Best Customer Service in the UK
Happy Computers won the 2003 Management Today/Unisys Service Excellence awards, rating it as the best for customer service in the UK. In 2002 the award was won by the Nationwide Building Society, and previous winners have included First Direct and TNT.
"This truly is an example of service excellence at its highest level", commented lead judge Christine Carroll. "
They are the happiest company that I have ever come across."
"Happy is a company that has blended an effective business", continued Carroll "with an aspiration to give something back to the wider community and at the same time creating an environment in which people manifestly thrive."
"You can only give great customer service if your people are happy", explains explains Henry Stewart, founder and Chief Executive of Happy Computers. "Our core philosophy is that 'People work best when they feel good about themselves'. I haven't yet found anybody who disagrees with that but how many companies base their management and support around that principle?"
"It is the whole approach of trust and respect", explained David Jackson, another of the judges. "Those are the two words. Trust people to do a good job and respect their abilities and their needs and their preferences. Many organisations understand what customers want and then prevent their staff delivering it. Happy doesn't, it trusts its people to give people what they want."
"The Service Excellence awards process does so much for a company," continued Henry. "There is the judging process, the awards seminar where you get to learn from all the other companies. Then all the finalists go off to a conference at the Unisys centre in Nice to learn more of each other's best practice. We have got to where we are today largely because of the support and development from the Service excellence process."
Recent winners of the award
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2002 Nationwide Building Society
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2003 Happy
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2004 First Direct
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2005 Rackspace Managed Hosting Europe
Happy People
Now the company plans to help others learn from its approach. Rebranding the core company as simply 'Happy', it will launch Happy People to train others in how to create great places to work and deliver great service. "We got a lot of enquiries from companies that want us to help them changed their culture and now we will be set up to do that."
"It's not rocket science, it's basically about trust. Ask yourself 'What would my organisation be like if everybody was completely trusted?'. And then think about what you need to do, in terms of training and support, to enable people to be worthy of that trust."
"We are very proud of what we have done so far and incredibly honoured to win this award," concluded Henry. "However we've only just started and we are still learning. There are exciting times ahead."
