David Owen wrote a long article for The New Yorker about the history and success of the industry leader in instant reporting solutions on customer or employee satisfaction. Or, to put it simply, the company that invented those machines that, inside the shops, allow you to give a quick judgment on the experience by choosing between four smileys: happy, a little less happy, disappointed and very disappointed. The company is called HappyOrNot, it is Finnish, it has existed since 2009 and now those machines are in more than 117 countries and among the thousands of companies that use them are Lego, Microsoft, McDonald's, IKEA, BMW, Decathlon and Autogrill. Since 2009, more than 6 million smileys have been chosen and pressed.
There are other companies that make similar machines, but HappyOrNot's are by far the most popular: you've seen them for sure, and you've almost certainly used them too. The basic idea is simple, almost trivial: to understand if customers are satisfied. And even what might seem like a disadvantage – the inability to give more information, to write a complaint – is not. Other more accurate systems, for example a survey to fill out, have a big common problem: they are boring and take time to do and then analyzed. Not to mention that, in the end, they report the opinions of only the customers who had the time and desire to fill them in, and often those customers are the very angry ones and not the satisfied ones.
Machines like HappyOrNot's ask the customer to really lose just a second or two, they're anonymous, and even a three-year-old could use them. For the user who uses them they are of no bother. Instead, they are very useful to the owner of the shop or company who analyzes the results and looks forward to every response. All it takes is a camera in the shop to go and see why, at a certain time, there was an avalanche of angry, red faces. Maybe too much queue, maybe a rude salesman.
The story of how HappyOrNot was born and raised is very “why the hell didn't I think about it”. The founder and current CEO is Heikki Väänänen: he was born in 1980 and grew up in one of those beautiful, very remote and not particularly lively Finnish villages. He told Owen that when he was “14 or 15” and moved to a bigger city, he was in a big electronics store to buy floppy disks and couldn't find floppy disks, someone to help him find them. or someone to complain to for not finding someone to help him. He said he thought, “Okay, nobody cares here, but there is someone, somewhere, who would care about the problem I had today.” For the usual question of boredom and fatigue, Väänänen did not write any complaints; but he kept the idea.
In the following years he founded a small programming company which then merged with one that created smartphone games. The company was successful (it made games for Disney, among others) and in 2009 it was bought by a bigger one. Väänänen decided that the acquisition did not convince him and told a friend who worked with him the idea behind HappyOrNot. His friend told him something like “it's too trivial for someone not to have done it already” but the next day he let him know that he had checked and that actually no, no one had seriously thought about it. His friend, Ville Levaniemi, also told him: “Ok, let's quit and get this thing going.”
The first HappyOrNot machine was placed in 2009 in a grocery store in Tampere, the second largest city in Finland. At the end of the day, 120 customers had chosen and crushed one of the (then two, not four) smileys. The company overcame its first major hurdle in 2012 when it started selling beyond Finland, a country Owen quoted a joke about which explains many things: “An introverted Finnish, while talking to you, looks at your feet. An extroverted Finn, while he talks to you, looks at your feet ». It was necessary to see if abroad people would have had the same courtesy in choosing to answer, and the same correctness in doing so objectively. HappyOrNot's first big success abroad was at Heathrow Airport in London: a place where many people (so many hypothetical customers) pass by and where many happen to have things to complain about and don't have time to complain. .
HappyOrNot now offers two types of machines (with touch screen or with physical buttons) and an option to insert the satisfaction meter on an internet page. A program for data analysis is supplied with the machines. The prices are not on the site and depend on the number of machines requested and on any need to change their shape or size.
Machines are successful because they say the essential things, but they say them clearly, and based on a large number of responses. As Owen wrote, even on Amazon – which has no problem with the total number of users – the reviews or stars are given by a small percentage of users. And not always, as the reviews of this 18 thousand euro projector teach, are true judgments, with real utility. For some time HappyOrNot has added the ability to add reasons and comments, but it is not mandatory.
In addition to having many advantages, however, the HappyOrNot approach presents some problems. What happens if an employee presses the green face so many times to make his boss think he is great? And what to do with those who – and there are – press the red face like this out of whim, for no reason? Todd Theisen, HappyOrNot's head of international sales, explained that the machines are made to prevent someone from compulsively squeezing the same face in no time. He also said that, of course, those who look at the data are interested in not seeing angry faces, rather than seeing lots of happy faces. He then added that even those who hit at random are not a problem, because luckily the “false negatives” become insignificant thanks to all the other answers. But on the other hand it's his business.
