as "promoters," "passives," and "detractors." He then proceeds to beat these good ideas to death with a bunch of non sequitur case examples and conclusions that aren't very helpful or actionable to anyone in a position to put this system into place.

I would say that the majority of this book is dedicated to this kidn of content that doesn't add any value. The fact that he has to constantly say how the idea of NPS is new and revolutionary should be a red flag in itself.

The book isn't a whole waste, so it still might be worth checking out. Just be careful not to buy into its own self-hype.

At some points I thought that the book might just be a huge advertisement for Bain and Satmetrix. Since NPS by its nature is very broad and general, maybe not very actionable, it's a great excuse to suggest consulting services to help you implement the system. How convenient!

The fact that they also dare to charge this amount for a book of such little actual content is also laughable.

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.

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 expensive for my company. However, this book does provide a lot of fodder for thinking about customer service, what your company is doing, what it could and should be doing better and how you can keep in contact with your customers to keep honest and proactive in making their interactions with your firm as positive as possible. I think that tracking your Net Promoter Score is less important than making the Golden Rule a "philosophical cornerstone" of your business. I don't know if companies like USAA, Amazon and E-Bay track their NPS, but they would be delighting their customers and receiving tons of word-of-mouth advertising from happy "promoters" even if Fred Reichheld had never written this book. The short story: I got a lot of great ideas for my company from this 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. The most impressive thing about this book is that the author manages to say the same thing in so many different ways. You could get the entire content of the book by reading the first two pages of the preface. I only read this book because it was given to me by my boss who insisted I read it over the weekend. I never would have chosen to read it on my own. I can't imagine how anyone could possibly need to have two points repeated so many times over so many pages. Also, what's with the "all rights reserved" symbol on the phrase "net promoter score?" Why would you bother? What's the likelihood that someone is going to steal the phrase "net promoter score..." Reading this book is like taking a road trip with a used car salesman. It's full of fluff and pushy salesman-like jargon. Also, many of the points expressed are not just off, they're completely wrong. The author presents eBay as an example of a company that is supportive of their customers and highly rated by them as having excellent customer service, when in fact eBay's weak point is that customers frequently complain that eBay sends them canned answers that have nothing to do with their questions in response to their inquiries. Also, the author outright states that there was a point in time where all businesses were small businesses and then suddenly businesses became larger and lost focus on their customers. Not only is this completely wrong it doesn't make any sense at all. There have been large and small businesses as long as there have been accounting practices. I highly discourage consumption of this book unless your boss makes you read it.

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. Reichheld is a huge advocate of offering premium customer service and measuring this as one of the driving forces of any company.

Most of the points that he makes in the book are that there are bad profits and good profits. Bad profits are those that are short term and can detract from and strangle a company. Good profits are those that are sustainable.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about strategy and mission statements. He really points to what the ultimate mission statement is for customer service organizations and that is simply the golden rule -- how do you want to be treated?

His book talks about the ultimate question to ask customers which is, how likely is it that you would recommend company X to a friend or colleague? This tends to be a more accurate indicator of customer satisfaction than just asking them how satisfied they are with a customer.

He also talks about closed loop feedback. Whenever there is error or a problem, closing the loop very quickly makes total sense. Although I dislike the paperwork in ISO9000, closed loop is one of its positive attributes.

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 one-star reviews found here; I won't delve further except to say that only the dumbest, most gullible of employee would read this, and even if they were found to be my vice, I'd kick 'em out on the curb. On second thought, maybe I should give this book a five-star review, because it did allow me to easily select which members of my company were fat. And by that I mean uneeded, and certainly unwelcome.

This is a great book. I have referenced this book in meetings to my team at work, and it has proven to be very useful. I highly recommend this book to anyone with leadership aspirations.

The concepts in this book are compelling and surely here to stay. This material survives in the real world!

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.

This is the first career/business development type book that truly kept me interested from cover-to-cover. Reading it will define your Jerry Maguire moment and you wonder how your business got the point it has without this being on the forefront of everyone's minds. How do companies truly "grow". Follow this book.

I gotta admit I was taken in by the book, but the problem comes in when you attempt to link the NPS score to any performance measure. The academics have all but refuted Reicheld's claims. Unfortunately, statistics matter and the best way to measure something with a survey is to use a multiple item, multiple measured scale. However, NPS does have some redeeming qualities, in focusing mangement behind one number. Many academics are recommending that if you must use NPS to use it along with other traditional statistical measures.

Fred does a very good job at explaining that your best & foremost marketing tool are your employees. His Net Promoter Score (NPS) system he has developed is an innovation for the corporate world and I believe is the way forward.

The book is well documented and gives you step by step infoon how to implement the NPS system within your company.

