Data driven customer experience and the roadmap to deliver happiness

Happiness is a choice, in which individuals have the ability to create lasting and genuine happiness for themselves. They make choices and take actions to be happy, choosing what to wear, what to eat, whom to love, and where to work. It is very subjective to delimit whether our choices are good while others are not but all based on individual profound desire to be happy. In some related work, researchers have found a strong correlation between customer satisfaction, happiness, and organization performance. Many organizations have spent money and effort in innovating and implementing initiatives, which were focusing on increasing customers’ satisfaction; however, customers are not happier today compared to what they were before. Therefore, the need for studying on mechanism of achieving customer happiness is crucial to ensure effectiveness and efficiency of customer service initiatives. In fact, it is important to identify factors that can elevate customer happiness and shift customers from comfort to happiness zone. This will motivate organizations to design products and services that can meet customer needs and exceed customer expectation in every touch point. In UAE, customers come from 202 countries with diverse cultures, religions, habits and ethnicity, which force government, semi-government and private sector to deliver services that not only meet but also exceed customer expectations. Accordingly, the paper will take you through the journey of UAE government for exceeding customer expectations starting from understanding drivers of happiness using a research framework that segment customers in different zones (Trust vs. Control & Stand out vs. Fit in) until quantifying drivers to measure service happiness score.