Our Customers Increase Productivity 26% by Making People Happier

Pasi Nikkanen: Welcome to Happy Today podcast. This is a podcast for those who want to improve service experience of internal services. If you use ServiceNow or other enterprise service management system, then this is for you.

Pasi Nikkanen: Hey. Welcome to this episode of HappyToday podcast. Today we want to share some numbers from our Happiness Score report. And this is really about the impact that our customers have been able to make. So tell me, you analyzed this data with the customer success team, so what did you guys find?

Sami Kallio: So what we did, we did take the first two months of each customer and convert that result that they had at that time, to the last two months. The only two customers that have been using our product for a year, or at least a year. And what we found from there is that on average, our customers were able to raise their happiness with 17%.

Pasi Nikkanen: That's huge.

Sami Kallio: But I would say that time-saving is even bigger, because that is 26%. It's meaning more than an hour a ticket.

Pasi Nikkanen: So the productivity in backed off of just focusing on happiness, was almost an hour per each ticket that the company was doing. Well that's a business case.

Sami Kallio: There is some kind of a business case. Even though some of the time will go to drinking coffee. But that was really, really nice to know this that it's really true that our customers has been able to really get results.

Pasi Nikkanen: So did you go deeper? What do you think really affects the differences and affects this that our customer's able to do this kind of improvement, or not?

Sami Kallio: Yeah, there was quite clearly only one reason that was dominating if customer would have been successful or not. And that is, if the data is shared with several partners, teams, persons, and really used. So there are a couple of customers that are not so successful, meaning that there is kind of the old fashion way, somebody's owning the data and not really sharing that part with partners, and so on. So one person cannot change anything. But in those that were really, really successful, it was shared openly with all people involved, so everybody can have their own input to it.

Pasi Nikkanen: Okay. And I think if people want to learn more on how to do that, we recorded an episode earlier called Steps to Happiness, so maybe go and listen to that one. Anything else? So what others? What differences?

Sami Kallio: I think there was some companies that really did that success from developing the tooling and developing the channels, doing changes in the service management area. And I think there was one of big, big great stories I heard from one of our partners a week ago, was that they developed a service portal in a way that they are now saving one hour per ticket after one, three months' project. And that is huge. It's a big company. So, understanding what is going on in the portal, what is making people happy, and then doing changes in a way that you are now saving one hour each ticket, that's a huge thing. And you can imagine how proud that team is about that process.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yes. Because usually when you do portal process, you just want to make it delightful, and nice colors, and good with the icons. But now actually they were making it, because it's a tool for the employees, actually. So, now making the employees more productive with the tool, that's a really good outcome of that project.

Sami Kallio: But I think 50/50% of the cases, some were doing the big changes in service management, some in the service techs team and how they work. And I think you have more information about one really great case from nowhere.

Pasi Nikkanen: Wilhelmsen, so they actually outsource their whole IT to an external vendor. And usually you would think that, Oh, it must affect negatively their scores. Actually, it did first. The happiness went down. But actually the productivity went up right from the start. But then, after 12 months of really analyzing the results, going into small things like how do you talk to a person when you start the conversation. So a person calling from India to a person in Norway, there's a cultural behavior, so the Norwegian people wanted you go right into the topic. And just making this kind of small changes all the time, continuously, they were able to make 72% impact on their happiness in 12 months. And I think like 40 something percent in the productivity, which is huge. You can already make a huge business case off the outsourcing, so that was a really, really good example.

Sami Kallio: I think those are the two areas. You either do the same using service management or services. Of course, best case would be that both will do the changes in simultaneously. But for some reason, in these cases we realized that in many cases it has been either of these areas that has been doing the most of the impact.

Pasi Nikkanen: Cool. All right, but this was part of the happiness score report. If you want to get your copy, you can go to happysignals.com and subscribe to that one. We also have a on demand webinar that you can watch the whole report explained by us. But Hey, thanks for this. That was the episode topic of the episode, and talk to you later. Thank you.

Sami Kallio: Thank you.