How Will They Answer the "Ultimate Question"

An intriguing opportunity for communities is presented by management consultant Fred Reichheld in his book The Ultimate Question.

Reichheld and his colleagues retained a research firm, which went to thousands of customers in six industries (financial services, cable and telecommunications, personal computers, e-commerce, auto insurance and Internet services). It asked questions about satisfaction and then it tracked the purchase behavior of those customers.

They discovered the one question a company can ask its customers that links so closely to their behaviors that it provides a practical surrogate for behavior. The question is one that has been used in customer satisfaction surveys for decades: would you recommend this company (or product, or service) to a friend of colleague? By subtracting the number of detractors (those who give a company 6 out of 10 or less) from the number of promoters (those who give the company a 9 or a 10), a company can arrive at what Reichheld calls its Net Promoter Score, a measure of how well it is generating loyalty.

Communities should be asking this question of their existing businesses to determine overall levels of satisfaction. The community Net Promoter Scores should be monitored constantly and used for comparative purposes. For instance, benchmarking your community’s Net Promoter Score against another’s is easily accomplished and can lead to new insights about your own. Segmentation between different industry types is possible. More importantly, it can be used as a measure of the impact of various retention strategies, community initiatives or public policy changes.

The Net Promoter Score is a measure that fits the changing dynamics of economic development marketing and a new emphasis on non-traditional media and word-of-mouth. It also works to the benefit of an approach increasingly being used by communities that focuses more on building relationships with existing businesses and entrepreneurs and less on mass marketing appeals.