Book review: The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth / Recognition do's and don'ts / Make your internal messages heard / McDonald's employs a good listener / Using bacteria to fight bacteria / Vodka is a girl's best friend

BOOK REVIEW: THE ULTIMATE QUESTION: DRIVING GOOD PROFITS AND TRUE GROWTH
If you want to really understand customer loyalty, go get this book. Fred Reichheld, customer loyalty expert and director emeritus at Bain & Company, a global business consulting firm, gets to the heart of measuring customer happiness and satisfaction.

It all boils down to one question, the Ultimate Question, which he recommends asking customers of most industries (in certain B2B settings, the question may need to be massaged a bit):

“How likely is it that you would recommend (Company X) to a friend or colleague?”

Bain & Company’s research had proven that conventional customer-satisfaction measures are unreliable. They found that there is little connection between satisfaction rates and actual customer behavior, or between satisfaction rates and a company’s growth. The many complex reasons for this are detailed in the book.

In tests administered to thousands of customers recruited from public lists in six industries, with the goal of determining which customer satisfaction survey questions showed the strongest statistical correlation with repeat customers or referrals, this question ranked first or second—and it makes perfect sense.

If customers are really loyal to a particular provider of goods or services, what’s the most natural thing for them to do? Of course: recommend that company to someone they care about. Does any other question matter? Not so much.

Reichheld notes that two conditions must be met before individuals will make a personal referral:

1. they must believe that the company offers a superior value in terms of quality, price, etc., (engaging their head), and
2. they must believe the company understands them, values them, listens to them, and shares their principles (engaging their heart).

On a one-to-ten scale, people who answer 0 to 6 to the Ultimate Question are considered Detractors, 7 to 8 are Passives, and only people who answer 9 to 10 are considered Promoters of the organization.

This book is filled with information on the pitfalls of being addicted to bad profits (profits gleaned from Detractors instead of Promoters), case histories of the relationship between a high NPS (Net Promoter Score) and company growth, and suggestions for measuring and improving your own NPS.

The bottom line: Try asking your customers how likely it is that they’d recommend your company to a friend or colleague, and track your own Net Promoter Score. Then commit to raising it. Every organization, of every size, in every industry, can profit from Reichheld’s (surprise!) common sense, research-backed recommendations.

Read more about The Ultimate Question at the author's website.

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RECOGNITION DO'S AND DON'TS
Developing employee rewards programs can be worthwhile, but only if they’re done with thorough planning and are customized for the organization. Here are some guidelines for recognizing good performance.

1. Don’t expect recognition programs to succeed if day-to-day management isn’t consistent.
If management pushes and pushes and is never satisfied with anything, but then is cheerful when a worker reaches his or her goal, the effort will seem hollow and insincere.

2. Understand that cash isn’t king.
Cash bonuses get confused with compensation, and then employees will begin to count on it. When bonuses can’t be awarded, their absence will actually turn the program into a negative.

3. Ask employees what types of recognition they prefer.
What management thinks people will value can be very different from what they actually want. Rewards are more effective when they truly hit the sweet spot.

4. Remember that timing is important.
Be timely in recognizing performance. If a significant amount of time passes between action and reward, people will feel that it’s not meaningful.

5. Get managers involved.
Employees want recognition to come from the people whose approval they value most. Having HR impressed with you doesn’t have quite the same impact as it would if it were the CEO or GM.

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MAKE YOUR INTERNAL MESSAGES HEARD
Email is fast and easy, but it may not be the best way to get messages across to your organization. Research by the ePolicy Institute found that for more than 10 percent of workplace email users, as much as 50 percent of traffic is junk email. Workers are connected in the office, on the road, and on their cell phones and PDAs. With all of this electronic “noise,” it’s not always easy for companies to make their internal messages stand out.

It’s often a case of too much information. Intranets can tell employees a lot, but these people often need to be enticed to delve in. What’s needed are “headlines” — a way to call out significant messages so that interested employees can read more.

One solution is screensaver technology, such as is offered by Netherlands-based Netpresenter. Messages can be styled in eye-catching ways and then displayed on users’ monitors as part of a screensaver. Some companies use the technology for important bulletins, and others use it for that “headline” effect. When a new page is added to the intranet, a bulletin can be generated and displayed on screens. If users are interested, they can then click to the intranet to read more.

Screensaver technology can also be used to reach “unconnected” workers (people like factory line workers, who don’t have email at their workstations) if display screens are visible throughout the workplace. This allows these workers greater access to — and hence greater participation in — the company as a whole.

Source: Communication World

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MCDONALD'S EMPLOYS A "GOOD LISTENER"
Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. Consider Ronald McDonald. For years, Ronald was the hub of McDonald’s marketing campaigns, conceived originally to appeal to kids. But in 1996, with sales lagging, McDonald’s made Ronald part of a series of ads aimed at adults. The ads flopped. And in 2000, the company reinvented Ronald for the 21st century, with new shoes, a new clown suit, and new hair.

But the most successful use of Ronald McDonald in recent years did not require any reinvention. Instead, McDonald’s used the same old clown they’ve had sitting in front of their restaurants all along — Ronald the statue, sitting motionless on the left side of a bench, one leg crossed over the other.

The new ads, which hype neither the food nor the restaurants, show different people sitting next to the statue, telling Ronald all of their frustrations. The idea was to allow all sorts of people to interact with the brand on a casual level — Ronald being different things to different people.

The simple approach seems to have worked. These surprising ads showing Ronald McDonald as a “good listener” have so far been a hit, with 19% of viewers saying they liked them “a lot” and 20% considering them to be “very effective.”

Source: USA Today

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USING BACTERIA TO FIGHT BACTERIA
Researchers at Texas Tech University have found a surprising way to remove harmful bacteria from meat. The secret ingredient? It’s bacteria.

Tech researcher Mindy Brashears applied a mixture of four different lactic acid bacteria to ground beef and found that the combination reduced the presence of salmonella and a harmful E. coli strain known as O157:H7 by as much as 99.99 percent.

Salmonella, which causes a variety of adverse food poisoning effects, is responsible for an estimated 400 deaths in the US each year with a total 1.4 million cases. E. coli O157:H7 causes another 61 deaths in 73,000 cases.

The Food and Drug administration said in December that the treatment is safe for beef and poultry, but it isn’t yet known when treated meat will be commercially available.

Source: www.chron.com

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VODKA IS A GIRL'S BEST FRIEND
Keep your eyes peeled for a new vodka brand, Diaka Vodka, billed as the world’s most expensive, primarily because of its unique diamond filtration process.

Diaka is made in Poland, and is produced with an industry-first diamond filtration process, which uses nearly one hundred diamonds of up to one carat in size. This filtering supposedly results in a vodka with unsurpassed clarity and smoothness.

The bottle itself is made with crystals, and is considered an important creative breakthrough in design and manufacturing for the industry.

TransBorder Marketing, Inc. CEO and Founder Rudy N. Vogel, producer of Diaka brand, states, “The vodka lover continues to demonstrate a willingness to pay for quality. Vodka constitutes the largest segment of the U.S. liquor market, and high-end vodka continues to grow at a blistering pace.”

Source: allaboutbartending.blogspot.com