Fast forward 13 years to 2008, and Heikki was a successful 28-year-old entrepreneur and computer programmer.
His Finnish video games business Universomo worked for some of the biggest names in the industry, everyone from Sega, to Disney, Warner, and Lucas Arts. But Heikki had recently sold up to an American buyer, and he was looking for a new business idea.
So remembering his teenage experience at that computer store, he decided that he wanted to set up a company that helps firms to monitor – and then improve – the level of customer service they provide.
More specifically, his idea was to build physical feedback terminals, where customers could answer questions about their experience. This could be a question about whether the staff were friendly enough, if a cafe’s food was good enough or if they were happy with how quickly they were served.
The questions would appear on a screen. The customer would then simply have to press one of four “smiley” faces, from very happy, to happy, a little unhappy, or very unhappy. HappyOrNot would then collate and email the data to the company.
“I thought it was a great idea,” says Ville Levaniemi, HappyOrNot’s other founder. “But I was sure that someone must be already been doing something similar. But I had a good search online, and amazingly they weren’t. So we started planning the concept in 2008, and in 2009 we launched the business.”
Today, HappyOrNot is used by more than 4,000 organisations across 134 countries, including London’s Heathrow Airport, the San Francisco 49ers American football team, UK retailer Boots, US chain Shoe Station, and French supermarket giant Carrefour.
