Why was the scale changed from 1...10 to 0...10?

Originally HappySignals ratings (in the resolution e-mail) were done on the scale of 1 to 10. This was changed in February 2019, here are the reasons why.

We talked with many customers about how to make sure the employees wouldn’t choose the wrong score, for example selecting 1 when they actually meant 10. This confusion happened sometimes, because people in certain countries use reversed scales, lower score meaning a better score.

Read our Chief Product Officer Pasi Nikkanen's thoughts on the change, and why it was made:

Last year I was watching a presentation of a study explaining all the different scales and methods in experience measurement and suddenly a bullet point caught my eye “Zero is universally recognized as negative.”, that makes perfect sense! Then I wondered why do we actually have the scale from 1 to 10? In the early days of our product development, we replaced the 0 with the ServiceNow’s Reject-feature, meaning that if a user gives a zero, they were so unhappy that the ticket should be reopened. This of course created the issue that people now might understand things wrongly. Today this is not the behaviour anymore, since the reject-feature is shown as a link below the buttons. I'm not shamed to admit this, but happy to announce that it's now fixed!

How the scale was changed?

In February, 2019 we added the zero back. It’s available in the survey forms and in our Analytics reports. The new scale looks like this:

scales

HappySignals Analytics supports the 0 score in all the views.

What does this mean?

The one part that will not get automatically updated is the e-mail that your employees receive, so they cannot select Zero unless we update the buttons in your e-mails. This we will do when you send us a request and it doesn’t cost you anything. Just click the link below, or send an e-mail to support@happysignals.com and we’ll be in contact with you to arrange the change. We need your tool administrator's contact information as well.

You can send the e-mail from here: Please, give me Zero back!

Will the change affect our scores?

Happiness (NPS score) - No effect

In theory, there will be more numbers, but in reality if the person was already about to click 1 and they decide to click 0 they would still be a detractor in the Net Promoter Score vocabulary. So it will not affect Happiness (NPS) score in anyway.

Probably you will just fix the possible false 1s and get more 10s.

Average score - Minimal effect

What it will slightly affect is of course average scores, 0 instead of 1 would create a few decimal changes in the average scores, but the change is very limited. We made a quick test with one customer, who had Happiness Score +57 (so more negative scores than our average benchmark customer):

Their old average from 950 responses was 8.43. By changing all the 1s to 0s (the most radical change there could be) lowered their average by 0.04 (0.5%), to 8.39.

What if we do not want to make this change?

You can keep the old scale in the e-mail buttons by not doing anything. The survey form after clicking the e-mail button, will allow users to change their score to Zero. As a cloud based service, this is not something we can customise to individual customers needs, and as this is a positive change, we encourage you to do it.

Hopefully this will give you confidence to request the change from us. Contact support@happysignals.com!