IF you want to truly find out what your customers are thinking about your business this book is a must read. It teaches you how to equate customer satisfaction into tangable profit dollars. It helps effectively use the customer feedback to get your employees delivering service beyond expectation!

I wish that I could have given this book a higher rating. I loved Mr. Reichheld's impassioned admonition against "bad profits," which he defines as profits made at the expense of customers. I also agree with him that good surveys are short surveys. You might want to buy this book for these two reasons alone. The bold proclamation that he has discovered The Ultimate Question, however, is like proclaiming that the check-engine light is the ultimate dashboard gauge.

Psychometrically, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a difference score that is based upon a single-item rating scale, and such scores can be very problematic. Albert M. Wilburn has already pointed out that different distributions of ratings can yield the same NPS, and that these distributions "probably differ in their implications on repurchase behavior." Notwithstanding, in Appendix A, Reichheld provides some evidence the NPS approach can work, and he is honest enough to disclose that it doesn't always work. Between the admonition against "bad profits" and Appendix A, there are a lot of stories.

There is an alternative to the NPS that has a more established track record. In 1994, Bradley T. Gale published Managing Customer Value, which disclosed AT&T's finding that the ratio of the perceived value of a company's products or services to that of its competitors is predictive of changes in market share. Since then, this finding has been reproduced in a variety of contexts worldwide. The methodology that surrounds the perceived-value ratio, Customer Value Analysis, estimates the impacts of the various price and non-price attributes that drive customers' value perceptions. This methodology is best described in Customer Value Management: A Guide for Your Journey to Best-Practice Processes by Khalid Hafiz and Scott Hendricks (Houston: APQC, 2001). Buy this little book either instead of, or along with, The Ultimate Question.

We can finally begin to realize that the very customers that use our services are the same ones that resent being "surveyed" into oblivion !
Only the very best companies can sustain somewhat correct feedback to begin with. I only wondered how long it would take for business leaders to stop abusing your best customers with long questionaires that may not even be relavant to the shopping experience. This may not be the ultimate destination for determining consumer needs but it is a great start in the right direction and an opportunity to save all the wasted money on self centered and manipulated customer focus groups.

Overall the book is great. It has a lot of great examples, though I think it could have gone more in depth about what they did with the NPF score once they figured it out. Otherwise it really is a very broken record book as the author repeats himself a great many times with the NPF is so important...and the examples are so similiar because he doesn't really show what they did with the NPF score after they found it. What did they do to make the company better? Show what is beneficial in finding an NPF score, the ideas to use the NPF, it can't simply be one after another of this great big company used the NPF score system and turned their company into this. How? How did they use the NPF to turn the company into what it is today?

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 key to this book's central idea is that you can REPLACE a large handful of other questions with this single question, so people will actually give you feedback. With a longer set of questions, you only get answers from people who enjoy filling out questionnaires! With this single powerful metric, you can watch your company go toward or away from customers. I plan on aiming part of my business in this exciting direction.

The work in this book describes the challenges all businesses face in establishing and maintaining authentic relationships with customers. The ultimate question, while simple, is a challenge of significant proportions. The challenge is for every business member living company values to the extent that their customers are thrilled with their relationship and their experience of the company. It is the logical compliment to six sigma. The knowledge in this book lived will lead to just and dynamic performance on the part of the whole company. This is easy reading, full of solid examples. The Ultimate Question is required reading for every business leader at all echelons.

This surprising book offers a powerful message based on common sense: Companies that treat their customers ethically and honestly will build a dedicated client base, and thus grow steadily and earn "good profits." The opposite lesson is that companies that take advantage of their customers through predatory pricing or shoddy products earn "bad profits" while building an army of disenchanted buyers who tell their friends to stay away. Fred Reichheld makes his point in black and white: Rip off your customers at your peril. He amply illustrates his message with powerful case studies, and includes details about using the "ultimate" question - "How likely is it that you would recommend this business to a friend or colleague?" - and the resulting "Net Promotor Score" to identify your best customers. We commend this book to service or product providers who want to achieve solid growth by nurturing their core consumers.

After reading "The Ultimate Question" this is definitely a metric worth looking into for any company as it can provide a real-time view of where your profits are coming from. Companies can continue in their old ways, but if you are earning most of your revenues from gleaning from your detracting customers eventually your competition will overtake you and you will end up high and dry.

The theory is not rocket science, it is good business practice. Getting the process tweaked to your specific business is where the work is and you need to be fully committed to implementing it.

After reading "The Ultimate Question" this is definitely a metric worth looking into for any company as it can provide a real-time view of where your profits are coming from. Companies can continue in their old ways, but if you are earning most of your revenues from gleaning from your detracting customers eventually your competition will overtake you and you will end up high and dry.

