When customers feel like there is something in the way of them experiencing the product or service they purchased, friction is the cause. It's when they have to make several attempts to accomplish something that should be simple or have multiple people tell them the same thing in different ways. Friction is when things break down and get stuck, confusing, or just plain hard to use. Even with the best of intentions, companies create friction in their journeys.
In this, the first DCX Podcast episode, I talk with Bill Price and David Jaffe, about friction and their new book The Frictionless Organization. Deliver Great Customer Experiences with less Effort. Bill and David explain how frictionless organizations cut costs, grow revenue, and create loyal fans by creating products and services that work so well for their customers that they never have to contact them for the wrong reasons.
Enjoy!
I hope you enjoy and take away some actionable insights.
My Top Takeaways from Bill and David in this interview
A frictionless organization is one that makes itself so easy to deal with that customers hardly have to deal with them.
Solving friction is an all-of-organization challenge/opportunity
Focus on key metrics to determine how frictionless or on the path to becoming frictionless your organization is
There are 3 main stages to becoming a frictionless organization - Create, Pre-empt and Redesign
Transcript
Mark Levy
Welcome, Bill and David to the podcast. Thanks for joining me.
Bill Price
Thanks, Mark. Appreciate it.
David Jaffe
Thanks, Mark. Great to be with you.
Mark Levy
So this is your third book together. Congratulations. Can you talk a bit about how your CX philosophies and kind of business in general I mean, it's been a number of years, right? So how has how have things evolved from the first book to this one?
Bill Price
Like you want to start with that, David?
David Jaffe
The interesting thing for me, it's like, our philosophy hasn't changed. And so if philosophy and Bill's philosophy has always been, you know, the role of some customer-facing parts of businesses to try and put itself out of business is to try and make everything work so well that you know, you don't need customer service or customer care or whatever you have, you want to call it. So that philosophy hasn't changed, and hence the original book, The Best Service is No Service. But what we started talking about three or four years ago is how the problems you were tackling had changed. Firstly, a lot more channels of contact. So from contact centers to messaging to chat to all the different forms of self-service that now exist. So it was getting harder to get your head around all of it, your hands around all of it. So that was a problem. Secondly, the technologies that can assist you had also changed and evolved significantly. And we felt that some of them were game changing, and we hadn't seen many organizations exploit them well, but our central philosophy was still we should be trying to get rid of the problems, not just handle them. And we find so many organizations are so busy, you know, running hard trying to find enough people to take the calls or deal with the messages or manage their offshore locations and all that kind of stuff. There's still not standing back and saying why is this all happening? And so our customer philosophies. Customers don't want to deal with you, I think the second sentence of our first book was 'No one gets up in the morning wanting to wring their utility.'
Mark Levy
I completely agree. I say I say that to my teams all the time.
David Jaffe
Okay, and okay, now we have so many great digital capabilities and self service capability, but the question is how good are they? How well have we communicated them? How intuitive are they? Do they appeal to all customers? What about customers who can't deal with those? It's an eye opener to me staying with my parents in their late 80s, how disenfranchising solutions now are. That have a mobile phone at the core. My parents would not be able to use most parking meters now in the UK because they demand a mobile phone. They wouldn't be able to go into most football stadium because they don't have a phone to put their ticket on. You know, and all these things are here and are now challenging for certain demographics. As an example of how problematic some this world has become for some people, but we'll also go into some organizations and find they're not promoting digital, well. The frontline staff. don't even understand what's the digital solutions are capable of. And digital has also created new problems like what's my password and how do I change this and where is this located? And can I do this on this phone, and all those kinds of problems. So it's for new problems. As one general manager who runs the contact centers for one of our major banks in Australia said, we’ve run out all these apps and cell service all these solutions, and we have the same number of people in our contact center today, as we did 10 years ago. They're just dealing with different stuff. So our philosophy hasn't changed, and Bill, you might want to pick up from there.
