How Are Customer Experience and Customer Happiness Linked?

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There are plenty of articles about the relevance of customer satisfaction to sales teams. We’ve even written a few ourselves!

To dive into this topic even further, we hosted a special webinar on it. Watch the recording today to see the highlights.

Customer satisfaction is an important metric and can go a long way to show how your team and product are performing.

But if you really want to take a closer look at your customer experience, CSAT scores might not be enough.

That’s because they only really scratch the surface when it comes to long-term indicators like predicting customer loyalty and showing you just how far your customer will go when it comes to promoting your business.

To fully understand these factors, we have to look beyond satisfaction.

What Is Customer Happiness?

Customer happiness means your customers aren’t just satisfied with your service; they’re truly happy because of it. And it can have an overarching impact on key factors integral to their experience with your business.

These include:

• How engaged they are

• How likely they are to share their positive experience

• How loyal to your brand they are

Ultimately, it really comes down to the customer.

For one person, it might lie in your sales team’s ability to personalize the call and strike more of a connection with them. For others, it might be hearing about your product value and experiencing just how much of a positive impact your product can have.

Happiness Looks Different for Every Customer

We all know happiness is subjective, so when we’re thinking about what constitutes customer happiness, a good place to start is realizing that it will be different for every customer.

This might make it a tricky metric to gauge, but as we’ll come to explore, it’s worth the trouble to secure an undeniably valuable insight that can drive customer experience success.

In our webinar, we welcomed…

• Dave Leiboff, Director of CSM at Aircall

• Nabila Smith, CX Tead Lead at Monday.com

• Sachee Perera, COO at CorePlan

• And Nat Felix, Customer Success Manager at Intercom

Together, they discussed:

• How a good customer experience equals long-term customer happiness

• What factors influence customer happiness, and how can different businesses ensure these are being met?

• The role of CX, Product, and Marketing in creating customer happiness

• The best ways to set customer happiness targets

• What tools and methods are commonly used to measure customer happiness?

How Do We Understand Customer Happiness?

If you’re looking to go beyond satisfaction, you’ll have to be prepared to dig a little deeper.

For starters, we recommend evaluating customer feedback. This won’t be as clear-cut as other measures of customer satisfaction, where customers provide a numerical ranking or answer a quick survey question. But the rewards are worth the effort as you begin to identify and measure the difference between satisfaction and happiness.

1. Look for Promoters, Passives, and Detractors

While CSAT scoring only provides a portion of the bigger customer picture, an NPS (net promoter score) survey affords you a sentiment analysis.

This goes beyond satisfaction metrics on how you’re performing, helping you understand your customer’s role as an advocate for your company.

It can be something that’s easily integrated with your existing cloud-based phone software, too, like Aircall’s Nicereply integration, which allows you to not just tap into how your customers experience happiness but also how they share it.

2. Make the Most of Every Conversation

Understanding customer happiness is a serious business. It involves investigating feedback and can take up more of your sales team’s time. Which means you can’t afford to waste a single conversation.

Having customer data through a CRM integration is ideal. It means that when your sales team calls a customer, they know their history inside out. Teams also benefit from staying connected across calls, with managers able to easily brief their sales reps on the very latest learnings—even during a call.

3. Get Personal

Remember that we’re no longer talking about satisfaction—we’re talking about happiness. So set your sights high when it comes to winning over customers who need a little more converting.

Our top tip? Go the extra mile. It might sound time-consuming, but integrating your CRM, whether it’s HubSpot or any number of CRMs out there, you can find those contacts in need of a follow-up and easily draw them into your daily outreach at the click of a button.

How Can You Cultivate Customer Happiness?

Once you have an understanding of what customer happiness looks like for your business, you can pay it forward and ensure you’re being proactive—not just reactive.

Cultivating customer happiness is all about communication.

It’s about ensuring your sales teams can spend time understanding your customers’ experiences, whether good or bad. And you need a holistic view. Your insights should range from the easy-to-achieve (like an NPS survey) to the personal (a follow-up call for feedback).

We checked in with Samantha Avillo, Senior Customer Success Manager for Aircall, to ask how she approaches customer happiness.

She told us, “I create happiness for my customers by checking in frequently, proactively providing updates, and genuinely making sure they’re happy with their experience. Depending on the company, I might spend more time focusing on seasonal changes or upcoming product releases I know they’ll be excited about.”

This level of personalization is key, and Samantha got us thinking about the key ways you can cultivate customer happiness within your sales team.

Things for your sales team to prioritize include:

• Personalizing their sales approach as much as possible

• Moving quickly to solve customer problems

• Proactively reaching out to customers about products you know will interest them

• Paying attention to customer feedback—both good and bad!

Up next? Learn how to leverage professional development to scale your sales team.

Published on March 7, 2022.