Editorial
The Gist
- Good friction. Certain types of friction enhance customer experiences, making them more memorable and engaging.
- Differentiate friction. Identify and minimize bad friction while preserving good friction to improve overall customer satisfaction.
- Memory test. Evaluate friction points in your CX to identify opportunities for enhancing customer experience memories.
Friction, for lack of a better word, is good. Friction is right. Friction works for customer experience strategies. (thanks, Gordon Gekko).
How can this be? We have customer effort as one of the gold-standard metrics. And just in case it needs stating, we measure customer effort so that we can reduce it, not so that we can increase it. Forrester’s CX Index benchmark includes Ease as one of the core components alongside effectiveness and emotion.
We talk all the time in the customer experience space about making experiences easier, making them simpler, taking steps out, automating parts of the experience.
All of that is not wrong. Most customer experience strategies could and should be made easier or simpler, or delivered with fewer steps.
Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed works.
— Ol’Mike (@pantaleo_mike) May 9, 2024
Understanding Friction in Customer Experience Strategies
But there is an enormous difference between removing friction, and removing ALL friction in customer experience strategies. The fact is that some friction is good friction. It calls our attention to key moments of an experience and makes them more memorable. This is not a conjecture. This is a scientific fact. Dopamine — the “feel-good hormone in our brain” — is at its highest level when we are unwrapping a chocolate, rather than when we are eating the chocolate. The time it takes to unwrap a chocolate enhances the experience of eating the chocolate. That is good friction in action.
So how can you differentiate between good friction and bad friction? And how can you design customer experience strategies that minimizes bad friction while preserving good friction?
Read on to find out.
Related Article: Customer Loyalty Strategies: Why Positive Memories Matter
Differentiating Between Good Friction or Bad Friction
Bad friction is any extra step, extra time or extra nuisance that becomes a primary part of the customers’ memory of the experience. If the long wait in line is more salient in the customer’s memory than what they waited in line for, you have bad friction.
The goal is to eliminate any friction points that are negative peaks in customers’ memories of experiences.
Waits are a key friction point. There are often thresholds above which waiting becomes frustrating. Starbucks, for instance, reported disappointing earning results recently and cited longer-than-optimal wait times during the morning rush as being a factor in many regular customers abandoning orders. Starbucks has strayed above the acceptable wait time threshold.
Here’s the thing though: Starbucks, and other companies, must keep waits below the acceptable threshold, but that doesn’t mean they need to eliminate all waits. Indeed, if the wait time is below the threshold of acceptability, customers will tolerate a bit of friction in the form of a line.
How much wait time is acceptable? The answer will be different in different contexts. For example, Starbucks likely faces higher customer expectations in the morning for speedy service, when workers are feeling the pressure of getting to the office, than they do in the afternoon when customers are taking a break from the office. In that latter scenario, a longer line might be just fine.
Regardless, companies must look at their customer and operational data in conjunction. What wait times cause customers to complain or give up? What, if any, variability exists across your different experiences? To give an ecommerce example, customers are likely happy to work harder to try to get coveted tickets to see a favorite band than they are likely willing to wait to purchase basic household items.
And we start to see the divergence between bad and good in those examples waiting to get a morning cup of coffee — this caffeine is going to make me late for work — vs. waiting for concert tickets — where the wait allows anticipation and excitement to build.
Related Article: CX and EX: Great CX Improves Employee Experience, Too
Practical Examples of Good Friction
Good friction is any extra step, extra time or extra nuisance that heightens contrast with peak positive moments of an experience in ways that strengthen the customers’ memories of the experience.
In other words, good friction sharpens the memories of the best moments of an experience by heightening contrast.
The instructions to assemble Ikea furniture are a good example. Are they clear? Not really. That adds friction to the assembly process. But guess what? The assembly process needs to be hard enough that customers believe they accomplished something by assembling the furniture. The Ikea effect — named for the higher value customers place on something they partially created — relies on enough effort on the part of the customer in the creation. If it were easy, you wouldn’t feel like you had earned that extra feeling of accomplishment.
There’s a similar story with Betty Crocker cake mixes. The company found that customers needed to add a couple of ingredients themselves to feel like they had actually baked something. If all they had to do was dump the cake mix in a pan and bake, then they didn’t feel like they had actually baked something. But if the customer had to take the extra step to add an egg and some oil to the cake mix, then they would feel as if they had baked the cake themselves. Good friction in action.
Related Article: Using the Peak-End Rule for Better Customer Journeys
Applying the Memory Test to Your CX
So remember to apply the Memory Test to friction in your experience. Where do you have moments of bad friction that become the focal points of customers’ memories? Those are friction points you need to reduce or eliminate.
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And then where do you have moments of good friction? Where you are sharpening customers’ memories of the best moments of the experience by heightening the contrast between emotion at the peak and frustration from the friction?
Like a great line from a movie, good friction ensures that experience memories live on in customers’ minds forever.
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