Category: blog

B3000+ Awards Night 2019

On Thursday night SmartMeasures as the 2018 B3000 Overall Business of the Year winners, were thrilled to pass the 2019 Award to Jarrod Briffa at Kinfolk.  Not only did Kinfolk take out the Overall Business of the Year award, they also won the Social Enterprise category.

Special guests were for the evening were Hon. Adem Somyurek, Minister for Local Government and Small Business and Mark Schramm, Acting Small Business Commissioner


B3000 winners from left: Di Schmidtke, Jarrod Briffa, Michelle Redfern, Hon. Adem Somyurek, Keith Middleton, Abrar Aziz, Bev Friend

The other category winners are:

A lot can happen in a year. 

What did winning the B3000 Award mean to SmartMeasures?

When the co-founders Mike Crooks and Libby Dale started work on their submission in April 2018, they had just launched SmartMeasures at the Salesforce World Tour in Sydney and were promoting their new product to Energy Retailers in Melbourne.

Libby Dale – “We had been working hard for many years on the idea and developing the product.  Entering the awards gave us the opportunity to engage in the process of thoroughly documenting our plans.  We would not have done such a deep dive into our business and the submission has effectively been the foundation for where we are a year later.  The recognition of winning served to validate our idea and gave us confidence to push on.”

Mike Crooks – “2018 was a big year for SmartMeasures, launching our product in March and winning B3000 in June through to signing our first Energy Retailer in October.  Winning the B3000 Innovation Award was an important part of our first year in market as it gave us, and our customers the confidence that SmartMeasures was a winning idea.”

The SmartMeasures team has grown substantially with five of the team in attendance and enjoying the festivities of the Award night.  The new members of the SmartMeasures team are:

Unhappy customers – what’s the cost?

What’s the difference between a dissatisfied customer and an unhappy or angry customer?

A dissatisfied customer is likely to feel frustrated or annoyed about an aspect of your service. Service delivery may have been a bit slow. Or a minor mistake was made. The incident may be quickly resolved and soon forgotten. An unhappy customer, however, will not be easily placated. They have the potential to do real damage to your brand.  

As with the difference between a satisfied and happy customer, it’s about the emotional connection. Just as an emotionally engaged and happy customer is a great benefit to your business, unhappy customers are a threat to your business. They will vent their dissatisfaction to friends and family. Leave damning reviews on social media and forums.

Not only will you lose their business. You will lose the business from other potential customers.

Dissatisfied versus unhappy or angry customers

An unhappy or dissatisfied customer have one thing in common – they are both bad for your business. Dissatisfied customers will be more passive. Their feelings are less intense and short lived. They are unlikely to complain or let you know they are dissatisfied. If they take any action it’s likely to be that they won’t use your products or services again. They may also tell a number of friends about their experience.

Angry customers will let you and the rest of the world know their feelings. They will leave angry one star reviews on Google and Facebook. They will take any opportunity they can to complain about your business and explain why you are hopeless.

From dissatisfaction to anger

Most dissatisfied customers can be handled with an apology and a commitment to rectify the mistake that was made. However, if the same problem, despite the apologies, keeps happening, the minor feelings of annoyance or frustration will deepen. Instead of extreme dissatisfaction, customers will start feeling betrayed by the business from promises constantly being broken.

Feelings of betrayal will turn to anger. Angry Customers will respond strongly and in many cases seek to punish the business.

The costs

The costs to a business from dissatisfied customers is enormous. Research shows a typical business hears from just 4 percent of its dissatisfied customers—and of those 96 percent who never voice complaints, 91 percent will never come back. According to research from Vision Critical businesses across the world are losing trillions of dollars due to dissatisfied and unhappy customers.

It’s not possible to keep every customer constantly happy and satisfied. Mistakes will happen. Miscommunications will happen. It’s how you handle those mistakes and how well you keep the promises you make to customers that will make them happy or make them feel betrayed.

The Value of Happy Customers

Happy customers are cheaper to service, less price sensitive and less likely to churn. Customer happiness goes beyond customer satisfaction by creating an emotional connection with a brand’s products and services. The challenge lies in understanding what makes customers happy and how much value this brings to the business?

Most organisations have developed extensive surveys and tools to analyse and assess customer satisfaction. CSAT and NPS provide time tested metrics for assessing satisfaction from customers willing to participate in a survey. CSAT surveys typically ask customers to rate experiences by the following criteria:

  • Very satisfied
  • Somewhat satisfied
  • Neutral
  • Somewhat dissatisfied
  • Very dissatisfied

But customer happiness is very different to customer satisfaction. The ability to define and measure happiness is far more challenging, though the potential benefits far exceed the benefits gained from customers who are merely satisfied.

The difference between satisfaction and happiness

Customer satisfaction implies that customers feel ok about their experiences with a brand. It’s an emotionally neutral state where customers’ expectations are being met. Satisfaction does not mean there is an emotional connection with the brand or its products and services

An article from Gallup highlights how satisfying customers without creating an emotional connection has no real value. For satisfaction without an emotional connection has no impact on loyalty or churn reduction. A customer may be satisfied with the last interaction they had with a company but would readily switch to a competitor for a better deal.

Creating an emotional connection

Cliff Condon from Forrester comments, “If brands want to break away from the pack and become CX leaders, they must focus on emotion. Best-in-class brands average 17 emotionally positive experiences for every negative experience, while the lowest-performing brands provided only two emotionally positive experiences for each negative one. Emotion is critical to a brand’s bottom line.”

To establish an emotional connection between a customer and the brand, means designing customer experiences that tap into emotional motivators such as a desire to feel a sense of belonging, to succeed in life, or to feel secure. So customers are not just satisfied with a transaction or an experience, but that sense of satisfaction is matched with a deeper emotional connection.

The benefits

It’s happiness not satisfaction that drives customer loyalty and engagement as well as the propensity for customers to recommend the brand to others. Research published in HBR demonstrates that emotionally connected customers are more than twice as valuable as very satisfied customers.

Emotionally connected customers will buy more products and services, be less price sensitive and recommend the brand and its products to others. In 2018 research from Adobe found repeat customers:

  • Are buying nearly 30% more items per order than first-time shoppers
  • Are 9 times more likely to convert than first-time shoppers
  • Generated three to seven times more revenue per visit

Other statistics include:

  • A 5% increase in customer retention correlates with at least a 25% increase in profit (Bain & Company)
  • Customers with an emotional relationship with a brand have a 306% higher lifetime value and will recommend the company at a rate of 71%, rather than the average rate of 45%. (Motista).

The statistics are compelling. Maximising customer happiness is a powerful means for maximising customer value.