Bill Price
But no, I think it's summarized really well, David. In the in the intervening 14 years since book one and book three came out Mark, what we found is that some companies do get it and they have been notable and then well documented in the fact that they are providing simpler solutions or easier solutions and we call them the innovators in the companies that are digitally native which made it easy for them but they thought through the overall proposition from the get go and then other organizations that have been around for a lot longer period of time. Some of them are struggling to figure out how to get on to the digital path and how to make things frictionless and we call them the renovators. But by subtraction there are a lot of companies that are in neither category, they just haven't gotten it yet. And they're the ones that really are still causing the friction, they are not able to get over the fact that they're causing this effort or in frustration for their customers. So I think the thing that has changed maybe in this period of time is that the difference has gotten more dramatic. And we hear when we talk to clients and when we go to conferences. Why is it that that your company can't be as easy to deal with as Company X and Company X could be a number of different organizations that are used by comparison, but when any organization hears that, when they used to hear that they would say well, we're not like Company X you know, we are a bank or we are a utility, we are the government. But that but that is going away because customers consumers don't care anymore. They say if that other organization or company can make it easy for me, you guys should make it easy for me to we're beginning to see the realization that that has to happen and that organizations whether they are government agencies or older companies, or internet companies doesn't really matter where they came from. They all need to realize that customers are driving these changes and they want to have digital solutions that are easy and work. They want to have the effortless type experiences. So I think that what we're catching now through the interviews and the profiles we've done is that organizations realize we have to do something, but we're not sure what to do. How do we make that change?
Mark Levy
Got it. Yeah. So what in your mind then is a frictionless organization, and is it possible?
Bill Price
Is it possible? David, I'll bounce back to you on that one and then I'll chime in.
David Jaffe
I love the way he gets me to go first. We think of frictionless organization is one that makes it so self so easy to deal with customers hardly have to deal with them. So the friction is all the context they create and problems they create that the customers then have to expend effort on to solve. So let me give a personal example. So in arranging my flights to come from Australia to the UK, six weeks before the flights I booked it on a self-service portal that deals with lots of airlines, I'm not going to name them and, and six weeks out from my flight, I get an email saying Dear Mr. Jaffe, your flight has been canceled. Okay, there's a little bit of friction in that for me, and it's like hang on a minute. And it basically said, you know, made it easy if I wanted to go and cancel the whole arrangement and get rid of the whole trip, which obviously wasn't a preference for me. Or it said you can ring this number so basically about three hours of calls later, we'd sorted out that, you know, I'd got onto an alternative flight and so forth. Then exactly the same experience happened five days out from the flight. I got literally the same message you know, I'm sort of Dear Mr. Jaffe your flight has been canceled. In this case, it wasn't even true. The flight or merely been rearranged, rerouted was going to take longer, and therefore one of my connections didn't work anymore. And another three hours of phone calls and backs and forwards and eventually found alternatives and you know; it was all sorted. But, I reckon, a frictionless experience with that would have been Dear Mr. Jaffe. Your current connection in Frankfurt no longer works. There is one available two hours later. Is that acceptable to you? So yes or no. And we could have sorted it in five minutes and one interaction, not three hours of blood, sweat and toil on both sides. And then therefore this this is the potential of being frictionless is that it saves effort, not just for me as a customer, but saves a huge amount of costs and problems for this organization. Where currently the phone's ringing off the hook, because flight cancellations are now much more common phenomenon across the world with COVID and other things. And so for example, Qantas at one point four weeks ago hadn't had wait times of up to 10 hours of contact centers because they were overwhelmed with all these incorrect types of demand that wasn't being handled well. So the opportunity to get rid of friction is tremendous for both the customer and all these organizations. Come on, Bill, I'll pass to you.
Bill Price
I mean, the way we do this Mark in the book is we make sure we have some very crisp metrics to figure out whether you are frictionless or on the path to becoming frictionless or not. And so picking up on David's example for the airlines we actually have an airlines example in one of the early chapters of the book, but the idea is to look at the rate of contacts per issue, and the rate of contacts overall. And if the rate of contacts overall has gone down, meaning you maybe you've doubled the size of the business, you've tripled the amount of customers but the actual number of contacts per customer has gone down, the number of contacts per order has gone down. The number of contacts per flight booked in David's example has gone down, that would be a good thing. But in too many cases, those numbers have gone up either because the organization isn't able to measure, that they haven't figured out how to measure the rates. They only measure the whole volumes, the total volumes, or they haven't realized how that's so important to the customer experience and to the employee experience. So, agents don't like having a 10 hour hold time, because that means they're beleaguered, no rest, they have no breaks and so it this is friction is bad both for customers and for the organization. And I'll give you a quick example to and use it use a different one. I was jogging this morning listening to NPR National Public Radio, and there was a story that NPR does every so often about outrageous bills, invoices, and that consumers have to pay. And it was an example that's a little bit unique to the American healthcare system. But there was a husband and wife couple both of them getting cataract surgery. One of them had a $200 charge the other one had a $4,000 charge. It was just amazing. And they talked to the husband who had the $4,000 charge. He's actually an MD he's a smart guy. And he talked about call after call after call and one of his first calls was Why is my bill so high, which we talked about in the book as a really good litmus test and good signal for friction. And then he went on to find out why in the state of California to pay 20 times his wife for the exact same surgery. And so we have this as a problem in our US healthcare system. And friction comes up all the time and we tend to in that industry, we tend to kind of gloss it over or try to make it a little bit easier. But what it needs is a really wholesale change or someone to break out and make it a big change. And I think what we talked about in the book is frictionless organizations and when to think through this fundamentally, they think through it as a whole of business. Problem. Everyone gets involved in it, they think through it from the beginning and in terms of the design of the product and service itself. And make sure that then follows through for the rest of the customer experience. And that would be the definition of frictionless organizations.