The theory is not rocket science, it is good business practice. Getting the process tweaked to your specific business is where the work is and you need to be fully committed to implementing it.

If it was author Fred Reichheld's intention to generate discussion and debate around the benefits of customer loyalty then this book has proven to be the ideal way to achieve that.

Look at the variety and range of perspectives offered by the reviews and articles this book has generated and the emotions attached.

So, if you want to understand the hype you have just got to read the book and make your own judgment. But it really depends on what perspective you bring to the opening pages.

I `buy in' to the argument that loyalty is great for business, so I found the book easy to read and understand and incredibly helpful. The argument is well crafted and supported, and with enough `detail' and case studies to support and reinforce my point of view. The underlying concept being that every organisation has both `detractors' and `promoters' and the objective of every company should be to grow the number of promoters whilst eliminating detractors. Those organisations with many more promoters than detractors tend to be more successful than others.

But many simply don't buy into the underlying premise that building customer loyalty is achievable, even desirable, in today's business environment. I'm not sure that this book will change their perspectives. Much of the data could be described by some, as `soft', `open to misinterpretation' even questionable but it is certainly an intriguing proposition.

Then of course, there is the whole concept that by merely asking one question - The Ultimate Question - will give you a useful insight into the health of your company. Is it really that simple?

Make your own judgment. For me though, The Net Promoter Score is a useful measure that has application in most industries and could be a terrific lead indicator. Would I `bet the farm' on this as the only measure? I don't think so!

Do I want to know the ratio of my company's Promoters to Detractors? You bet.

There are a lot of books on customer experience, but this is the one that sets the standard. The rationale is stunning. But best of all there is a real method of measuring this soft, squishy thing called customer loyalty. When I saw that General Electric was using Reichheld's method as a means of determing compensation to its managers ... well, what more proof do you need. So I had to buy this book again, this time to send to a friend of mine who was a doubter.

Fred Reichheld in his book, The Ultimate Question, makes the claim that there are good profits and bad profits, and organizations, for too long, have been chasing the bad profits. Bad profits result from cost cutting and attempts to squeeze the last dollar out of customers. Good profits come from growth in the form of a new business recommendation or additional purchases from current clients. The problem is there's no real way to differentiate; companies feel pressure to make profit, whether good or bad. Reichheld feels there is a better way.

Reichheld says that the way to good profits is by increasing overall customer loyalty, but until now there hasn't been a good way to measure this. Traditional customer satisfation and retention surveys have shown little to no coorelation to actual customer behaviors. So while companies pay lip service to these surveys they'll always act on what they can measure - accounting numbers. These numbers are accepted because they follow the Generally Accepted Accounting Pricinples (GAAP). Reichheld proposes a standardized system for measuring loyalty with the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and the Ultimate Question.

While experimenting with above customer loyalty surveys, Reichheld found that no answer really coorelated with customer action, except one, the Ultimate Question.

"How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?"

Use a scale of 0-10 to grade against and you'll have a clear picture of your business. Anyone answering 0-6 is labeled a detractor, someone who is probably bad mouthing your business and creating the greatest amount of headaches. Anyone answering, 7-8, is nuetral, neither hurting nor promoting your business. People responding 9-10 are your promoters, and best source of recurring and new business. Take the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors and you have your Net Promoter Score (NPS). A simple formula:

P - D = NPS

Reichheld goes on to prove that companies with a high NPS are able to leapfrog the competition even when the odds are stacked against them. He discusses how to implement the system and combat some of the problems that arise, using real world examples of companies like Enterprise and Intuit.

The Ultimate Question is an extremely powerful concept and a book I would recommend to any decision maker looking to grow their organization. If his concept catches on, businesses will have a tool to point to as an alternative to strict financial numbers. Reichheld offers a way to grow our businesses through good profits and stop attacking customers when chasing bad profits.

Fred Reichheld argues in his new book titled, The Ultimate Question, Driving Good Profits and True Growth (HBS Press, 2006), that most companies are "addicted to bad profits" and that makes it hard for them to achieve real and sustained growth:

"A recent study by Bain & Company found that only 22 percent of the world's major firms achieved real, sustainable growth of even 5 percent a year over the ten-year period from 1994 to 2004."

Bad profits are defined as any profit earned at the expense of the customer relationship. The logic is that if you don't treat customers well, they will not only leave you at the first opportunity, they will also tell everyone they know, to do the same. These "detractors" extract a huge financial toll on your company.

The other side of the coin is that if you do take good care of your customers and turn them into "promoters" then they will sing your praises to everyone they know and new customers will flock to you as a result. Further, these new customers will be very profitable and loyal.

