The great thing about keeping score is that you can track your progress. We started asking customers who contacted support what they thought about the interaction in 2010. We were thrilled to end that year with just seven out of a hundred being unhappy with the service (and 84% being happy, 9% being OK).

But I’m really proud to announce that we’ve dramatically raised our game in 2011. We’ve gotten the frown ratio down to just three out of a hundred (90% being happy, 7% being OK). That’s less than half of what it was just the year before!

(If you look at just the last six months of 2011, it went even better still: 92% happy, 5% OK, 3% frowns).

Part of this is hiring a bigger team so the average number of emails each person has to answer is less. We’ve gone from needing each person to answer about 80 emails per day to just around 40 (again, on average—there were and are significant swings at times). That of course means that we can spend more time on each response and making more customers happier is the result.

Gains have also come from analyzing the data. Finding out what made people unhappy and trying to do better. We also now follow up with more frowns and try hard to “flip ‘em” by doing what we can to make a bad experience great.

I’m so proud of our support team for what they’ve accomplished this year. Thank you Ann, Chase, Emily, Joan, Kristin, Merissa, and Michael.