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Loyalty Effect, The: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits and Lasting Value by Frederick F Reichheld  (16)  £5.99

Loyalty Rules: How Leaders Build Lasting Relationships by Frederick F Reichheld  (4)  £7.14

Managing the Customer Experience: Turning Customers into Advocates by Shaun Smith  (4)  £22.99

The DNA of Customer Experience: How Emotions Drive Value by Colin Shaw  (4)  £24.99

Good to Great by Jim Collins  (35)  £13.20

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Book Description
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.


Synopsis
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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First Sentence
Too many companies these days can't tell the difference between good profits and bad. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover

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Loyalty Effect, The: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits and Lasting Value by Frederick F Reichheld  (16)  £5.99

Loyalty Rules: How Leaders Build Lasting Relationships by Frederick F Reichheld  (4)  £7.14

Loyalty Myths: Hyped Strategies That Will Put You Out of Business and Proven Tactics That Really Work by Timothy L. Keiningham  (1)  £10.39

The Satisfied Customer: Winners and Losers in the Battle for Buyer Preference by Claes Fornell £16.14

The DNA of Customer Experience: How Emotions Drive Value by Colin Shaw  (4)  £24.99

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews   18 of 20 people found the following review helpful: Easy to read, simple approach, but with fundamental flaws., 6 Jun 2006 By  Reader from Oxford - See all my reviews 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.  Comment (1) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? (Report this)   3 of 4 people found the following review helpful: Perfect Sense, 19 Sep 2006 By  John G "Hypnotic" (SCOTLAND) - See all my reviews This book is essential reading, well written, engaging and rips through the over complicated world of customer surveys. The proof Fred Reichheld offers about the link between client satisfaction and growth is attractive and powerful. I will be implementing many of the ideas immediately in my business and believe that many organisations will be forced to look again at their approch to customer surveys. There will be a lot of overpriced marketing survey companies quaking in their boots when this information reaches a wider audience. I suggest you and they read it now.  Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? (Report this)   6 of 11 people found the following review helpful: ....to obtain the absolutely essential answer, 14 Feb 2006 By