Many of our customers have asked us for the ability to show off their customer happiness scores. Several have even gone as far as updating their company blog monthly with the information. So, we’ve made it easy to publicly display your customer happiness ratings.

We’re happy to announce a new feature in Hively – the WOW Wall. 

The Hively WOW Wall is a public page you can use to display how happy you make your customers. The page displays your brand, website, and the percentage of the happy, satisfied and unhappy ratings your team has received. Best of all each WOW your team receives is automatically displayed on your WOW wall so people can hear directly from your happy customers. We also display your team members on the page and give you the ability to filter the WOWs by each team member.

You can also display your company WOW Wall on your own website. Simply take the code scrap we provide and paste it into any full width web page on your site and *BAM!* your very own customer testimonial page.

The Wow Wall is a great way to display positive feedback from your customers and show the world how well your team is taking care of its customers. Check out our Hively WOW Wall here.

If you’re a Hively customer activate your WOW Wall today and let us know if you have any questions. If you’re new to Hively, sign up today and start WOWing your customers!

Oh yes. Happy holidays and have a happy New Year!

We just finished adding a new integration partner to Hively. This time with one of our favorite help desk applications – Help Scout. Help Scout is perhaps, the most simple solution available for managing your customer support. It’s easy to get started with Help Scout and ideal for small businesses.

It’s easy to insert Hively rating snippets into you Help Scout email templates. Now you can measure employee performance from customer feedback for each of your team members. Here’s how to do it.

A few things you’ll need:

• A team account created in Hively with your team members added
• A Help Scout account

Step One

Login to Hively and click on your name on the top right. Then select team settings, followed by Integrations. Select Help Scout from the integrations dropdown.

Step Two

For each user, you will be asked to enter an ID. Here’s a list of user IDs for your account. Once completed, click the Update button.

Step Three

Next click on the Get Snippet link. In the popup window, click the Show HTML link, then copy the code.

Step Four

Now log into your Help Scout account. Select “Apps” in the top navigation menu and choose Hively.

Press the “Install App” button on the left.

Step Five

Once installed, two toggle buttons will apear. Select “Settings,” and paste your Hively snippet into the text editor below. Be sure to click the HTML button (< >), before pasting in your snippet.

Select the mailboxes to include your snippet on and hit the “Save” button. Now you are set!

One thing about the customer service space that really irks me is this obsessive emphasis on “best practices” and generic tips… all of them backed by almost no data.

That’s a shame, because the data is definitely out there, in the form of consumer research studies and social psychology books & experiments.

While most of the advice is still solid, it’s always a good idea to confirm your intuitions with solid intel, just like Hively allows you to gather feedback from your email support efforts.

Below I’ve outlined the 3 biggest misconceptions in this highly important aspect of your business, and if you want to argue about it, get prepared: I’ve got research on my side!

1.) Myth: Your Customers Want “In and Out” as Fast as Possible

Don’t get me wrong, there are times when it is appropriate to “get out of the way” of your customers.

I like being a self-sufficient person and I don’t always need to get a hold of someone from support, especially if I’m trying to learn something about the product.

One example comes from premium WordPress theme sellers like DIYThemes, who offer a huge tutorial section for learning their software at your own pace.

That being said, the data shows that there are times when trying to maximize speed and minimize customer interaction can go horribly wrong.

Strangely enough, this lesson comes to us from research that analyzed convicted felons!

The research (found in the book Sway) examined how these felons felt about the “fairness” of their sentencing in relation to the crime committed.

Outside of the obvious (those with harsher sentences deemed they were “unfair”), there was a very interesting tidbit that the book pointed out: those felons who had spent more face-to-face time with their lawyer were far more likely to rate their sentence as “fairer” than those who didn’t spend as much time with their lawyer.

Woah!

The Brafman brothers, authors of Sway, asserted that:

“…Although the outcome might be exactly the same [in length of sentence], when we don’t get to voice our concerns, we perceive the overall fairness of the experience quite differently.”

In similar research, it was found that while most patients who are injured during a procedure do not sue their doctors, those who were far most likely to sue were those who felt their doctor “rushed” their treatment or didn’t spend enough time with them.

Customers value attention in a world that promotes efficiency over everything else.

Letting your customers know that you appreciate them takes more than a “thank you” or a pleasant demeanor: actions speak louder than words, and attentive, personalized service says volumes.

Don’t try to get your customers in-and-out as fast as possible, make sure they leave as satisfied as possible.

2.) Myth: Customer Feedback is Not Useful for Innovation

Numerous quotes on the importance of innovation coming from the company (and not the customer) can be found from some pretty prominent names.

Take Steve Jobs often cited quote:

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups.

A lot of times…people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

Or the one from Henry Ford (even though he probably didn’t say it):

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

While trying to radically innovate while listening to feedback from your average customer isn’t always optimal, to deny that your customers can’t do many things better than you is just absurd.

