HappyOrNot terminals look simple, but the information they gather is revelatory
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
There was a collective gasp from all the checkout operators, so I assume there is a direct impact to their performance rating. We pushed the super-happy face a few times to compensate.
NPS is a disaster. Since it's directly tied to financial consequences for staff, (1) staff beg for 10s, (2) anyone who knows how NPS works and has a conscience always gives 10 in order to protect staff from maangemetn abuse.
Because they are humans? Doesn't everybody learn from their mistakes? Some are worse at it than others, sure, but that's what upper layer of data analysis is for...
A few quick zaps and the rat will learn pretty quick. But every day it will dread going into the box more and more.
There's also the positive reinforcement from being confirmed as having done a good job.
NPS has ten steps because that granularity allows you to track improvements even in good teams.
If all you're doing with NPS is taking people out back and shooting them for a 9, then you're missing out on a lot of value.
Besides, people are pretty much incoherent about what is the difference between a 3 and a 7. Some people's 3 are a much higher rank than other people's 7.
Putting 10 options in front of random people is mostly useless. There are very few places where it will lead to meaningful choice.
These and other things came out of the competition to improve the success rate of the recommendation system.
This 4 scale smily face is pretty common in China, the started over 10 years ago. Even at places like banks and government agencies. They were a key part in how China got it's day to day corruption under control. People would pay bribes for service but leave a poor rating. And while corruption still exists in China, it is no where as in your face or omnipresent as it once was.
So possibly pressing the happy face doesn't compensate. The article also mentions that there's a reset delay to prevent people from pressing buttons repeatedly.
https://github.com/gaving/happy-or-not
Never got around to analyzing the data, too scared.
Maybe they have an employee pressing random buttons in the back room at frequent intervals.
I wish larger companies would take note
On one hand, we spam the ever-living shit out of people with email ads, push notification ads, etc to try to generate engagement.
On the other hand, we sometimes go out of our way to remove the human element from other parts of the loop: consider how rare it is to see a prominent "never ever recommend me this [show|song|book|whatever] again" button. With the massive number of potential features to choose from for finding similar pieces off content, I'd like to have more control there. Like a way to tell Spotify "I want my Discover Weekly playlist to only pull from songs that are less than 5 years old" or such.
Ooh, thanks.
The iPad app seems to be missing this... No heart, either.
Now to google to figure out the heart vs the + button, too, hah.
The best outcomes we ever achieved were triggering a conversation. Helpful, but I'm not sure I would call it "revelatory".
It shouldn't be hard to order the sequence of steps such that washing your hands is your last activity before leaving the bathroom.
When they started appearing near my local pharmacy, it was placed next to a stand of toys with giant cute eyes, which drew my attention to the "matching" happy face. Nice job on strategic placement, I thought.
Video monitoring is mentioned in the article together with timestamping. A store had a "customer satisfaction" problem in the morning, so together with video footage, they could determine there was slow-starting employee who was at fault.
> One client discovered that customer satisfaction in a particular store plummeted at ten o’clock every morning. Video from a closed-circuit security camera revealed that the drop was caused by an employee who began work at that hour and took a long time to get going. She was retrained, and the frowns went away.
While that works against a toddler who relentlessly taps the unhappy button, it’s an ineffective defense against a manager intent on manipulating feedback.
(Also: why would they press the button? bad reviews being given)
"We see that, while your over all ratio of good to bad isn't horrible, you have quite a bit more bad than usual and more votes than usual without the sales we'd expect."
"When I first met Theisen, I asked him what would prevent a store manager from standing next to a terminal and repeatedly pressing the smiley button, and he said that... the most important information from any location comes from the number of frowny presses, which not even a dishonest employee would be able to undo."
These days, it would be very cheap and easy to wire up simple "HELP" buttons at all the trouble points in a restaurant, along with cameras and machine vision (other than cameras in the bathroom). And those sensors could create a synthesized view of a restaurant or department store, or whatever. The synth view can then inform where help is needed.
But these sensors, low energy cpu's and radios are already attainable at the cheap. And at industrial productions, could be as low as $.50 per button. I'm really surprised why nobody has done this yet - and I read the article and found that yes they have. It's called HappyOrNot, and it's for surveys and quality control of every metric in 1 variable.
It works that way in debugging software, at any rate.
Maybe this is evil of me, but I think it'd be super interesting to strictly vote "very unhappy" on everything. What kinds of changes do you think businesses would implement if people were still buying stuff despite claiming to feel very unhappy?
What they really need to ask, if you're right about what they want to measure, is "Was your experience today better / same / worse than last time?" And then they need to stop pushing for you to click "better" every time, "same" should be the usual response unless they've actually improved notably.
Turns out morning shoppers were happy, evening weren't (due to queues), and the way to increase happiness and revenue was more staff in the evening, rather than pushier sales in the morning.
My first exposure to an effective business metric was my first consulting gig which was at Domino's Pizza HQ. Tom Monaghan was convinced that shorter delivery times led to increased sales. He had been unable to convince the franchisees of this, so he started a "Service and Delivery" program. Each month, secret shoppers would order pizza two different times, record the delivery time (starting when they hung up the phone) and rate the quality of the service. I wrote the program to crunch the numbers, sorting by sales, and sorting by delivery time. The two lists had a very high correlation. He published these lists each month in a company newsletter. When I started the process, the delivery time was like 34 minutes companywide, and a year later, the time had been reduced to 28 minutes average. The sales rankings validated his intuition.
(The program had to be discontinued, after there was a lawsuit relating to a death caused in an auto accident involving a pizza delivery driver.)
So the lesson here for us engineering types is, as patio11 says, is to find a way to do business value in what you are about to build.
What do you do if one agent is great and the next agent is terrible? Using something like a HappyOrNot button on every interaction would give you a lot more information about individual agents and their interactions.