So far, this is not new information to most of us. Here's what's new. Mr. Reichheld and his colleagues at Bain & Company have figured out how to measure the quality of the relationships a company has with its customers.

This is huge. Pause, take a deep breath and ponder the ramifications...

No, we are not talking about that old satisfaction survey voodoo that everyone knows doesn't help. We are not talking about transaction surveys like you may get after buying something or calling technical support. We are talking a predictive snapshot that very reliably predicts future customer behavior.

If you are willing to give up bad profits and pursue only good profits, you can then and only then, deliver real and sustainable growth.

It will take a decade or more for this approach to work its way through the economy. It will happen because it's more profitable and we love profits. You will know it has happened when you find investors and customers demanding to see audited Net Promoter Score (NPS) data.

This is also the beginning of the end of "sales" as we know it today. The profession will vanish and be replaced by customer service...but that's another story.

Most marked up and highlighted book I've ever read! Page after page of "Golden Rule" type simplistic gems to take the culture at your company to the very level we as consumers and B2B partners so desperately crave! And are gladly willing to trade our serious dollars for every time!

This book really hit home for me. As a business owner, I have always realized the importance of customer satisfaction along with how much a happy customer can help both your current business and future business growth. This book assisted me in realizing the importance of measuring how many of my clients are true 'PROMOTERS' and how many are 'Detractors'.

Instead of asking clients many questions using a long questionnaire, the book made me realize the importance of 'The Ultimate Question'. In my opinion, most small to even large business owners would benefit from spending a few hours reading this book. As a BuzzAgent I was able to listen to Fred Reichheld discuss his book on a conference call.

As a result, my partner and I are in the process of asking all of our clients the Ultimate Question to determine our true promoters.


Kushner, M
A u t h o r
Truth about Caffeine, The Truth About Caffeine: How Companies That Promote It Deceive Us and What We Can Do about It

By definition, the net promoter score is the percentage of respondents falling into the 9-10 range minus the percentage falling into the 0-6 range. Consequently, very different distributions of advocacy scores can yield the same net promoter score; for example, all of the response distributions shown below yield net promoter scores of 40.


Detractors (0-6) | 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
Passives (7-8) | 60 50 40 30 20 10 0
Promoters (9-10) | 40 45 50 55 60 65 70
--- --- --- --- --- --- ---
100 100 100 100 100 100 100


This is a problem because despite having the same net promoter score, these response distributions probably differ in their implications on repurchase behavior. This also calls into question what conclusions we should draw from a difference or similarity between you and your competitors in terms of net promoter scores.

Good book. I think it is important that the author comments that the ultimate question could be different depending on the industry or product/service. Worth the read!

I saw Reichheld speak at a Shop.org conference, liked his talk, bought the book, read it, and really liked it.

I'm posting this review because I *didn't* get the book thru Bzzagent.

Since some of negative customer reviews here point out the irony that Reichheld used Bzzagent to promote the book (I'd say, "and so what?").

In the spirit of the book, I'm a satisfied customer (buyer and reader) of this book, and I'd recommend it highly.

I read the original Harvard Business Review article, and thought I understood the concept. However, reading the book was inspiring, and I applied the concepts to our business immediately. The NPS methodology is so simple, but so powerful. The original aim of the method is to evaluate customer satisfaction, but I also recently applied it to reference checking for a job candidate. By asking if the reference would recommend that their best friend go to work for this candidate, I was able to build a surprisingly helpful picture of the leadership qualities of the individual under consideration.

This is a book that should be standard reading for any service organization.

In The Ultimate Question, loyalty expert Fred Reichheld says that the best way to raise profits and generate business growth is to ask customers `Would you recommend us to a friend or colleague?' He suggests that asking this question can give companies of all kinds a precise understanding of the experience its customers have when dealing with it.

The answer to Reichheld's ultimate question manifests itself in the form of a Net Promoter® Score (NPS), a concept co-developed with Satmetrix Systems, which reveals to a company how much its customers like doing business with it. He says it demonstrates to companies how true, positive growth can be achieved by making your customers love doing business with you so much that they tell colleagues about it. He also states that this is the only way for a company to maintain growth long term.

The book itself is easy to read and is clearly broken out into three sections discussing why the ultimate question works, how to measure if it's working, and what a company needs to do in order to be ready to really grow by implementing customer centric metrics. While there are other books out there discussing the concept of customer loyalty, The Ultimate Question goes into much greater detail on how to do this using the Net Promoter Score, a metric quickly gaining traction with companies such as GE, American Express and Four Seasons, all of which are profiled to some extent in the book.