In fact, there are plenty of notable examples of customers playing an integral role in company innovation.

My favorite examples come in the following two forms…

The first is a broad look at innovation from MIT’s Eric von Hippel. In his research, he analyzed 1,193 commercially successful innovations across nine industries.

He found that 737 of those (60%) came from customers!

Another more specific example comes to us from the multinational conglomerate 3M.

In the 90′s, 3M’s Medical-Surgical Markets Division was in a big slump, and they needed to make changes fast. In order to inspire some more creative thinking, they organized a “lead user” (superstar customer) team to help with innovations in addition to their in-house staff.

Want to compare the results yourself?

• User-lead innovations had an average revenue of $146 million dollars (in 5 years)
• Internally generated innovations had an average revenue of $18 million (for the same time-span)

Yikes, customers win again!

This research is important to keep in mind because many fantastic businesses are founded and flourish just by solving customer problems.

As it turns out, customers are pretty good at telling you what those problems are and in helping you innovate to deliver solutions, so don’t forget it.

3.) Myth: Winning Over Customers Takes Big Expenditures

According to Cialdini’s research, the social construct of reciprocity is one that is pervasive in all societies.

The process of reciprocity is doing favors for others and creating goodwill with people so that they view you favorably in return. Most businesses understand this practice (at least I hope so!), but too many think that it’s all about the expense.

In a classic study by psychologist Norbert Schwarz, he found that as little as 10 cents (this was in 1987) was enough to change the outlooks of participants who found the money by surprise.

In a later interview, Schwarz would later sum up this phenomenon as such:

It’s not the value of what you find. It’s that something positive happened to you.

Simple enough right?

In another great example, a company called Sweetgreen regularly places gift-cards under bicycle seats when it’s raining and near parking tickets by expired meters, just to brighten people’s day.

That’s an example of a “frugal WOW” in action; dazzling customers with caring service that doesn’t cost you a whole lot.

With this info in hand, you need to re-think any pricey programs you have in mind and focus on really surprising customers with creative acts of kindness that generate goodwill for a fraction of the cost.

Your Turn!

What did you think of some of this research?

Let me know in the comments, I’ll see you there!

About the Author: Gregory Ciotti is the marketing guy at Help Scout, the invisible help desk that turns email support into a personalize & painless process for you and your customers. Get more customer insights from the Help Scout blog or from our free e-book.

IdeaMensch is a blog that interviews founders of start up companies. Check out their interview with Jason Lander, Founder and CEO of Hively.

Where did the idea for Hively come from?

We worked with companies for years that were incredibly focused on customer service. However, most of them weren’t measuring their customer satisfaction levels, and if they were, the were trying to do so with surveys. Surveys don’t work; they’re time consuming, the data is hard to aggregate, and they have a very low engagement rate. So, we created Hively around the idea of giving businesses the ability to measure customer service online in the simplest way possible. We furthered it by creating a means for managers to immediately reward employees for delivering exceptional customer service.

When customers leave you feedback with Hively your engagement with them doesn’t have to stop there! Hively provides you with ‘thanks buttons’ to add to the customer feedback process.

What are thanks buttons?

Thanks buttons are customizable buttons that link to web pages, videos, white papers, coupons or even send emails. These buttons give your customers options for further interaction with your company. With Hively, after a customer leaves you feedback they land a page we call the ‘thanks page.’ This page displays a custom message from the team member that just received feedback. Under this message you can also display thanks buttons.

What are some examples of thanks buttons?

You are really only limited here by your imagination. You can display as many thanks buttons as you like and you can display different thanks buttons based on the type of feedback you received. For example, if a customer just gave you a WOW create a thanks button asking them to now rate you on Yelp! If a customer just gave you negative feedback, create a thanks button that sends an email directly to a manager for quick contact and follow up.

Some specific examples of thanks buttons include linking to:

• Like us on Facebook
• Follow us on Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram or LinkedIn
• A YouTube or Vimeo Video
• Downloading a whitepaper, eBook or coupon
• Completing a survey
• Leaving a company review for you on Yelp, Google Places, LinkedIn or Avvo
• Sending an email to support or a manager
• A support site

How do you create thanks buttons?

Easy. All team leaders on paid Hively subscription plans have the ability to create thanks buttons. Simply login to Hively, go to your team settings and click on the Messages tab. At the bottom of the page you can create your thanks buttons. First, select the rating type you want to create thanks buttons for by clicking on the Happy, Satisfied or Unhappy face. Remember, you can create unique thanks buttons for each rating type!

Next, add as many thanks buttons as you like. Give each button a label and link them to a web page, image, video or document. For example: http://www.teamhively.com. You can also have the link be a ‘mailto’ link. This means that when a customer clicks this button they will be able to send an email to the person you designate. For example, if a customer gives you an unhappy rating you might want one thanks button option for them to be able to contact a manager. To do this, select the unhappy rating face. Next, label your button ‘Contact a manager’ (without quotes). For the link type, put in your the email address of the manager like this: ‘mailto:tammy@acme.com’ (again, without quotes).

