Answering the Ultimate Question

Fred Reichheld's 2006 book The Ultimate Question - that question being, "How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?" - challenged the conventional wisdom of customer satisfaction programs. It coined the terms "bad profits" and "good profits" and pointed to a faster, much more accurate way of gauging customers' real loyalty to a company, introducing a quantitative measure (the Net Promoter Score) for establishing a baseline and effectively tracking changes going forward.

Richard Owen and Laura Brooks are co-developers, along with Reichheld, of the methodology behind answering the question. In this book, Owen and Brooks tell how based on a variety of real case studies to actually embed Net Promoter discipline in organizations of all types.

Answering the Ultimate Question builds on the link between Net Promoter Scores and business growth and profitability. Combined with an operational discipline to increase Promoters and reduce Detractors, Net Promoter represents a potential win-win for businesses and their customers. The Net Promoter Score offers a near-real-time metric closely coupled and correlated with precipitating actions. Instead of waiting months for long, drawn-out surveying, analysis, and interpretations, Net Promoter will affect real, positive change for those organizations that apply it correctly.