Reichheld's belief is that the vast majority of companies don't have in place the right strategies or mindset to achieve true growth and he cites research which shows that while an extremely high percentage of senior level executives congratulate themselves on how good their customer experience is, their customers, when asked, paint a very different picture. The results show there is a 70-80% gap in the scores CEOs gave themselves, and those their customers gave them.

Reichheld's point here is a valid one - customer experience needs to be something that is addressed at every level of an organisation. It isn't enough for a CEO to simply think the company has good customer service, if in reality it isn't happening. If good customer experience is lacking within an organisation, the CEO needs to know and needs to know why, in order to turn it around.

Reichheld also states that it isn't enough to simply implement the Net Promoter Score measurement within a company. Having this metric in place will help only if the company has gone through the following process, which he calls the three D's, in order to ready itself for the results, whatever they may be:

- Design value propositions that focus on the right customers;

- Deliver these propositions end-to-end, across every employee and every department in the company; and,

- Develop the ability to deliver this proposition consistently over time and in line with the changing needs of the business.

If a company can get this right, Reichheld says it will be in a position to start transforming into a business that is continually led by the voice of its customers.

Reichheld also examines the important point of how most managers today are focused on increasing shareholder value, often at the cost of exploiting customer relationships. For example, price hikes across the board or cut backs in service or quality, all come at a significant cost to the customer and ultimately their satisfaction with the company.

Reichheld's golden rule then is simple - don't exploit your customers. His solution is also very straightforward - all companies need to do is use a `simple and trustworthy' customer feedback process that allows a business to see how many of its customers love it and how many hate it (the Net Promoter Score). This visibility then allows them to fix problems and not only retain current customers, but increase new customer levels through word of mouth, generating both profit and growth.

This book is full of useful insights. I was fortunate to hear Reichheld present this content at a seminar for marketing professionals. While some reviewers have complained that his approach is overly simplistic, I doubt any of them have actually applied his methodology to their business. I applied his methodology to my business (direct selling) and had over 6,000 interviews completed to identify promoters, passives and detractors in the businesses of independent distributors. Consistent with Reichheld's findings, the segments of my business that were growing fastest had more promoters in their respective customer bases and were performing better across a wide range of metrics. From the detailed findings, we identified best practices that were leveraged across the entire business. Buy the book. Have an open mind. Apply the concepts he has laid out. If you do, you will walk away with useful ideas to accelerate the growth of your business.

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.

I just finished reading that NPS "The Ultimate Question" book. An interesting read. I found that it does contain a lot of useful information but at the same time, is a bit advertorial in nature. I found that it does discuss a lot of well-established, common, logical ideas but, I didn't find anything significantly new. Still, it does make you recall a number of ideas that are, in essence, useful. It seems to me that the writer generated the majority of his references from his own company (Bain & Company) and promotes readers to utilize the [...] website in conjunction with his book, to generate a proper NPS score. At first, he seems to refer to the website as its own entity but he does slip in an admission that he is one of the owners/partners in the site's business. In essence, I would take it with a grain of salt.

The NPS (Net Promoter Score) program itself is actually extremely simple. What we are doing now is similar. Here's how it works:

You ask your clients:
"How likely is it that you would you recommend (company) to your friends and colleagues?"
You provide a scale of 0-10 for the response.
0-6 on this scale = a "detractor" (unhappy / dissatisfied customers who jump-ship at first better offer and will likely trash us with their friends)
7-8 on this scale = a "passive" (satisfied customers but unenthusiastic - easily wooed by competitors)
9-10 on this scale = a "Promoter" (Loyal enthusiasts who repeatedly buy and will likely talk us up to their friends / colleagues)

Then, you do all the number crunching and figure out what the percentages are. You subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters and what you have left is your NPS score.

According to this book - the average NPS score for most U.S. companies is less than 10%
Efficient "growth engine" companies (companies doing well) have an NPS score between 50-80%
Note: Bain & Company (the writer's company) made up this whole thing as their attempt to provide an "industry standard". They admit that one does not currently exist.

You can't get an NPS score without running the survey first (asking the question). They offer their website services (pay services) to create an NPS survey for your company but they admit you can do it yourself as well (they just advise against it).

SUMMARY: It reminds you of some important basics but it is in no way "groundbreaking".

More Bain & Co hype, with not much evidence or substance. Yes we know there is lots of wasted resource allocation, but we need practical solutions.

The book is full of pseudo-statistics, and like the earlier book, the Loyalty effect, many made-up numbers. Evidence, empirical generalisations, hard facts are lacking.

This is the ultimate con in business literature, an argument from the particular to the general. There is no ultimate question that fits all situations. Buzz marketing only applies in limited circumstances.

Managers who follow this books advice are likely to squander money. Avoid.

