Want happier customers? Try having more fun

M5 Networks, a purveyor of voice-over-Internet protocol phone systems, provides service to some 1,100 New York City businesses, including Isaac Mizrahi, Brooklyn Brewery and the New York Health & Racquet Club, as well as Ms. Faulding's firm.

"They were asking for a list of things that showed they really know us," Ms. Faulding says. Like what? "One item was, find someone who speaks an African language," she recalls. "I'm originally from South Africa, so that was me."

It might seem odd that deep in the doldrums of the worst recession in decades, M5's employees had time to run around the city on such a wacky mission.

"It's true that 2009 was a hard year for us," says Dan Hoffman, M5's CEO. He co-founded the company, which now has 120 employees, in 2000. In 2008 alone, M5 grew 52%, reaching $23 million in revenues. Then the bad times hit: "About 700 of our clients cut 10% or more of their work force, which meant we disconnected thousands of phones," he says.

That's when Mr. Hoffman decided "to use the downturn as an opportunity to get better at the fundamentals." By further enhancing customer service, he hoped to stir up enough positive word-of-mouth to bring in new customers.

"What gets measured, improves," Mr. Hoffman says. "When you give people an interesting way to measure how they're doing, they compete to get better." 

About the contest

The first step was divvying up his workers into competing teams--much the way you may remember from summer camp. In addition to introducing the usual sorts of sales contests, Mr. Hoffman started inventing games whose scoring depends on wowing customers. One was an essay contest that asked employees to describe a time when they went above and beyond--for example, by cheerfully schlepping to a client's office in the wee hours to fix a problem.

The winner of that contest went to Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala. And the winners of the scavenger hunt went skydiving over the Delaware Water Gap last fall, "just as the leaves were turning," says team leader Sandi Smith, M5's office manager. "It was stunning."

The real winner is M5. The company managed to grow 13% in 2009, hitting $26 million in sales, but what makes Mr. Hoffman even happier is that customer satisfaction shot off the charts. He tracks a measure called Net Promoter Score, developed at Bain & Co. and relied upon by giants like GE and Procter & Gamble. NPS uses a mathematical formula to assign companies a rating based on clients' answers to the question: "On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague?"

Mr. Hoffman points out that the average NPS in the telecom industry is -4: That's right, a negative number. M5's is 42.