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For companies offering call center services, some want you to call to ensure your ongoing satisfaction. Others can keep costs down if you don’t call, but they fail to make the connection between your satisfaction and their ability to maintain profitability over the long-term. For the former, the goal is to make the customer happy and the processes aligned in the call center are designed to support that strategy. For the latter, they aren’t likely to be around for the end of the story, so no need to make assumptions.

When it comes to metrics that measure the customer experience, you have your usual, like First Call Resolution (FCR), Average Handle Time (AHT), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and more. But have you heard of the Smiley Face Index (SFI)? A recent Business2Community post explored this metric and its place in call center services. While it isn’t meant to displace other metrics, the SFI offers a simpler way to examine customer satisfaction.

We may assume that the SFI is just a suggestion on paying attention to how we’re treating a customer. Instead, it literally measures the number of ‘smiley faces’ exchanged by the customer and agent during a text message or Web chat interaction. The more smiley faces produced; the more happy customers and happy agents exist. While not necessarily scientific in nature, this approach does still have the potential to give insight into howcustomers perceive interactions.

For instance, if a customer service agent has 10 interactions with customers and there are no smiley faces exchanged, it could either mean the customer doesn’t like sending smiley faces or the service didn’t warrant such an expression. If another agent instead has seven out of 10 customers send smiley faces, you can tell the agent is doing something right. This doesn’t suggest the first agent is doing something wrong, but the second agent may be better equipped to drive the call center services outcomes needed to achieve the desired level of satisfaction among the customer base.

If customer satisfaction is the goal, it may be time to start measuring smiley faces.