David Jaffe
You quoted an example of not an eye for an eye
Bill Price
and this is why we had so much fun writing these books together Mark.
Mark Levy
Well, I agree with you that you know, measurement is incredibly important. To get to the measurement, there's so much underneath in an organization that needs to be aligned. From the C suite on down and a commitment to that, mapping that journey out, those key moments. And look as an airline, you know that flights are going to be canceled, right? And doing some second level thinking that says, well, what's the next step? As a customer, not just as a business, the business says, Well, I want to notify you. Right. Okay, but the next step is I want to keep this customer, I want to make sure that they move to the next step. And that is not what I find is it's not a it's not a common process. Either it's silos of groups within organizations who are responsible for certain pieces but not others. So, is there a way to align the organizations to become frictionless because as you said, it's not just, everybody has to work together?
David Jaffe
Absolutely. And that's one of the reasons we called the book the frictionless organization, and we deliberately kept things like service out of the title. Even with our first Best Service is No Service, I think it gave some people the impression that this was for the people with the guys who do service. It wasn't. It's a book, as you're saying, mark for the whole organization as this very much is we're saying this is a whole of business problems. The guys in the contact center or whatever, they're dealing with chat or messaging or whatever, are fielding the problems. They're not genuinely making the problems
Mark Levy
Well, and they don't have any information or the right information to address the issue. So from a customer perspective, they're starting again, if they're on the 10 hour wait time, you know, that customer has been waiting, you're not getting a happy customer at that point.
David Jaffe
You're right that the whole of what we're saying we agree totally, that's a whole business problem. And the second chapter of the book is all about how do we get the right level that people to own the problems across the business? are how do we assign responsibilities in the right way? And we absolutely recognize that if this isn't sponsored at the right level in the organization, in the C suite, then the strategy probably isn't going to work. And in every chapter, the book, we have what we call bad stories. And good stories. We of course, we don't name the organizations of the bad stories. But one of them that I included was about an attempt of the service part of an organization to get the rest of the business to start owning problems and work on the problems with them. But there was no senior sponsorship, there was no shared metrics for everyone. And so the thing just eventually failed. They came to the initial meetings, all these other executives and said that's interesting. But it's still as they were concerned; it was still the problem with the customer service area. Whereas Bill can probably give some examples of where the sponsorship and the shared metrics have created a much better environment where everybody was co-owning problems, Bill, you want to pick up?