Suggested reading:
- Customer equity (ISBN: 0875847641)
- Marketing and the Bottom Line (ISBN: 0273661949)
- Marketing Payback (ISBN: 0273688847)

I bought and read "The Ultimate Question" because, as a marketing professional, I had heard a great deal of hype about Reichheld's Net Promoter Score. Having now read the book, I can say confidently that the hype is definitely not deserved. In fact, I found this book to be the worst kind of substance-less, hollow nonsense. Reichheld criticizes traditional measurement systems, and in some ways his criticisms are fair (trust me, I know). But his solution is truly mindless; should I or anyone really believe that all of my company's relationships with its diverse customer segments can be optimized by asking just one question? I know Reichheld has been big shot consultant for many years, but perhaps he needs to spend a little more time in an actual corporation dealing with actual customers before dispensing bad advice about customer relationship management.

Both the Wall Street Journal and USA Today have just named The Ultimate Question the #1 business book of the year! What more needs to be said?! Predictions are that the impact of net promoter score (NPS) will be at least as big as six sigma.
This book should be required reading for every business school graduate.

Mr. Reichheld NAILED it. That's right, he NAILED it. The points made in this work bring to the surface the hard facts:

1. The Customer rules
2. Completely satisfied Customers are the most effective means of driving true growth and good profit
3. If you don't agree, see Rule #1

The author has meaningful data, charts, and real life examples to highlight what is really happening to companies that go way beyond Customer loyalty. These companies set aside "profits" and focus on the Customer like a laser. Their reward; they are killing the competition, growing exponentially, and enjoying the Customer as their best marketer and loyal partner.

Every working individual should read this book to understand how vital it is to have the Customer 100% satisfied with their buying experience. Reichheld explains the importance of accountibility in this experience; from the Customer Touchpoints (frontliners he calls them) all the way to the CEO. He demonstrates what has happened to the "old-liners" who spend the shareholders' money on advertising campaigns, acquisitions, and "fuzzy math" accounting to meet the "bad-profit" numbers instead of reinvesting it in completely and utterly pleasing the customer.

By hiring and retaining a new kind of talent, they absolutely leave the Customer not only with dedication to the brand, they bring thier freinds and family with them. This book is well written, enlightening, entertaining, and hard hitting.

Buy it. And no, no one paid me to write this (but, I'm not too proud if he wants to slip me a twenty)

Reichheld proposes you just need to ask one question in order to drive business success. This is "How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague". This is commendably simple and the resulting `promoters minus detractors' used to derive the Net Promoter Score (NPS) gives an easy to understand measure of how well your business is doing.

However, this approach has not gone down well with his peers. He bravely acknowledges the storm of criticism (p183), but then does not address the fundamental flaws they raise, arguing merely that people are against it because they can't believe something so simple can be effective.

Two fundamental flaws which he doesn't deal with are:
* A simple measure like NPS doesn't tell you what needs fixing. A measure which tells you you're not doing very well, but which doesn't guide you towards the priorities for improvement is frustratingly useless.
* While simplicity is a good thing to have, the NPS can be a danger to your company profits. You can't buy customer satisfaction, but you can buy loyalty by cutting prices. Improving an NPS score can lead to `buying loyalty' behaviour, and damage shareholder value.

He argues that the Net Promoter Score is a better approach than measuring customer satisfaction, and takes the whole of chapter 5 to make this point. However, he just uses the weaknesses of poor quality customer satisfaction programmes to highlight the advantages of the NPS. Most would agree there are many companies wasting small fortunes on inadequate customer satisfaction programmes, and these would be better spending less money on a Net Promoter Score approach, but this doesn't mean the NPS is better than a properly run customer satisfaction programme, i.e. from an agency who can do the mathematically complex cause and effect modelling to identify the priorities for improvements.

There are unfortunately too many examples of simplistic thinking in this book to recommend it. For instance, on page 84 he claims that his research shows that "the links between satisfaction-survey scores and customer behaviours that drive profitability or growth are tenuous at best", and argues instead in chapter 3 that the NPS can drive growth. However, a moment's thought on what drives people to `recommend this company' shows the weakness here. People will recommend because they are significantly more satisfied with the product or service than with other competitor products, and because the price is right. He defeats his own argument for the NPS as a driver for growth by trying to claim satisfaction does not drive growth, and further illustration of this is in the appendix where he lists high NPS companies as the ones which show high growth - a little research on the American Customer Satisfaction Index website shows these high NPS companies are also leaders of customer satisfaction.

In summary, if you just want to measure how well your business is doing and don't want to spend much money, then the Net Promoter Score approach may be for you, but watch out you don't target your workforce on the results or your margins might suffer. On the other hand, if you want to improve from where you are now, there's no shortcut to investing in a decent customer satisfaction programme which will tell you what needs fixing.

