Impressive: 37signals goes public with its customer support ratings

Last  September 37signals created “Smiley”. It was an internal rating system to measure customer satisfaction and happiness. In what is a very ballsy move, the Chicago based company has now made its customer happiness ratings public in real time, and you can view them here.

How it works is very simple, at the end of a customer support email there are three faces, one that’s happy, another that is neutral and one that looks mighty angry. Customers then click the face that they are happy with and add additional optional feedback.

Each customer is linked to a support member and all the feedback that each customer support staff receives is tallied up.

37signals has taken all the smiles and put them into a real-time scorecard of it’s last 100 ratings that produces a percentage happiness rating, when we checked it was at 91% , no small feat.

In their own words from their blog, on why they went public:

We want to go even further. We want to be held to even higher standards of excellence when it comes to our customer service. So we’ve decided to expose our customer service ratings to the world.

A member of web entrepreneur community Hacker News and developer of competing product GoPlan presented his thoughts on the move perfectly:

I have to give it to these guys (I work on a competitor product). Even though this is a simple idea and possibly something of trivial implementation, it’s clear, honest, and just plain nice. My hat is off to them for keeping their customers happy – very well done.

So, would you consider doing this at your company?