How can you make your customers happy?

     Last August I was at Inbound13 conference in Boston. I was lucky to have an extra day to spend going around the city. During that I stopped by a restaurant near the Memorial park and the food and the service were great. I did over tip the waiter because the service was super awesome. I realized that I checked-in by Foursquare and wrote a good recommendation with pictures too. Looking back at that moment I realized that I did that automatically and happily would recommend it to anyone. Wouldn’t you do the same too, if you get a super good service and food?

Some people might do that in different ways, but the fact that the experience was good, I felt good and happy spending the money, though it was bit pricy. Now looking at how do you promote and serve your product or offerings to customers. Does the result draw smiles on customer’s face when she/he pays the bill? As you can see this is a good Word of Mouth driver and a more trusted voice for strangers to become your customers.

As part of happiness related research conducted by Prof.Elizabeth Dunn, it focused on the idea that the happiness is an experience more than tangible object, so buying stuff for oneself not always a happiness driver, but enjoying things and moments with others through means bought by money is real joy and happiness. Feeling appreciated, being overwhelmed by excellence of service and well treatment are lasting experiences we enjoy to go through when we travel our dream vacation or our fancy honey moon… It goes on and on with examples and facts about the study.. That inspires us that when people love what you do for them as a brand , they don’t need a tangible incentive to promote your product or service, it will spur naturally and they will be happy talking about it to others..

So How do I measure customer happiness?

The scientific side of this and how do you measure customer delight and happiness is to calculate the accumulative scores of the feedback you get from customers by simply asking ” How likely would you recommend us to a friend?” And that has a scale from 0 to 10. Then follow that by an open ended question for their comment or feedback ( maybe the reason). This is called NPS and defined in Wikipedia as “Net Promoter Score” is a customer loyalty metric developed by (and a registered trademark of) Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix. It was introduced by Reichheld in his 2003 Harvard Business Review article “One Number You Need to Grow”.[2] NPS can be as low as −100 (everybody is a detractor) or as high as +100 (everybody is a promoter). An NPS that is positive (i.e., higher than zero) is felt to be good, and an NPS of +50 is excellent.”

After you realized what does that mean , now you might wonder how to put this in use for our business. Well, there is an important part of this program, which is to follow up on the results the good (promoters) and the bad ones (detractors). Then close the loop by asking the promoters to write testimonials, and the detectors to highlight their reason and issues that made them evaluate you as bad. What is recommended is to follow up on the issues that made them unhappy and solve them, then ask them again to evaluate the service. Does that make sense?

I hope it does because this will make better visibility and measurement on how good is your offering and how customers see you as a brand. What is most important is to make sure that excellence in service that your organization provides is at the core of what you do and not something lies in the customer service department only.

I was lucky to work on such model with Nokia and most of it is automated through systems and apps that are embedded in mobile handsets. The feedback is utilized through review and customer feedback engines that are published on the mobile product pages. Plus it is an open channel and a transparent one with consumers about the quality of products and services the company offers. This of course helps for continuous improvement to satisfy customers more and realize the magic of their happiness!

With the opportunity to have different social channels online and customers are more connected and empowered to speak up and share their experiences… The question for you is,  how do you value customer feedback and how much do you care about your customer experience?