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Bain & Company partners Maureen Burns and Darci Darnell join Fred Reichheld, the creator of the Net Promoter Score, in launching their new book, Winning on Purpose
Winning companies—or those that truly make the world a better place, deliver 2-3 times the average stock market returns and offer fulfilling work for their employees—often have one thing in common: they put their customers first, ahead of all other stakeholders. Many of these top companies are adept practitioners of Bain & Company’s widely used Net Promoter Score (NPS), a metric for tracking customer loyalty, which is grounded in the recognizable truth that “if a company treats you right, you come back—and you tell your friends and family.”
Global consultancy Bain & Company announced the launch of Winning on Purpose: The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customers by Darci Darnell, Maureen Burns and Fred Reichheld, creator of the Net Promoter System in December.
This new book provides extensive and convincing evidence that customer capitalism allows all stakeholders to win while building a sustainable future.
In Winning on Purpose, the authors detail why businesses should make enriching the lives of customers their primary purpose, proving that this is the best way of ensuring sustainable growth, happily fulfilled employees and robust investor returns. The book also unveils two of Bain’s new innovations: Net Promoter 3.0, which has been updated to meet today’s current business and social environment, and Earned Growth, an accounting-based twin for NPS.
Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company fellow and creator of the Net Promoter System, said: “Dissatisfaction is surging against traditional capitalism. It has become critical for businesses to move away from financial capitalism, which is focused primarily on profits, and stakeholder capitalism, which ultimately doesn’t satisfy anyone, to customer capitalism, which makes enriching the lives of customers a top priority.
“That’s proven to be the best way to ensure robust, sustainable results for all stakeholders,” Reichheld asserted. “NPS shines as a guide star for leaders committed to making their companies truly great.”
With an entertaining and inspiring mix of personal stories, customer and employee experiences along with CEO and investor insights, the authors share key messages:
- How NPS feedback from millions of customers has revealed that the previously invisible forces of love and loyalty drive business success—and how traditional financial metrics orient companies toward greed and self-interest.
- Why most NPS practitioners achieve just a small fraction of the system’s potential, and how leading practitioners use it as a moral compass to ensure people are treated right. Featured case studies include Apple, Amazon, Airbnb, and Tesla.
- The Revolutionary Earned Growth Rate (EGR), which provides the accounting twin to complement NPS, ensuring firms earn “good profits,” mainly generated when loyal consumers come back for more and bring their friends along.
- How to fight the Great Resignation by empowering employees to serve customers and hear how they did. The best companies know that the human touch is a key competitive differentiator for customer satisfaction and retention. And that for employees, the freedom to serve customers with empathy and creativity is the best path to extraordinary teams.
- The F.R.E.D. Stock Index (FREDSI), which tracks total shareholder return for companies that achieve their industry’s highest NPS. Not only are these companies customer-love winners; they consistently beat the stock market, with annual returns of more than 26%--almost triple the stock market average over the past decade.
