 Okay, so thank you all for coming. The science of happiness. I'm not really a scientist, but I'm really happy to be here, so that counts, right? Okay, so what do we really know about happiness? So we know that it can be caused by anything or anyone, and that everybody has different happiness triggers. For me, it's ice cream, I love ice cream, so whenever I eat ice cream I'm really happy. And let's say that our happiness triggers really change as time goes by. And also, we can categorize certain happiness triggers. For example, let's say that lots of people that are starting with web development and creating websites, they are using Joomla. And as a good friend, you come along and use WordPress to them. So what's going to happen? Chances are they're going to be very happy. I'm going to stop there, so okay. So next thing, what do we know about ourselves? So we all want to be happy, right? And we also all want to have successful businesses. And we also want to maintain our successful businesses and make it even better, right? So how to run a successful business? I'm not going to talk about that, because chances are these guys can tell a lot more about that. But what I am going to talk about is happiness. I'm going to talk about customer happiness, how to achieve it, why you should achieve it, and I'm going to use science to do that. So let's take a look at a few studies. A study of major lottery winners found that on average they return to their original baseline level of happiness within one year. Why? People are good at adjusting at good things. I mean, they adjust very quickly. So these material goods, they only provide temporary emotional boost, which fades quite quickly. So what is this thing that provides an increase in happiness? It's the quality and the quantity of the relationships. And that's the main thing. So before we dive into the subject, a wise man once said, and then put his quote here, from the moment the customer hears about you, enters your store, starts using your product or arrives at your website, a relationship is created. And it is up to you to notice that relationship. Basically, I just need to make one correction here. I meant a bald man once said. So yeah, hi. So I'm a happiness engineer at Automatic. And I put this paragraph on my website, customer happiness, and let's talk about customer happiness. So there are three scenarios, most common scenarios, how customer happiness can be achieved. So let's take, oh, no, I skipped the slide. First of all, we are all customers, right? So we go to the grocery store, we are customers. We buy something online. We are customers. And also the majority of us in this room, we have our own customers. We are plug-in or team developers, we sell our software, our service. And what are the questions that we need to ask ourselves in order to, how can we achieve customer happiness? So basically, the first question, the most important question, is when do I, I mean, we as customers become happy? And when we also put ourselves in our customer shoes, we'll see another question pop out, and that's it, when do our customers become happy? So let's take a look at this, when do I as a customer become happy? So three possible scenarios. Number one, when you bought the product or use the service and you're satisfied with its performance, right? So that's number one. Number two, when the product or the service you used actually exceeds your own expectations, and that is also called customer delight. And there is also a very common scenario, number three, when you are relieved that the product or service wasn't as bad as you expected. So let's take a look at the definition of customer satisfaction. So it can be defined as stepping out of the experience in order to define it and evaluate it. Someone can have a positive experience, which can lead to negative one, even though the experience was positive, it wasn't as positive as one expected. And that's the main thing. So satisfaction or dissatisfaction is not just an emotion, it's an evaluation of this emotion. So let's take a look at the practical example. You have a product which has reached a certain level of performance, a product or service, and you have your potential customers. So they have created their own level of expectations, by our marketing team, by themselves, by other products, et cetera, et cetera. So these two influence one another. And if the performance of the product or service exceeded customer's expectations, you gain customer satisfaction, which ultimately leads to customer happiness, which goes on to customer loyalty. You have loyal customers. They're bound to spread word about your product or your service. So you're going to use word of mouth, and we live in digital era, so word of mouth is also very common, and it's a lot louder word of mouth. And this is how you gain new customers. So new customers come, they have their own expectations right now, which are probably just a little bit higher than the ones before. And this is a cycle that repeats itself, and it eventually makes your business grow. So let's take a look at this formula. So satisfaction is a function of the customer's expectations and the performance of the product or the service. I'm not reinventing the wheel here. This is something already done by Oliver Richard back in 1981. But the thing is, this formula also works in real life. So your satisfaction, your happiness directly is influenced by your expectation of the certain product or event or service or anything else. So let's take a look at one practical example of this. Let's say you have a product, packed in a box, wrapped up. Let's call it perfect product. And there is a certain customer that wants to buy your product. They have their own expectations. Just for the sake of this presentation, let's call that customer, let's imagine he's Batman, all right? So you have a potential customer, Batman. He has his own expectations. And what happens? The customer goes to the store, buys your product, and later you discover that that customer is Batman. So Batman starts using your product, and Batman will either be satisfied with your product or he won't be satisfied with your product. So let's say like this. You develop an app, an app that allows you to send SMS notifications to a cell phone whenever there is a bad signal up in the sky, OK? So Batman sits comfortably in his home, watching TV, drinking beer, and all of a sudden in the news he says, oh my god, there's Batman, there's Havoc in the city. And Batman's like, OK, I didn't receive an SMS. So what's going on? So after he pops into Batman Bill, takes care of the villains, he comes back and what does he do? He calls your customer service. And he's like, OK, what's going on? Why didn't I get an SMS notification? And if the customer service is not a very devoted team full of enthusiasts, well, the chances are that Batman is probably going to be very dissatisfied. He's going to spread his wings and go spread the word about how bad your service, your product, was. And this is something that happens with word of mouse. So word of mouse, when there is a bad thing that is going to spread, it actually covers a lot more distance in a very short amount of time. So Batman is eventually going to come and get you. If that happens. So let's take a look at another scenario. Another scenario is we have a helpful customer service. So how can I help? And if you help Batman, for example, oh, Mr. Batman, sir, did you enable push notification inside the settings, for instance? And he's like, oh, I forgot. OK, thank you. Thank you very much. And you get to keep your product intact, right? And you're probably going to gain Batman as a loyal customer. And I can say that's quite a relief, right? So there is one question that pops into our minds right now. And that's why wouldn't we just lower the customer expectations, right? Because there wouldn't be so many dissatisfaction. We wouldn't keep the bar so high. So actually, the thing is that's not a good thing to do because of several things, but I'm going to just mention two. First one, actually, we're making it more difficult for our competitors to stay in the game if you set the bar so high. And another thing is we're all growing together. So for instance, if we have a product or a service with certain features, and those features are awesome, they have a stellar customer service and so on and so on, tomorrow these features are going to be an industry standard. This stellar support is going to be an industry standard. And we are all growing and evolving together. So I'm just going to wrap up. It's not food for thought. So just like WordPress hooks, we can also choose to hook on the positive emotions of our customers. So we are using filters and actions. And for instance, we can use happiness to hook on the positive emotion. Have you noticed the new titles, I mean, new titles of major companies and every single company developed? You don't have customer support agents. You have customer success champions. And in Automatica, we're all happiness engineers. So this is something that influences both customers and employees themselves, also on the conscious and the subconscious level. So we are bound to spread happiness. It's not just solving a ticket or two. It's about spreading happiness. And when the customer has a problem and he comes to you and gets an answer by a happiness engineer, not just a customer agent, he's going to be just a bit happier at least. And I thank you very much for listening to me. If, by any chance, you didn't like my talk, it's probably because your expectations were too high. Thank you.