Warming up to Customer Satisfaction

I went with our team down to Toronto this week to present analyses to two automotive clients. As we were having lunch between the presentations, we obliquely got onto the topic of global warming, and it turned out that one of our contacts at the ad agency that represents these two clients was in fact a staunch environmentalist. As she was expounding on the evils of SUV culture and the sacred imperative of solar-panneling, I got to thinking about two concepts, which on the surface seem unrelated, but may in fact have some commonality: weather and customer satisfaction.

What makes a customer happy? Going deeper, what is the nature of happiness? Is it phenomenological, or can the individual carry into his every dealing the baggage of deeper dissatisfaction? Or to phrase this more precisely: might Canadians and certain Americans score lower on barometers of satisfaction (pardon the pun), simply because they had been surveyed at a time when they've been freezing their collective asses off for months on end? Conversely, might not the Floridian or Californian, wintering in the mid 60s, be naturally more sanguine in his valuation of a website than, say, the Manitoban, standing at the corner of Portage and Main with 3-inch icicles dangling from his nose?

I don't have any figures on this, but I think it adds another semantic layer to a term we hear a lot in web analytics: seasonality. Typically, we hear it in the sense of marketing cycles, sales and subventions, and product roll-outs. But what if customer satisfaction is also informed by more subtle things, like the weather. Anyone who has endured the long torpor of a Montreal winter knows that life looks much rosier in July than it does in February.