HappyOrNot Aims to Change Customer Feedback

Getting customer feedback is a challenge for any business. Contracting research firms is too expensive for most companies. A wealth of online survey tools exist but they have inherent flaws. You can have well-written surveys that ask important questions but those insights are meaningless if customers don't actually participate. Tampere, Finland-based HappyOrNot is a startup that brings a novel approach toward customer and employee surveys. By using an extremely simplistic gauge of customer satisfaction, HappyOrNot is designed to give businesses as many customer survey impressions as possible.

HappyOrNot was founded less than a decade ago by Heikki Väänänen and Ville Levaniemi but its terminals have already been installed in more than 100 countries around the world. To date, HappyOrNot's customer list includes more than 4,000 organizations and it continues to grow year over year. It has worked with such major companies as American Express, Avis, and IKEA. According to the company, it's rapidly growing and aiming to entirely change the way people provide and gauge feedback. We took some time to speak with Levaniemi, co-founder and Executive Vice President, for an overview of the company's solution and what its goals are.

Extreme Simplicity

HappyOrNot is relatively unsophisticated compared to survey tools such as GetFeedback or SurveyGizmo. The solution is typically offered in the form of a terminal with four physical, emoji-like buttons. Users are asked to rate their experience by pressing one of the buttons. The first button is dark green and very happy, which is followed by light green and less happy, red and frowny, and dark red and very frowny (see image above). Data is instantly recorded and can be uploaded to a companion application in which the client can follow the data in real time.

According to Levaniemi, the simple tool has transformed its clients. "This all basically starts with it being extremely convenient for all parties involved," he said. "First, it really doesn't take any effort or work from the customer. This comes from the easiness of pressing a single button. It's inviting to look at and has a friendly interface. You don't need an app or subscription. You don't need to be afraid that we are taking metadata from you."

What the system lacks in rich data (such as the open-ended insights you might get from a platform such as Zoho Survey ), it makes up for in customer participation. According to one figure provided by the company, clients have seen response rates of up to 80 percent.

According to Levaniemi, it is the most negative feedback button—the dark red frowny face—that offers the most valuable insight. "It is really important for a company to find the 'de-satisfaction' level. It tells the company how much business they have lost because of a dissatisfied customer."

A lot of the value prospect of HappyOrNot is that the survey is recorded just after the customer's experience, whether that's in-person in a retail store or medical office or an online visit to an e-commerce webpage. As a result, businesses can look at patterns based on different times of the day. A retail store might find that certain employees may be giving customers a worse experience on their shift. An airport could identify problem areas in real time by looking at the app during a rush.

"We find that this really makes the client reflect on things that they had never considered before," said Levaniemi. "Clients could ask themselves, 'How many people did we have working? Were we doing something we weren't supposed to, like unpacking boxes on the store floor?' The red feedback is extremely important."

The companion app offers business users real-time tracking of customer impressions. Carrying on with the theme of user-friendliness, the app's "Quick View" looks more like a fitness tracker than an analytics tool. Businesses are given encouraging messages for improving their satisfaction ("Nice! Your performance improved last week," reads one message) and are given simple statistics from the previous week. More traditional options, such as visualized charts and trends, are also available on the companion app.

Optional Insights

In addition to the physical buttons on the main kiosk, there is also a touchscreen version as well as a web version for online interactions. The touch-screen version offers a 3-tiered approach to the button presses. Customers are asked a first question, a follow-up selection, and an opportunity to provide open feedback inside a text box. The web app, which typically appears after users make a payment, also lets users enter open feedback. According to Levaniemi, the web variant was created at the request of companies that had success with HappyOrNot in their physical stores and wanted similar insights for their web version.

E-commerce users can find unique insights into their business using HappyOrNot. Levaniemi recalled a story in which one client realized they were missing out on sales because they did not support payments from a certain bank. This forced those bank customers to use a different payment system. "They basically found that they were losing between five and 10 customers a day because they felt inconvenienced," said Levaniemi. "Again, this solution is so simple, but time and time again we see it dramatically changing how our clients do business."

Pricing varies widely depending on the customer's needs. According to the company, a single store setup with one kiosk costs $100 per month. Prices go up from there based on the number of stations and other requirements.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.