8 ways to quantify the happiness of your customers

As the latest research report, The Happiness Advantage from Sogeti points out, “New digital opportunities can make our lives easier, more efficient, safer, and more joyful.” It’s no wonder then, that the report describes digital happiness as “the new frontier of competition”.

So, how do you become a digital hero? What does your organization need to become a superstar guardian of your customers’ digital happiness? The Happiness Advantage report provides some great examples of companies that really understand, live and breathe the concept of happiness. There’s Japanese telecoms and internet corporation SoftBank, which has a corporate strategy built around ‘Information Revolution – Happiness for everyone’. Online e-tailer Zappos has a happiness vision and leverages social media as the key digital technology to create happiness. Zappos aims for real, personal social conversations and stories, shared by employees and customers alike.

I urge you to read the report for some inspirational stories about happiness pioneers like these.

To speed you on your journey to becoming a superstar happiness guardian, the report offers some pragmatic advice. It also defines four steps “Envision, Quantify, Install & Design” as the underlying framework for action.

I want to look at the Quantify step and the eight ways recommended by the report to measure customer happiness. After all, if you can’t measure it, how do you know if digital really is driving happiness?

1. Ask your customers how they feel. It sounds a simple approach, but it’s one that’s worked for time immemorial. And one way of doing this is through the Net Promoter Score (NPS).
2. Count the likes. Digital platforms have opened the door to numerous online/social ways to rate a customer’s happiness with your service or product. From likes and stars, to emoticons, this quick and, let’s face it, one dimensional, metric is a good starting point for understanding customer happiness.
3. Look at clicks, swipes and taps.This has become a standard practice for every organization operating in a digital world.
4. Use big data. Insights derived from big data captured across all customer-interaction channels can be used to help make people happy. For example, the ability to match a product to a customer’s personality offers a potential gold mine opportunity.
5. Analyze emotions. Do you know if a customer is angry or impatient? Software that analyzes the tone of voice and then automatically connects a customer to a human call center agent best suited to handle the given situation can make a big impact on happiness.
6. Give people a wearable device. OK, so this might feel a bit ‘big brother’ but bear with me. Japanese multinational Hitachi captures its employee happiness metrics via a wearable device measuring motion, interaction, movement, and voice. This enables people analytics and, in one instance, found that happy employees in a call center performed 20% better than their unhappy colleagues.
7. Observe humans, using humans. You can’t beat human empathy, but this way of measuring happiness does require experts (behavioral and anthropology) to go out into the field (a workplace, for example) to see how people deal with real-life situations.
8. Imagine what a typical customer or employee is feeling and create personas around which to design digital interfaces that make users happy – but combine this with observational metrics and avoid projecting your own assumptions.

Yes, most of these are common sense but it’s worth taking them on board. We cover them in more detail in our report. Everyone using digital hopes that it will improve their daily lives. So, being able to quantify the level of happiness and measure where you’re going wrong (or getting things right) will help you to better fulfil the dreams and aspirations of the people you connect with day in, day out. Making you a superstar guardian of their happiness.

More tips can be found in the NEW research report: ‘The Happiness Advantage’