The Diminishing Returns of Customer Happiness

Okay, so I expect to catch some heat from customer evangelists here.

But I work in CX too and one thing is clear:

Customer happiness is not a strategy

Even if a company’s PR department says that it is.

The obsession with making customers happy is common place with modern organisations, and I get it - when you’re building a company culture, this stuff is super important. I would much rather have an organisation obsessing over customer happiness than one that was the opposite.

However, without some clear direction this is dangerous - I’ve seen this manifest in a couple of horrible ways.

The less harmful path is a bit of good old fashioned virtue signalling:

‘We just wanted to share that we invited a customer to our workshop and it was SO great’

The more harmful result is when we get distracted from the mission, chasing points with customers that have no link to the impact that we want to have as business.

The Happiness Trap

It’s easy to see why happiness became the focal point for CX. After all, it feels good to make people feel good. In Pharma, when a patient, physician, or other key stakeholder is happy, it seems logical that this is good for business. But how far does that really go?

Most Pharma leaders take a ‘trust the process’ approach to CX - where they can’t articulate how customer happiness drives impact. They just trust that it will.

It’s the reasons many companies double down on CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) and NPS (Net Promoter Score i.e. likeliness to recommend). They’re hoping to find a correlation between happiness and business results.

But it doesn’t take huge amount of interrogation to spot some flaws in that lens.

What’s the real link between customer happiness and commercial outcomes? And no I don’t mean the correlation. Can you articulate HOW customer happiness drives commercial outcomes in your business?

The way in which customer happiness relates to commercial results in Pharma is this: if we drop the ball somewhere across the customer journey, chances are that’s going to have negative impact on our business.

If we don’t answer the phone. If the drug doesn’t arrive on time. If it’s too hard to find information about our products - that’s going to have a negative impact on our business.

But there are diminishing returns to customer happiness.

Diminishing returns to customer happiness, Jed Casey (2024)

Past a hygiene level of satisfaction, we can keep making our customers happier but that doesn’t necessarily translate to better patient and business outcomes.

Any arguments about customer loyalty in Pharma are shaky at best and certainly not proportionate to the huge amount of resource being poured into CX.

So in essence, what most companies are focused on is trying to not be bad across the entire experience. I like to call this the ‘playing not to lose’ strategy.

It might be enough for some but I certainly struggle to get excited about it.

Emotions are a lead indicator for Outcomes

In my mind, the real opportunity in CX lies in shifting from superficial measures of happiness to outcomes-driven experiences.

An Outcomes-Driven approach to CX, Jed Casey (2024)

Ultimate success isn’t measured in terms of how our customers feel about us.

It’s DEFINITELY important as a lead indicator and health indicator but ultimately success is measured in whether we achieved the outcome that we set out to achieve - however we’ve decided to define that as a business.

It’s not enough to make customers feel good - what matters is how the experiences we create drive real, tangible outcomes for patients and our business.

In Pharma, that means asking ourselves the following questions (in this order):

1- What within this ecosystem needs to change in order for the greatest number of patients to see the most value from our medicines?

2 - What does this translate to in terms of the shifts required in the people who are a part of the healthcare ecosystem?

3 - How do the experiences we create, enable those shifts and ultimately those outcomes?

The Bottom Line

The goal is not happiness, the goal is change.

The more clearly we can articulate the change we want to see, the more intentional we can be about the experiences that support it.

Making people happy is nice but making an impact is essential.

Becoming more intentional about driving business outcomes through customer experiences sits at the core of Outcomes-Driven Customer Experience if you want to read more (click here for my previous post introducing Outcomes-Driven CX).