Be sure to save your buttons by clicking Update. Now your customer thanks page will display all the thanks buttons you’ve created for each rating type.

That’s it! If you’re a Hively customer give it a try. If you’re not yet using Hively sign up today for free!

“Hively is an amazing tool to help us measure our customer satisfaction. We use it to reward our employees that provide the best customer service on a weekly basis. It’s an excellent motivator and constant reminder to our team that our customers are #1 to us.” – Dan Gutierrez, VP of Advantage On Call

“We’ve created a weekly and monthly competition with Hively’s point system.  We give extra points for customer responses and negative points for lack of participation.  This has created an environment that put’s our customer and employee’s first.  We pride ourselves on working for our customer and employee’s first and their feedback has helped us reward our internal team and adjust our processes so that we can continue to succeed”

We’ve added a couple of new enhancements to Hively, all focused on providing you with better customer service while using the application.

The first enhancement is our ‘View Help’ screen. If you’re curious about where something is or what a button/link on a page does simply click the ‘View Help’ button at the bottom right of your screen and the View Help page will come up. On this page we’ve highlighted and summarized some main functionality and things you can do.

Also, new subscribers to Hively will see this View Help screen a few seconds after they login. This screen can be closed at any time by clicking the X in the top right hand corner.

The next thing we added is a Feedback tab! The feedback tab sits on every page of the application and can be clicked at any time. Doing so will produce a pop up where you can click a Hively smiley face (not required) and leave us feedback. You can use this form to give us general feedback, request help, or ask us a question. Simply submit your comment and we’ll get back to you right away.

We hope these new additions help to answer some of your questions and improve your experience while you’re using Hively. If you have questions or need help please visit our support site or send us an email any time.

The Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN) is an amazing organization that has help Oregon Entrepreneurs for years. Hively has been a member since we started the company and enjoyed many of the benefits membership brings us – access to other successful entrepreneurs, informative talks, networking events and much more.

This week, OEN did a member spotlight on Hively and our CEO/Founder Jason Lander. In the interview, Jason discusses the idea for Hively, where they plan on taking it and the challenges of being an entrepreneur.

Q: What problem does it solve?

A: Most companies try to measure customer satisfaction with surveys. But surveys have a low response rate, they’re time-consuming to manage and the data is hard to act upon. Instead Hively lets your customers give you feedback by simply clicking on a happy, satisfied or unhappy face every time they get an email from someone at your company.
Every time you get feedback you earn points and get ranked on a leaderboard so you can see who on your team is performing the best. You can also reward top performing employees directly through Hively by sending them Buzz and rewards with digital gift cards.

Read the full interview here.

We’re happy to officially release our Buzz feature of Hively! The feedback from the feature and our partnership integration with Tango Card has been so overwhelmingly positive we’ve decided to take it out of beta early and make it available to everyone.

The Buzz immediate employee feedback and reward system enhances Hively’s easy platform for soliciting and measuring customer feedback by giving users the ability to quickly offer employees a pat on the back – and to move from a virtual to a tangible reward system.

Check out what one of our customers – Ruby Receptionists – has to say about it.

…now, through the addition of the Buzz reward feature, we can swiftly recognize those employees that go above and beyond our standard of delivering a mix of friendliness, charm, can-do attitude and professionalism.”  Jill Nelson, founder and CEO of virtual reception service Ruby Receptionists.

How does the Buzz feature change things from companies focused on delivering exceptional customer service? Read what Hively CEO Jason Lander has to say about that.

“Immediately recognizing and rewarding outstanding customer service can give an organization a competitive edge and boost its bottom line through reduced employee turnover and improved morale,” explained Jason Lander, CEO and co-founder of Hively. “According to a recent study conducted by Towers Watson, only 36 percent of responding organizations tied their competency models to a reward program. Yet organizations with reward and talent management programs are more than twice as likely to be high-performing companies. Hively, now enhanced with Buzz, closes this gap.”

How does Buzz work?

…for businesses wanting to move from a virtual to a tangible rewards program, Buzz includes an option to tie accolades to rewards. Through a new partnership with Tango Card, Hively users can deliver real time rewards to top performing team members through gift cards that can be redeemed for cash, donated to charity or exchanged for merchandise from companies such as Amazon, Starbucks, Nike and Zappos.

You can read the official press release on the Buzz employee feedback and reward system from Hively here.

Companies that measure customer feedback and reward employees for delivering outstanding customer service can gain a competitive edge and boost their bottom lines. These companies will see greater customer loyalty, less employee turnover and improved morale.

Hively is the first web based system that offers you a complete ‘closed loop’ feedback system from customer to employee. Our goal with Hively is to create the simplest way for companies to gather and measure customer feedback, and reward their employees for providing exceptional customer service. The diagram below is our way of visually explaining how this process works.

Sign up for Hively today and see the benefits for yourself!