> THE FACT
A short time ago, Décathlon started to provide its customers with “Happy or Not” satisfaction terminals which they can use to analyse customer satisfaction in real time. The customers only need to answer simple questions by using ‘smilies’ ranging from red to green… Testntrust, the customer satisfaction comparison website, has recently put forward a model of interactive terminals for companies to allow them to gather the opinions and evaluations of their customers, as well as display an overall score and track its movement in real time. The company can also use it to show its responses.

> THE ANALYSIS
Although still marginal, the appearance of customer satisfaction terminals in shops now shows us that they are in the process of re-defining their relationships with their customers. Several phenomena are behind this. Brands for which customers’ opinions are now placed at the heart of their relationship strategies and which want to make their desire for transparency and commitment known. Customers who increasingly want to feel that they are “co-authors” of choices in the shops that they frequent, or even that they play a role in their image by expressing their opinions or feelings. Isn’t the presence of terminals to capture their opinions also one of the “collateral” effects of habits that have been acquired on the web where each site can compare, classify, give its point of view and access that of others?