This book is worthy of a new term, Marketistics; i.e., the use of pseudo statistics for purely marketing purposes. This book is light weight (thin) and light in content, and most likely written by a ghost author. Evidence? The many discrepencies,inconsistencies and logic flaws in this book were ignored completely.

But, worst of all, you realize that most of the 5 Star rankings for this book can be attributed to Buzzagent. Doesn't it seem ironic that someone espousing a book on the power of recommendation would enlist paid recommenders to promote his book? Isn't this exactly the kind of "gaming" behaviour that a real measurement system should discourage?

One would hope that not many companies would compensate executives on an "ultimate" number that can be bought and paid for.

This book has good points and bad points. For business owners, it can really hit home. All of us entrepreneurs have always realized the importance of customer satisfaction along with how much a happy customer can help both your current business and future business growth. Nothing new here.

This book assisted me in realizing the importance of measuring how many of my clients are true 'PROMOTERS' and how many are 'Detractors'. Instead of asking clients many questions using a long questionnaire, the book made me realize the importance of 'The Ultimate Question'. In my opinion, most small to even large business owners would benefit from spending a few hours reading this book. Maybe best bet is to borrow before buying.

Ok, we all know customer service today is a low priority for companies and their executives, even though they say they want to make their customers happy. But their customers are not...and many companies spend their time focusing on the bottom line (profits) to the detriment of their own best customers.

Reichheld, who dons himself the "Loyalty Guru" rubs some folks very wrong. I tried to understand the hostility in some of these negative reviews but didn't come up with an answer. It surely stirs up bad feelings to some book buyers. Controversy must be working in his favor as its a bestseller!

Many people received the book via Reichheld's Buzz Agent's program and encouraged to critique the book. I bought mine in an airport and finished it before my flight was over.
For me, neither a thumb up or thumb down. Just blah blah blah.

I did also buy "The Black Book of Outsourcing" in the airport a few trips back and have it now on my desk, a superb reference and primer, career guide and management resource. Its my favorite business book of the season so far. Thanks.

Some part of this book explained things correctly, I can see the points. Customer satisfaction is absolutely important. Without customers, there won't be any profit.
Though, the rest are quite different from what I learned. Yet, I still found something interesting from it.

The Ultimate Question - practical, ease-to-use concept to improve customer loyalty now

Reichheld's book provides a straightforward approach to better understanding your customer base. By asking a simple question - on a scale of 0 to 10 with 10 being most likely and 0 being least likely, how likely would you recommend company X to a friend or colleague? - you know precisely where your customers stand. And more to the point, by asking follow-on questions to those who are not "promoters" (those who give a rating of 9 or 10), you can quickly find out what it takes to better satisfy these customers. I have learned that by doing this, customers not only feel their input counts, but also that companies can take steps to address customer concerns, thereby improving their business.

I was responsible for implementing all customer survey programs at a division of a Fortune 20 company. We used Satmetrix, the consulting company Reichheld plugs.

Here are my positives on the book - light read, amusing and definitely not focused on statistics. Unfortunately, my other comments are less complimentary. His case for good profits versus bad profits, while fundamentally true, is hardly fresh thinking or insightful. Net Promoter is based only on recommendation. This seems to be ill-conceived. Our products aren't the kind of products that people talk about at neighborhood parties (too specialized and too boring) so word-of-mouth is virtually non-existent.

Finally, and most importantly, the "ultimate question" didn't motivate any positive behaviors at my company. In fact, it was viewed as just another corporate waste of time and money. The answer to a single question doesn't say anything about what to do about improving performance.

But I don't suppose that story sells many books.

I bought this book because I bought into the hype that there could be an ultimate question. I was deeply disappointed in the very premise of the book once I read further. How can one question really drive growth, especially when that question is "how like would you be to recommend us to a friend?" How often do you recommend toilet paper, your pest control service, tampons, or a host of other products that you may use and love, but may not be really excited about sharing. Not to mention, the concept that everyone is a promoter or a detractor seems weak. And how can I turn my detractors into promoters or are they just a lost cause?

This book left me with more questions than answers. It seems like the business guru version of the diet pill that promises to make you lose 100 pounds without changing what you eat or how much you exercise. Unfortunately for all of us, it isn't going to be that easy, either with dieting or driving growth.

Every first-year marketing student learns about the "bait-and-switch" technique, even if only as a cautionary tale: a firm advertises a product at "too good to be true" prices, lures potential customers into the store, and then reveals to these customers that the advertised, bargain-priced model is out of stock. However, the disappointed customer is shown a higher priced alternative, one that generates a higher profit margin for the firm, of course. All of this is part of the firm's plan: the customer is lured into the store by the low-priced model, is disappointed by its absence, but is then encouraged to trade up to a higher priced alternative, lest having wasted a trip to the store (and the related sunk costs).

