Wednesday, November 14, 2007

3 Months of Happy

A neat video from TED Conference on leading thinkers, (here) tells us some interesting things about happiness. In general. Like, we tend to forget anything good or bad that happened more than three months ago; that we are actually happier if we live with a definite decision rather than keeping it infinitely open ended. People are comfortable and are happy with "bounded offers" where the trade offs are known. Coupled with some recent thinking about consumer choice, and product scope choice in particular, companies are finding customers gravitate towards services where decision making is a bit easier. If you think about Google search, you hit a search term, and are presented with a page of possible answers destinations, and usually, you will pick one of the top three. The underlying assumption on your part is that Google does a pretty good job of understanding what you are trying to find, and presenting the more reputable ones higher on the list (implied perhaps, but still there). When even customers that have said they are happy with your service churn, what can we learn from this? Well, when you think about making customers happy, perhaps it doesn't count unless it happened in the last three months? Perhaps you shouldn't give them 10 upgrade options, just the one "do you want it or not".

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1 comment:

Unknown said...

I love that TED website - some incredible speakers. Choice makes us sad and personally I never felt the same since I had SKY.

There is another happiness video on TED from a french Bhuddist who maintains that all it takes is practice. Worth watching.

I will add the happiness video to my collection, thanks!

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