Bill Price
and I was thinking threw that exact thing and we did a workshop a couple of years ago for one of our clients. And we had already done some of that baseline quantification, some of the metrics that we've already described here, that contacts per X was per subscriber in their case, and we came up with about 50 different customer service reasons. And each reason then had its own KPIs. And one of those KPIs was churn. What was the 30 day out churn the turnover of customers after they contacted the company for each of those 50 issues? Not easy to come up with those data, but once we came up with them, we had this workshop, and the CEO attended the workshop, and his intention was to be there to kick it off. And show the flag and then go back to his office. But as he was reviewing the data, with everyone, all of his team around him at that time, he was just shocked because the average churn was, I'll just say x I won't give the numbers even the average term was x per month. And for some of the reasons it was like 1/10 of x, like not an issue, those were relatively positive, innocuous issues and ones that could be handled either digitally or in some other form. However, some of those reasons had 10 to 12x the churn. More than 100% a year turnover, almost guaranteed because of these issues and these ratios that you would imagine to be challenging, things that were broken things that were confusing, things that were frustrating. I had to call you again about this. So repeat contacts as well. And he sat there and said, if we can knock down that 10x on the average, so I've only looked at averages. All we do around here is look at averages, the average turnover is x, as I said, X but when you look at the range, the long tails as they are called, it can be dramatic. So he stayed for the entire workshop, and he made sure he drove his team and said this is really important. So you went from this is important to us to this is really important for us. And they made tremendous strides in the next six weeks because it requires moving things out of the way. It requires changing priorities. Not just saying this is important, but rather put some investment behind it. We're going to put a team behind this. We're not going to do these things over here that we thought were important, because now we know that customer experience with these damaging reasons is much more important than we ever thought before. So the metrics lead to the engagement. And then he in turn turned his team has said now John, you're gonna run this. I mean, they said it very defferentially. Let's figure it out ourselves. So then they worked out themselves. So it wasn't just the CEO So David Hughes example of customer service trying to find the owners that doesn't work. The CEO really can't find the owners because that's too much top down. It really has to be in a collegial sense, ideally, where they know that they're getting the support from the CEO, they know that some of the data are there. They also know some of the data are gonna be hard to find. But the Head of Product says I own that one. Yeah, the head of IT says okay, I'm gonna pick up this one. Some billing director says, well, we know our bills aren't right all the time, so I'm going to take that one. And then they wind up feeling like they can start digging into what the root causes are.
Mark Levy
Yeah, I find the root causes are challenging to get to. And, and so that kind of leads me into my next question, which is really about this, my focus is really around digital. Right? How is digital making a difference and how has it changed the customer experience? How's it changed effort and friction? So, maybe talk a bit more about digital, how that's changed over the last number of years, how important that is, and where some companies are doing a great job or not.
David Jaffe
The sort of analysis Bill's talked through. But once you start understanding the reasons for this content, it helps throw light on digital in two senses. One, if we understand the reasons customers are making contact, it can show where we need digital solutions and don't have them for the sort of gaps in our digital platforms or self-service. But it can also show us the rate at which the further opportunity to migrate problems to digital as well why only a third of our customers are checking their balances online and the other two thirds are still ringing up for it or whatever it is. And the third thing is obviously digital can create new problems that are then having to be serviced. So, I had a client where the security guys had got all over the passwords and identifiers and all that sort of stuff and insisted that the password that customers used was at least 15 digits and couldn't use common words that were actually the name related to the product. So in their case, it was about pensions, and they could you know, none of your passwords could include the word pension, because someone might be a guess that, of course, it was illogical to have a 15-digit password that you didn't use in any of your other digital solutions. But that didn't include the word pension or so they just made this problem really, really tough and then to make it worse. No one in the in the contact center who fielded the problems knew what these rules were. And so often they would propose that they'd worked out some common format that got you through this nightmare of this 15-digit password. So they're actually making security looser, because they were suggesting to virtually all customers the same format. And so the intention that Security had in tightening things up was actually being lost. So it's just a classic example of if we get the analysis right, we can start to understand these problems. Start to invest in better digital solutions. Make the digital solutions we have got less friction filled, or more frictionless. And also help staff understand when they should educate customers on digital solutions. And when they shouldn't, where often we find staff live in fear of digital is going to take my job. No one's gonna have a job around here anymore if we promote this and also, they have a bias experience set because they only hear of the problems with digital right so their solutions in their minds and this thing must be broken. So all I hear is customers saying I couldn't get this to work, or I couldn't find that, or I shouldn't do that. In one organization we're into they've given us a nickname. They said the apps crap. Because they only ever had problems with the fob fix the year before, but you know that lingered in everyone's mind. So they weren't ever going to promote and help me. Last thing though, maybe I'll throw to you is because we're taking up these digital solutions, the nature of the problems that then land in the customer facing error is different. Want to pick up from there?
