Being a User Experience designer, I tell my clients often that their user/customer is the most important part of their ‘work’.
On a few occasions I have asked a team “Who is your boss?”, knowing that they will answer something like “Suzie, VP of product blah blah”, which is technically correct.
I say “No, your boss is your customer or user”. Reason is, if you piss them off or they go away because you produce an abomination of UI, you will lose the fundamental reason of your employment: revenue stream.
This doesn’t always produce the ah-hahs that I expect. I have been scowled at followed by that uncomfortable silence we know so well.
This is just to say that I would love to implement a way to analyze a metric that we don’t yet know how to: Customer happiness
There are ways to get close to this. Return/repeat customer data, surveys (see my other post on this), feedback, social sharing and sometimes direct interaction.
Is there a more sure or truthful way? I believe there is. I don’t know exactly what that is but I can speculate and spitball at least.
What if every sale came with a text-only phone number that you had to call in order to get your product/service to work better. or to upgrade to a special “pro level”. Basically a way to enhance your thing with something simple but that required a user to interact and rate your product and give feedback. I feel like this is so valuable, even if it is negative!!
