Do you know Fred Reichheld? (The following copy comes from Netpromoter.com. Read about Red-Spark's relationship with Netpromoter.com.) His latest book introduces Net Promoter Score® (NPS), the radical new tool being rapidly deployed by leading firms to transform ordinary customers into promoters - the drivers of sustainable growth.

In The Ultimate Question: Driving True Growth and Good Profits, loyalty expert and Director Emeritus at Bain & Company, Fred Reichheld shows companies how to unlock the door to good profits and true growth. Corporations can do this, he says, by asking their customers one simple question: How likely would you be to recommend our company to a friend or colleague? By asking this question, companies can put themselves on the path to true growth - growth that occurs because their customers love doing business with them and serve as advocates to friends and colleagues. Reichheld, the bestselling author of The Loyalty Effect and Loyalty Rules, asserts that this is the only kind of growth that can be sustained over the long term.

According to Reichheld, the real challenge for organizations is to make employees just as accountable for providing a superior customer experience as they now feel for delivering superior profits. Traditional satisfaction surveys simply don't work; they don't measure what companies really need to know. In The Ultimate Question, Reichheld introduces a unique measurement tool - called Net Promoter® Score (NPS) - that can focus an entire organization on improving every customer's experience. The process is both simple and radical. Companies need to ask this all-important question in a regular, systematic, and timely fashion. They need to track and publicize the answers, and they need to put the information to work immediately. Companies that actively use this process can manage customer loyalty and the growth it produces just as rigorously as they can manage for profits.

To do this, Reichheld advises companies to identify customer promoters and detractors. Promoters are loyal enthusiasts - people who will talk up a company to their friends and family, while detractors are unsatisfied customers who will spread ill-will. Once a company determines the percentage of each, it can compute its NPS. The higher the NPS, the more promoters a company has. Obviously a company must strive towards having a high percentage of promoters. With a simple click of a button via the Internet, detractors can share their dissatisfaction with thousands of potential customers, thereby strangling a company's growth. And that's where, Reichheld says, the Golden Rule comes into play.

"The Golden Rule of treating others as you want to be treated yourself has a significant place in business," says Reichheld. "Successful organizations take this rule seriously because it is the basis of loyal relationships. It's an integral part of how they operate: they want customers who are so pleased with how they are being treated that they not only come back for more, they bring their friends."

One of the temptations that a company must fight against is the lure of bad profits - profits that come at the customer's expense, such as charging a high fee to change a plane ticket, charging higher renewal fees to current subscribers than to new ones, and not giving credit for unused gas when a rental car is returned, for example. Reichheld's research shows that the most common reason a company fails to achieve growth and gain loyal promoters lies in these kinds of bad profits, and many companies are hooked on them without even realizing it. Bad profits, he shows, cut off a company's best opportunity for true growth.

The Ultimate Question helps managers identify the difference between good and bad profits within their organization and shows how to increase promoters and decrease detractors. In addition, the book details why customer satisfaction surveys fail and provides rules of measurement, as well as sharing insight into how to generate customer-winning strategies to develop a larger community of promoters.

Based on extensive Bain & Company research, The Ultimate Question provides a hard, no-nonsense metric to help companies determine how they are viewed by their customers, and helps managers improve customer relationships and create communities of passionate advocates that stimulate innovation. Practical and compelling, The Ultimate Question is the one tool growth-minded companies need to thrive.

Do you have a Net Promoter-related question? Ask it at the Who Is Using Net Promoter? discussion forum.

Net Promoter is a registered trademark of Satmetrix, Bain & Company, and Fred Reichheld.