Bill Price
Yeah, I mean, I think the first source of this mark is to figure out what should be provided as a digital solution. And the tendency in the last 10 or 15 years has been in some companies, not all of them. While we've got these really great tools. We have apps, we've got chatbots, we've got an IVR that's pretty intelligent. We got all these different tools we can use let's put as much as possible on those tools. And let's see what works. Or let's make it as digital as possible. Digital first, digital only. We hear these terms all the time. And yet oftentimes what we've run across is that customers get confused, there are too many options. They're not quite sure how to sort through it all. And so, we have in the book a fairly simple looking but hard to perform sorting mechanism that says certain of these reasons need to have a digital solutions. But other ones need to have a personal touch, other ones need to be eliminated through the root cause. And then in the digital solution corner, apply some root cause analysis in there to figure out whether something is effective or not. So again, doing some metrics, what is the containment rate by issue in the digital tools? And what we often talk about in our books is if the containment rate is 55%, which is sometimes seen to be good in digital self-service, we flip that around and say well the complement of that is 45% failure. And so let's look at that failure rate. And no company wants to acknowledge or embrace a 45% failure rate. And so how can we get that failure rate down to single digits, which means like a 90% success rate per issue in digital. Even doing that math is hard for a lot of organizations to do because they look at averages again, as opposed to by issue, but when they look at it by issue, they may find that it goes from 10% Success 90% failure to maybe they do have some 90% successes and only 10% failure, but from the customer point of view if that fails for them, what we like to see is or we like to say is you're going to be lucky if they call you, me David called because he had to get to Frankfort had to get on to England, but if it had been a less critical change and something had been canceled or done wrong. He might have just said Well forget I'm not going to do this anymore. I'm going to shop somewhere else I'm gonna go somewhere else. And so when that customer has been in contact you a second time, it means coming into the contact center for support or going into a retail shop having some assistance. And so it's already a failure in their mind. And that unsuspecting frontline agent is saying hi my name is David; how can I help you? Well, David, doesn't may not realize that Bill had a problem upstream that causes to happen, he should, but most customer service reps don't know that. And so he can't really deal with it in the customer situation. So the digital gap analysis or the digital root cause is so important to do, at the reason level at the different issue level.
Mark Levy
Yeah, yeah. I also find that there's been a proliferation of new platforms, right data is the key right to finding usually I look at data to find the smoke. Yeah, right. And, and, and then dig in. What I find in a lot of organizations is that the data is siloed. Or it's not being looked at in the way that it needs to its being looked at as a business metric versus maybe an operational metric. And so in order to have cross channel systems that understand context, that can know you tried this already, right, or pop up something when they get to the agent that says this person said this stuff in the chat, like because of the silos and I get back to the organizational structure, because of the silos, because of the fact that there isn't a necessarily a consistent or focused digital kind of mantra and focus on the business. You end up with these inconsistencies. So technology can be there to sell you and help solve a lot of these things, but unless the business organizes to support them, we're still going to end up with friction. So is there anybody you're seeing who's doing it well?
Bill Price
One, company that's actually in David's backyard down in Australia, New Zealand is called Xero it's spelled X E R O, but it's pronounced zero. And they're from a US audience point of view. They're like Intuit, the tax software company, for small and medium businesses, but they are almost completely digital, and they've done a really good job, in our estimation, we quote them in the book and had a good chance to learn a little bit about what they do. But unlike most companies, Xero decided not to have an inbound contact center. There's no 800 number free service number to call. They really pride themselves on having what they call Xero central. A central repository of knowledge articles, of customers helping customers C to C on their website. And here's one of the key things they actually measure it, and they say that they have a 96% containment rate in Xero Central. So A they can measure it and B it's a darn good number. So only a 4% failure. And then when it fails. Then there is the equivalent of a trouble ticket that goes downstream to someone at Xero, who then figures out the right expert to call you back. So the expert calls back and says, okay, Mark, I see, and they know where you were I see you're on Xero central you try this you were inquiring this it didn't work. Yeah, how can I help you or can I give you some more information? And if that is the actual problem that the customer had, then that Xero customer service rep learns from it, and but doesn't just solve the problem which is necessary but goes beyond it and says how can we make Xero central even stronger? Yeah, well, we missing why wasn't it intuitive enough. How can we make it even better as a tool, so their intention is to go from 96 up towards 100% and customers love it? I mean, they love the product, the products simple, intuitive, easy to use, they don't have to contact the even Xero central very often, but when they do, it really seems to work for them. So we're not saying get rid of your 800 number service at all, but we're saying keep it have that in that case, it's a full multichannel or omnichannel view that they've done that seems to work really well for their customer
Mark Levy
Well, it sounds cultural. It sounds like everybody understands. Right. The piece is, I do find oftentimes, and I think you'll agree, contact centers you know, they address the issue for that customer for that moment. And, and then they move on to the next one. And the idea of really understanding like, wait, that call came in because of this. And it turns out that there's an issue downstream at the retail store where they're saying this, but that's not correct. Right, and not addressing those things. So, but culturally if the intent is to provide that feedback, right, you can get closer to solutions.
