Happiness Blind Spots Groundhog Day, Every Day

You don't need to be a sleuth to realize it. A better understanding of business happiness can help you recognize blind spots. Using simple technology, you can avoid a sorry state of affairs: deaf and blind backend (management/team), mute frontend (customers). But shifts in your approach and sensitivities are important prerequisites.

Every business faces challenges and risks when serving customers, But you can actively address blind spots before they undermine performance and happiness at your business. If you don’t have a positive and proactive reading of your day-to-day operations, then how can you maximize business potential? Why reinvent the wheel every time your customer completes a transaction or your teammate clocks out at the end of the day? By then it’s too late, everyday.

Groundhog Day on February 2^nd might not be relevant to your business. But the groundhog day of blind spots can be circumvented with a real-time "refresh" on your tablet or smartphone, right at your fingertips. Here we are not talking about monthly management meetings or Monday morning meetings where a bulleted list of goals and complex strategies is circulated around the table — yawning allowed. Instead, each member on your team can hold his/r own board meeting every business day of the year. Everyone involved in your business can be talking the same language — problem solving, opportunity spotting, and value ownership.

Turning problems into opportunities means embedding any combination of the following into your daily routine:

• Categorizing customer sentiments and identifying blind spots through automated triggers and red flags.
• Identifying positive effects (read, opportunities).
• Using customer-facing technologies, promoting customer-led improvements, and encouraging teammate-led initiatives: That’s the opposite of waiting for problems to surface, then dealing with them.
• Emphasizing a pipeline of creative ideas and leveraging team experience and knowledge.
• Infusing your team with optimistic bias and energy, as they become problem-solvers and value owners via a systematic approach.
• Measuring your business every month against specific KPI targets, cascaded to three business levels: customer happiness, teammate happiness, and teammate training.

These are simple yet powerful plans that could produce immediate results.

Imagine the power of triggers alerting you that an internal or external challenge is mounting within your business operations.

Customer Outreach Your outreach strategy might rely on an old rolodex or a pipeline of new contact information directly from customers, but just imagine your rolodex bitten by a radioactive spider. If you convert your customer's flat business card to the 3D record of a person who relates in real ways to your business, then you will have contact relations pumped up to take on heightened levels of customer happiness.

No More Guesswork Is your assessment of happiness grounded in reality? Or just based on a hunch, excessive confidence, or wishful thinking? Consider a reality check. Quickly gauge the sentiments of stakeholders — internally every month (teammates) and externally on-the-spot (customers) — by asking no more than one to three pointed questions. The forms you use for this purpose are customized to reflect your brand, to generate stakeholder input without any pre-determined influence, to advertise positive sentiments about your business, and to plug-in to your business apps. You don't have to be a whiz-kid to deploy such technology and to pull off big-data mining and analytics.

Increased Teammate Retention Optimal delivery of products and services depends on training and retaining skilled teammates with a sophisticated sense of value ownership in the business. Teammate retention can be increased by positive encouragement, incentives, motivation, and investment in the development of key skills.

Hi-Tech and Up-to-Date Paper-based systems are old school. Electronic surveys via email are passé. Proprietary systems often fail to keep pace with the evolving needs and habits of customers and teammates, putting your business at a competitive disadvantage.

Every Team Member, A Growth Engine The challenge would be bigger if your methods were not comprehensive — focusing only on customers without integrating teammates, for instance. Furthermore, traditional performance and growth strategies, using a top-top approach, constitute a colossal missed opportunity for the company: team on the lower echelon won’t necessarily have the opportunity to make any meaningful contribution. Making each team member a growth engine and value owner is a bottom-up approach directly linked to a culture of happiness and repeat business.

Ideally you just use one simple platform to power your business with happiness management, while maximizing the benefits of a social-local communication wall combined with motivation and training. Now that’s a superpower.

When your house is in order, you know where to find things: Valuables are under lock and key, milk is in the fridge, books are on the shelf. Fortunately, there are technology-based happiness models developed to help you motivate your team, elevate your customer happiness, and monitor business performance in real-time. Challenges are always there, but you are ready to nip blind spots in the bud. Is your house in order? Are you ready for happiness?

Contact us to receive a demo and start a conversation

Happometer helps corporate and location managers increase repeat-business, by integrating customer happiness, team happiness, and team training management. The team can drive stronger performance with the simplicity of a digital scorecard, in one seamless environment together with contact relations features. Happometer is cloud-based and mobile-enabled with social-local walls across locations. No downloading or installation required. Your data is encrypted in a secure environment.