8 tips for measuring (and improving) customer happiness

Dear Newark Airport Express,

Not that you care, which you made glaringly obvious during our interactions, but your customer service sucks. Actually, sucks is far too generous. Let me see if I can dig up an adjective to accurately describe your "customer service." Insipid, deprived, anemic... those aren't quite painting the picture either.

Let's try this on, Newark Airport Express (operated by Coach USA), whatever the opposite of customer service is – customer disservice? – you dominate that game and will be in contention for the top spot at this year's most miserable event, the World Cup of Dissatisfaction. Pay attention, Time Warner Cable and Comcast. While your impending supernova of awful customer service might swallow us all, you're gonna have to fight to take down these buses if you want the trophy. 

To those with customers, I beg you to take note. While I don't have the secret recipe to amazing customer service, I can point you in the right direction (the exact opposite route Coach USA takes) of the most important ingredient. It's the same ingredient on which many of our most beloved brands base their signature sauce.

Tip #1

Boiled down to the basics, customer service is all about delivering happiness to your customers. So if you only take one thing away today, remember that screaming at paying customers, refusing to offer solutions, threatening missed flights, and making a whole bus full of customers uncomfortable at 5:30 a.m. (all before ever leaving the stop) isn't recommended.

Tip #2

It was abundantly clear the bus operators don't understand the most important metric of customer service: how happy your customers are after interacting with you.  Please, I beg you, learn from this tragedy. Value and measure customer happiness. Because what we measure, we improve... And the market on measuring pissed off customers has already been cornered.

Thankfully, most companies are not powered by crushed spirits, and for those companies, Zoho Support has beefed up our happiness-surveying muscles, empowering you to grade and track your customer service performance. By constantly checking the pulse of your most important asset, your customers, you learn more about their needs and how you can better serve them.

TIP #3

​After resolving a customer's issue, always ask your customers if they are happy with the service they received. The goal is to deliver happiness, not merely satisfaction.

TIP #4

Streamline the survey process for the customer to encourage all customers to share their feedback. In Zoho Support, we give your customers the ability to rate your service directly ​from the very same email message that delivered the solution. For us here at Zoho, we've already seen a 60% increase in those who rate their service since we empowered customers to rate directly from the message. 

TIP #5

Once you've empowered your customers to share, build processes around this customer feedback to unlock more value.  If a customer is unhappy with your service, automatically escalate the ticket and notify ​a manager, so the interaction can be reviewed quickly and any issues tended to before the customer blows you up on Twitter. Or Yelp. Or slams you in a blog post. With all of Zoho Support's power available to work in harmony with your customer feedback, you can automatically launch processes defined by your customer happiness surveys.

TIP #6

Dig deeper into survey data and gain insights to constantly improve results for your customers. We improved the customer happiness reports in Zoho Support, making it easy to see how your results fluctuate over time. Even craft custom reports and dashboards to keep your customer-centric company honed into exactly how your customers view your service.

TIP #7

Always be aware of how a customer feels about you. Customer happiness is the end goal, so we redesigned Zoho Support to give you instant access to a snapshot of how happy each of your customers and accounts is with your customer service. Quickly view tickets and also see how​ customers rated their experience. Inside a ticket, an account or a contact, you are instantly aware of how happy a specific customer is with your service.

TIP #8

Customize and personalize your happiness surveys to improve your results. By adding your agent's photo to the survey, your customers are reminded who exactly helped them, reinforcing the personal nature of your customer service. Even customize the message that customers see after they submit their results, giving you another opportunity to express your brand's personality and appreciation.