Bill Price
Yeah, those data are as you point out, Mark those data are available, but they're not pulled together or as David likes to say they're not joined up. And if you join up those data, it's powerful. I mean, another way to look at it is your customer, this is sort of the challenge we often get your customers know everything about their experiences and everything about you. But you don't know everything about them. Right. In other words, it's not it's not always immediately known from the company point of view, but the customers, if the customers believe that's the case, then they will even go beyond that. And even imagine that the company should know that. When in fact most organizations have trouble because of the data being in different silos. Yeah, the expectations are extremely high from a customer perspective.
David Jaffe
Can I give an example, Mark? So firstly, what Bill has also touched on, or hinted at is we think there's a problem that organizations are obsessing about How do we go? you know, with surveys and feedback, and they're so busy saying How do we go? that not asking Why did you have to? Which is a more fundamental question. They're assuming that we had to or that we wanted to or something like that. But they never really asked that question. And as you said, never get back to the root causes of, we're so busy scoring everybody and saying how good was our experience that we're not asking the fundamental question is should we even need to have an experience? Map the journey mapping journeys, we don't even want to go on the point. To give a good example one organization that is a UK based insurance conglomerate that sort of picked up on this philosophy. And a gentleman led a huge transformation program in that in that business and found they were totally obsessed with surveys and speed metrics. You know how quickly how quickly how quickly we're doing how quickly of picking the phone up, all that good stuff. And whereas he got good data on why things were happening and who was accountable and how well digital was working. And within a year, they removed 40% of the contacts. The operational savings were huge. And moved. The satisfaction scores however, they were measuring it up by a factor of 20% as well, because they now have more time to deal with the problematic queries and the difficult stuff. And there wasn't as much friction for customers, so they were generally happier. You can imagine that customer retention improved dramatically as well. So this was a huge turnaround. Plus, the executive team had a common point of focus of things they could work on rather than rather being held accountable for say a net promoter score without knowing what levers there is individual execs could pull that will make a difference. And once they had the right data, they could see the problems that they could work on, as Bill was describing earlier.
Bill Price
Yeah. And just to chime in. One more point on this one mark is that the over reliance on surveys, whether it's a net promoter score survey or CSAT survey we actually do talk about those by name in the book, but the idea is, a lot of organizations still say, well, our NPS went from 30 to 35 in the last year, we're doing great now let's move on to the next topic. Right not realizing that inside of that there are some deep detractors who are very upset who were about ready to leave or have already left by now. And the fact that these NPS surveys may be summarized on a monthly basis, maybe even a quarterly basis, so they're not even current to be able to create action plans. So we talk a lot about making sure you don't really need to even ask the survey questions anymore. But a lot of the digital tools that are out there with speech and text analytics and other types of predictive tools, you don't really need to wait to ask customers what they think about you and whether they'll recommend you someplace. You don't need to wait till those data come back in to summarize so that you can actually have a continuous flow and maybe survey customers on specific issues along the along the way. So those sorts of immersive analytics are emerging very quickly. And the organizations that are embracing those are finding really great benefits to learn the why as David said, rather than just the overall numbers.
David Jaffe
As Bill is saying there, I think isn't it almost rude to constantly put customers through more effort to answer survey Shouldn't you know how well you're going? Shouldn't you know, how much poor interaction and how much friction you cause and what experiences you're putting customers through? So it's become it's become an easy out, to use a baseball expression. If you'd like, to put customers through survey and sort of lean on that data, which we think you know, right, rather than do the hard yards of analyzing, you know, all the other things that are really going on and to give an example, we also think sometimes there's survey bias and hidden survey bias. So for example, one of the airlines I deal with in Australia never surveys me on delayed flights, one time they really need to hear from me, right? They don't ask me. Yeah, right. And it may even be an accident of the software was something I happen to think that it's not that it's maybe more malicious or different that but that the C perhaps the CEO doesn't even know that that's the nature of the surveys and they're only hearing from so called happy customers on flights that happened to lead on time.
