4 Tips to Measure Customer Happiness

Measure Customer Happiness

So what if we could do the same with our customers, and do the marketing equivalent of the World Happiness Report to find out how happy they are with our services?

1. Stop measuring the wrong things

This will be different from, and hopefully more useful than, traditional indicators of success. Metrics like how many users visited your site, conversion rate, and cart size are important, but they’re missing something.

They can’t tell you how the customer feels because it’s all about your business, not the customer.

Instead, we need to think about engagement and satisfaction. Both are much talked about and sought after but are rarely correctly measured or even well understood. Even when a brand has an active social media presence, making it easier to judge your audience’s engagement, marketers sometimes miss the point.

2. Engagement is more than just a number

It’s often assumed that a high follower count automatically means you’re doing something right and, even if that’s not true, it doesn’t mean you’re engaging people. Or they are satisfied.

You may have 500,000 followers, but they are not engaged if most of them don’t like, share, or comment. On the other hand, if you have 50,000 followers and half of them are fascinating, they are more valuable. If they are engaged, chances are there is at least some interest in what you do, which is half the battle won.

There is a question of assessing the sentiment behind engagement. Judging whether people are happy has a problem because people are more likely to express negative emotions than positive ones, so negativity tends to be overrepresented.

Complaining about bad experiences seems easier than praising good experiences. Complaining is an expression of frustration and a way of retaliating, but being nice? Not much profit for the customer.

3. Ask what they think

The best way to encourage positive feedback is to ask for it – or instead, ask for it. People need to be urged to put in the effort, but it doesn’t need to be complicated – long surveys are difficult and tedious for customers – so make it simple, like post-purchase SMS.

And although the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is used everywhere, in an age when the way people interact with and recommend brands has changed significantly since its inception in 2013, perhaps the days are numbered. It’s better to use questions specifically tailored to your business and customers and less open to interpretation than the NPS 1-10 scale.

Using a Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is common practice, but its success isn’t just about finding out what customers think. It’s about taking action if something goes wrong.

4. If something goes wrong, fix it

If something goes wrong, follow up. The message “How did we do it today” is everywhere, but it is useless if the response is not acted upon. Learning about brand mistakes is as important as understanding what brands do right.

What makes a person happy is often considered subjective and challenging to measure. But when it comes to customer experience, it’s not hard to figure out what makes people happy.

Good service, complaint resolution, problem-solving – all of them are much simpler to measure than the level of corruption in society and the use of antidepressants. If it’s possible to know which country is the happiest on Earth, it’s possible to find out if your customers are satisfied.