The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth
by Fred Reichheld (Book and CD)
A Book Review by Ed Ruggero
A storm knocked down the line providing phone, cable and internet service to my home. Although there was no interruption in service, the line itself lay across the yard and was a hazard. I spent a half hour trying to report the problem by phone, but the voice prompts kept taking me to dead ends. I went to the company’s website, described my problem in a comments box, and sat back to wait for the repair crew. Hours later I received an email telling me that an automated line-test—probably generated by my logging on—had determined that my service was working fine (which I knew) and that the company valued my business.
Forty-eight hours after the line went down, I finally got a human on the phone, and a repairman arrived a few hours later. He was a cheerful fellow, and in the spirit of being a good employee, asked me how I enjoyed his company’s highly touted fiber-optic service. I told him that if I had a viable option, I’d drop them in a minute. I’ve told this story several times to neighbors and will probably keep on telling it, not because I’m a curmudgeon, but because I feel that the cable company deliberately provides poor service (saving money on real customer service operators, for instance), overcharges me, and isn’t the least bit concerned about me as a customer.
This is the kind of dysfunctional customer relationship Fred Reichheld writes about in his book The Ultimate Question. Customers like me, who never fail to disparage this company, show up in the right place on a balance sheet but do not contribute to growth. In fact, a company with enough detractors inhibits its own growth. ,
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