Mark Levy
And I find too, that the, the need for understanding the intent and the expectations, it doesn't come from the number right especially for digital experiences. If you ask someone about you know, if you ask the NPS question after a digital experience, okay, I paid my bill. Great. They're not answering about how that digital experience was. They're answering my bills too high. So I gave you a zero, right? And the zero, so the only way to really, I think, in many cases really understand more about digital and the experiences that the customers are having and are they feeling trusting of those experiences? Do they feel like they were heard, right, the things that usually they go to a human for requires more direct contact with customers? So it's not saying digital is the end all be all but it's a key part of it and enables you to find those solutions and really understand it from the customer perspective. You write in your book about the path to being frictionless and you say, there's three stages. And can you guys describe the stages and the challenges that companies have in moving through them?
Bill Price
Yeah, yeah. So we Yeah, as you're saying we have we have in the book, we've got a very clear summary of different steps that you have to go through. And the first collection of them we call to create a collective focus to make sure that everyone agrees on what the fundamental problems are. And without that, that's foundational. Without that, then everyone's going to be flying off in different directions. And that includes understanding the reasons and setting up the actions and the priorities and the owners that we described. The core of the middle of it is really to drive what to do, to really break those down into their actions. And one of the actions is digitize. Another one is preempt, which is a variation if you will of digitize which says like the airline example Dave gave in the beginning, if you know something is wrong, let your customers know. Give them options, give them alternatives. Don't just drop them on them for them to deal with it but provide some sort of follow through. And some of the strategic actions are positive. An example that we talked about a little bit in the book is what do you do in cases where the customer wants to cancel an account? That is cancelable? Do you want to force them to talk to you to try to save them and provide them another alternative? Or do you want to make it a little button click on digital, and you can cancel the account. A little bit less serious, but what about canceling an order at the entire account, you want to make that a conversation that you want them to have when customers typically don't want to talk to you about canceling an order. But maybe you want to know why they're canceling the order. So you make it a digital solution with some sort of a drop down or an information that will Why do you need to cancel this order, in which case it's a full digital and so we talked about that a lot in the middle step and the final step is what a lot of organizations just give short shrift to which is to maintain and improve is continuous improvement. notion of always learning both immersively and through surveys and other means. What's really going on and then redesign because if you don't redesign these days, your products, your services, your go to market, someone else is going to do a better job. So we really talk about the collective focus on the action steps and then then the maintenance and improvement
David Jaffe
on the on the redesign because I think it has a big relationship to digital as well. And we've kind of hinted at it a bit in this conversation that if as you're more and more successful in digitizing, and migrating more and more interactions to digital forms, so customers are self-serving more and more. They are natively doing lots of things there now a lot of often simple, straightforward transactions are the easiest to digitize. So we're moving more and more straight forward into the customers hands through self-service through digital solutions. Fantastic. So what that means is what's left in the Mend contact world has now a different complexity mix. Typically now it is the problems, it's the really hard stuff. It's the canceled flights that need rearranging and we can't just hit a button to do that. Because there's different options and negotiation with several third parties and data, right. That's now getting too hard, potentially for some of our offshore locations too. And so we think sometimes digital kills offshore, unfortunately, because it was the simplest stuff and routine that we tend to put in offshore locations and now. Now we're left with all this complex stuff that may be people in those locations don't have the experience and life experience to deal with. And therefore it's part of redesign. We have to think potentially rethink our models of how we organize to deal with what's left and what skill sets do we need that now we know we need digital natives helping support digital channels. You know the 50, 60-year-olds who were employing are no longer the right mix for the millennials and others who were dealing with in different ways. So hence, we have this redesigned chapter that says there's a lot of new things to think about, or, you know, root cause analysis, we may have started to realize that our whole product design process is the fundamental flaw that's causing all this friction. And that we don't just need to know we've put a lot of band aids on it. But now we need to get back to real fundamentals and say, so how do we design products in the future and stop building friction in? and to go even more fundamental in things we need to redesign. So, we talked about both those aspects as part of that, that chapter two, as you know, it's a never-ending process. It's like, you fix a lot of things and then a new competitor comes in with an even better mousetrap and an even better interaction model and you've got to catch up again.
Mark Levy
Yeah, yeah. Well, wonderful. This has been a great conversation. Well, we will look forward to whatever the next creation you guys come up with is. The book is called The Frictionless Organization. It's out now @amazon.com and any other like, there we go. You can see it there. Awesome. And thank you both for joining me.
Bill Price and David Jaffe
My delight. Thanks for inviting us
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