Happy Communications

The storm is long gone, but the catastrophic effects of 2008’s global financial crisis still echo in many parts of the world. Businesses in New Zealand were largely unaffected but in recent years, price competition strategies have been losing traction and profit margins were falling.

If price competition was no longer effective, how could businesses set themselves apart from the competition? It was this dilemma that helped advertising executive, Nicole Quin realize that businesses needed to shift their focus from offering cheaper deals to delivering greater value. And, the best way to do this was by enhancing customer experience (CX).

Despite understanding the potential of this approach, most business leaders and key decision makers were unable to implement an effective CX strategy. “The major stumbling block was the lack of trained personnel needed to accomplish such an intricate business remodeling blueprint,” says Quin. So, Quin retrained as a CX practitioner and put her expertise to practice by establishing Happy Communications (Happy) in 2017, one of the first agencies to specialize in ‘customer experience management as a service’ in New Zealand. Today, Happy is recognized as a leading CX agency that helps enterprises drive business growth by delivering superior brand experiences that are valued by customers.

“The first step in exceeding customer’s expectations is to understand your customers and what drives their purchase decisions. Our team of CX experts, work closely with clients to overcome business challenges by putting the customer at the heart of the business, devising CX strategies as a proactive organizational priority rather than a reactive response to customer complaints,” says Quin. The company conducts customer journey mapping workshops to get comprehensive insights on their client’s end customers, their needs, expectations, thoughts and feelings throughout the journey to identify gaps between customer expectations and product, service and communication delivery. The journey map provides a framework for building the CX strategy and management program and enables clients to implement customer centricity as a strategy.
One of Happy’s proudest success stories was an Australasian cosmetics company looking to increase online sales and expand into other markets. The challenge was maintaining their existing customer preferences while attracting new audiences. Happy conducted a full audit of their business as well as customer research and journey mapping workshops to understand where they needed to focus. This gave the business relevant knowledge about their customer needs and which channels to enhance and optimize to nurture new leads and drive existing customer retention. They established a CX management programme to enable the business to continue to monitor and improve their performance in relation to customer expectations. This enabled the business to gain a 360-degree view of the customer. With the implementation of Inbound Marketing and a CX management programme, the company saw a 300 percent increase in their online traffic and a 25 percent increase in year-on-year sales.

Currently, the firm is building a tool that will help businesses assess the maturity of their ongoing CX strategy while also developing a proposal for their future course of action. “Our mission will always be to help brands attract and retain customers by creating ‘happy’ customer experiences every time, through every interaction,” wraps up Quin.