The bait-and-switch came to mind as I read Fred Reichheld's recent offering, "The Ultimate Question." While Reichheld's earlier work was at least marginally interesting, this latest work falls far short and will leave the attentive reader feeling scammed, like a consumer lured into a store only to have the advertised "too good to be true" sale revealed as a hoax. Let me explain.

Throughout "The Ultimate Question," Reichheld presents a strong rhetorical case for his Net Promoter Score (i.e. NPS, or "the ultimate question") against traditional and more complex measurement systems, typified by the customer satisfaction survey. (As a sidebar, Reichheld so transparently erects satisfaction surveys as a strawman throughout this book - without offering a shred of real analysis or substantive critique, his simplistic "top ten list" of criticisms notwithstanding - that the reader must laugh). These satisfaction measurement systems fail for a range of reasons, so Reichheld tells us, but mostly because they are too involved and too complex to be useful or easily applied by management. As Reichheld writes:

"...the only measurements of customers' happiness were vague statistics of "satisfaction" - statistics derived from surveys that nobody trusted and nobody was accountable for."

"...satisfaction surveys often delude executives into thinking that their performance merits an A, while their customers are thinking C - or F. Business leaders need a hard, no-nonsense metric..."

"These black-box software packages [needed to analyze data] churn out analyses that are intelligible only to an elite breed of Ph.D.'s."

It is as an alternative to these excessively complex measurement systems that Reichheld offers his ultimate question, the question that yields a company's NPS. With just one simple question - "How likely is it that you would recommend Company X to a friend or colleague?" - Reichheld claims a company has the information, the critical "one number" that it needs to generate "good profits," build customer loyalty, and gain a strategic advantage over competitors. With the data generated by this question (after a little manipulation by Reichheld, although certainly nothing so complicated as to require an "elite breed of Ph.D.'s") any company can have the one number that is strongly correlated with growth, a statistic that is simple to produce and easy to interpret. With this, traditional satisfaction surveys are dead, so says Reichheld - the reader/market researcher/senior executive has found an attractive, superior alternative.

But, of course, Reichheld's offer is a scam; he himself admits as much throughout "The Ultimate Question." After being promised repeatedly that we are done with complex measurement systems, that we now need only this one number to grow, Reichheld finally reveals the truth: NPS is not all we need to know. In fact, as early as the second chapter Reichheld informs us that:

"We also realized that two conditions must be satisfied before customers make a personal referral [i.e. become promoters]. They must believe that the company offers superior value in terms that an economist would understand: price, features, quality, functionality, ease of use, and all the other practical factors..." [italics mine]

In other words, at this critical juncture Reichheld admits that companies must have additional information - a lot of additional information, in fact - to grow their Net Promoter Score, and thus to grow their business. Thus, even if we assume that a company's NPS is the key to growth (something Reichheld does not convincingly show, by the way), companies still must know how customers perceive their prices, features, quality, and so forth, in order to take advantage of their NPS; without this information, NPS is nice to know, but is useless in helping grow the firm. And how are we to discern how customers perceive our prices, quality, and so forth? Obviously, these are precisely the kinds of questions asked in the "vague," "long," "useless," "complex," "30 to 40 question" surveys Reichheld attempts to tear apart throughout his book. In short, we are back where we started.

So why has Reichheld perpetrated this scam on his reading public? What might he have to gain by promoting NPS as a simple alternative to more complex measurement systems, only to then suggest that this same type of more expansive data collection and more complex analysis are necessary after all? Why obviously because Reichheld wants to sell us a more expensive product with a much higher profit margin. He is even kind enough to give us the name of a website and the name of the market research firm - Satmetrix, where Reichheld sits on the board of directors (an ironic name to be sure, given his antipathy towards satisfaction surveys) - that is willing to "help" a company learn and leverage its NPS score, through a large amount of data collection and analysis, no doubt.

In sum, don't bother with "The Ultimate Question." When all is said and done the book is really the ultimate bait-and-switch, a transparent attempt to get firms interested in a seemingly simple alternative to traditional measurement systems that in reality delivers on none of its promises. The book is "quick fix" simple-mindedness at its worst, the type of shoddy research and sloppy thought that hinders organizations from truly building better relationships with their customers.

After reading Reichheld's first book, I greatly anticipated this one, only to be very disappointed. There's little in this book that couldn't have been covered in an HBR article. Much of the book seems to be rehashed from other sources. And to add insult to injury, Reichheld had a column in my local paper that covered the main points of this book, including the ultimate question, but did not mention the book by name. Buy it used if at all.

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.