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The Science of Customer Happiness By Keith Dawson
In recent years it's become ritualized behavior for companies to try to differentiate themselves from their competitors based on the amount of love they purport to show their customers. Too often this is a way to pay lip service to a complex concept that fails to account exactly for what makes customers happy. The idea of “happiness” floats out there like a butterfly on a summer breeze. Yes, we can quantify “satisfaction” if by that we mean the number of people who tell us that things are “ok.” But what do we really mean when we make it the centerpiece of our customer strategy, and therefore hang millions of dollars of resources and all the blood and toil that we can spare in trying to achieve it? Try, for just a moment, to think about the happiness or satisfaction issue as if it weren’t emotional, as if it could be quantified. It’s a variable, like any other. There are extremes of happiness (like “elation” and “misery”) and a wide area in the middle of mild contentment. Now apply that to the customer. What you really have, instead of customers who fall into the binary categories of happy or not happy, is a broad spectrum of views about your company and your products that may change at any time. Different stimuli produce different “happiness” reactions in customers. (Does this sound like a psych experiment? It is one that happens thousands of times a day in your call center.) Happiness and satisfaction are not simple states. For example, a customer could be what I call interaction happy – he could be perked up in response to a particularly good experience that he’s just had. Or he could be abstractly happy – thinking positively about you without any recent stimulus to cause him to change his mind. When you decide you need to raise your customer satisfaction scores, you need to figure out exactly which type of “happy” you’re aiming for. It does cost a lot of money to increase those scores. Are you sure that interaction-happy is going to make the same kind of long-term business sense as abstractly happy? For example, let’s say you decide to raise the interaction-happy scores. This would most likely be measured in immediate post-call surveys. It can also be detected in certain call handling metrics; first-call resolution is a good indicator of whether you have interaction happiness. Cross- or up-sell success rates are another. But you may have to invest in much longer calls, hence longer average handle time and fewer calls per agent per hour in order to get those higher satisfaction scores. Many of your telecom metrics will seemingly indicate that your center isn’t performing optimally. In other words, rising amounts of interaction happiness are costly and can be a drag on standard metrics. On the other hand, let’s say you want to improve the overall perception customers have – improving the abstractly happy. Unfortunately, there are customers who will tell you what they think, and those who won’t bother. Let’s call them active and passive. Customers who are abstractly unhappy, but passive, are lost to you unless you go after them in a serious, programmed way. And worst of all, you have no way of knowing who they are. You have to seek out this information; it will not come to you. Active people will tell you what they think whether there’s a structure for gathering their feedback or not. If they are active and happy, great. You’ll hear about it. If they are active and unhappy, the whole world will hear about it. In either case, because you simply don’t know whether the passive customers are happy or unhappy, you must, MUST create some system for collecting information from every customer that solicits feedback. Some feedback information makes its way into your call center anyway. Agents are always figuring out short circuits through corporate red tape that make their lives easier. If you don’t formally collect this intelligence you are forgoing a chance to turn abstractly happy (or unhappy) people into interaction happy ones. And you’re taking the chance that any active people will tell the blogosphere or their fifty best friends how ignorant you are. I believe that the quickest way to create “happy customers” is to take advantage of the expectation gap that people walk in with. They expect a certain level of service. If you exceed it, you create interaction happiness. Do that enough times in a systematic way, and you create abstract happiness. Solicit feedback from passive customers and you retain more of them. You transform passives into actives, and you get them to be active on your behalf. |