Have you ever had to deal with an unhappy customer? Someone who couldn’t stop telling you how bad you were, how much you fucked up and how stupid you were for screwing up?

Yeah… we haven’t either

But for those of us who have had to deal with unhappy customers, it’s really an unpleasant experience; the kind of experience that makes you want to say, ”Never again.”

Here’s a little secret we’d like to share with you:

With some simple upfront work, you can ensure that more of your customers are happy and avoid a lot of the work and pain that comes with a significant outburst.

Why?

• Because happy customers give you leeway.
• Because happy customers tell their friends.
• Because happy customers make you a part of their life.

We thought Om Malik really nailed it in this post about Why Some Apps Work, Some Don’t when he talked about happiness and utility as being the biggest reasons for the long-term success of an app. When you’re developing an app, you want to make your customers happy and to give them a reason to come back and use your app again and again. Many of the ways to achieve this are through iteration and listening to your customers’ suggestions, but there’s another thing that you can do in order to ensure this:

Make your customers happy by listening to them.

Just like your best friend or your significant other, customers often just want acknowledgement. They want to know that you care about what they have to say and that you’re listening.

In an increasingly noisy, busy, self-promoting world, many of us have to come to expect that no one is really listening, they’re just waiting for the chance to talk. This leads to an obvious opportunity for you, as an app developer: the simple act of listening can become a happiness-creating moment.

Let’s say, for example, that you’ve installed the Apptentive framework in your app (what, you don’t have it yet? Go try it. Like now) and you’re just starting to get feedback from customers.

A piece of positive feedback comes in that’s somewhat generic and you think to yourself, “I could ignore that, it just says the person liked something”.

OR YOU COULD ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR CUSTOMER

This is the PERFECT opportunity to reach out and create happiness. The simple act of responding to the person, thanking them for taking the time to say anything at all (remember, they didn’t owe you a shred of attention) and wishing them well in their day very well might buy you a happy customer for life.

Now, wouldn’t you say that’s worth the 30 seconds it takes to hit reply and to make someone happy? Sign up for Apptentive today and get yourself positioned to have the happiest app customers around.