When have you seen force or friction impact a company’s ability to grow?

[mbarba]

Revenue Operations, or RevOps, is integral to taking an inbound approach to business and speeding up your company’s flywheel.

Why are those important? Let’s define terms first:

• Inbound is a method of attracting, engaging, and delighting people to grow a business that provides value and builds trust.
• The flywheel is a model adapted by HubSpot to explain the momentum you gain when you align your entire organization around delivering a remarkable customer experience. Rather than thinking of your business as a funnel, with leads coming in at the top and customers coming out at the bottom, think about your business as a circle — as a flywheel.

When thinking about how to spin your company’s flywheel faster with RevOps, there are two important concepts to keep in mind:

1. Force is what allows your business to scale by spinning your flywheel faster and faster. This looks like when your customer has a great customer experience and tells their friends and colleagues about it.
2. Friction is what grinds your business to a halt, if not addressed. This is when your company provides your customers with a bad customer experience, and they also tell their friends and colleagues about it. In turn, this slows down your flywheel.

Here’s what I’d love to hear:

1. Share a time when you had an amazing customer experience and you saw a company grow faster and faster because of their wonderful customer care.
2. Share a time when you had a poor customer experience (please don’t name names or organizations) and how you saw that type of poor care affect their business.

[SVanZyl]

Not yet, as I am new to RevOps.

[nivea]

Amazing:
A company resolved a product issue swiftly with proactive and empathetic customer care, earning my loyalty and leading me to recommend them to others. Their exceptional service fueled positive word-of-mouth and accelerated their growth.

Poor:
A business with slow responses and unclear communication during a service delay caused frustration and online complaints. This poor care led to customer loss and damaged their reputation, slowing growth.

[JBarth4]

1. Amazing: Bought a great tech tool for effective note taking, file retention and personal business organization. Every step, from ordering to unboxing, to post activation had a self serve but personalized experience. Furthermore, the product does everything it said it would and more.

2. Poor: Needed a call back on a broken device that was insured. No callback, no online self service option. Very frustrating. Ironically, trying to submit this answer was also frustrating because the Captcha wouldn't verify. 😉

[nsharma175]

1. Amazing Customer Experience:

I once had an issue with a damaged product, and the company quickly replaced it, added a handwritten apology, and included a bonus item. This exceptional care made me recommend them to friends, boosting their growth and reputation.

2. Poor Customer Experience:

A service provider double-charged me and offered no timely resolution. Frustrated, I stopped using their service and shared my negative experience, which hurt their reputation and likely slowed their growth.

[DBurgueño]

Bank apps used to be the worst, but now they've been improving, at least the ones with UX/UI  department.
The worst that I can remember was in a store and the attention was extremely unpleasant. I wrote a google maps review and now from time to time I get a "like" on my review, why? because it is still the same.

[jvaca1]

When have you seen force or friction impact a company’s ability to grow?

Yes, all the time, especially in traditional companies, that hasn't translated to the modern era yet.

[Gloo_Rick]

I've seen friction in low site UX, where members have to work too hard to get the information they need from the site they're paying to surface content quickly. This hurts growth and retention.

[CBoulanger]

Kind of a two-for-one. I've seen Sales teams add a lot of new people, but without adjusting or updating their processes. The additional Sales people are technically a force, but the inability to onboard and get them equipped with the right tools (battle cards, software, etc) is friction. Together, they end up slowing down the business.

[ODOGWU]

An great example of a positive customer I've had in the past is when I went to get some food from a food vendor. Now this food vendor had a long queue but despite the long queue I was attended to and told to relax. I didn't really think so much about how long the queue was because of the way I was being attended to. Then when it finally got to my turn the the lady at the selling point was so nice and well mannered and it was just a fun experience buying from them. I also noticed that it wasn't just me that the treated that way the treated every single customer the same way.

On the other hand a negative customer experience I had was when I wanted to get some some snacks at a snack shop. I remember asking the lady how much that particular smack cost the lady was really impatient in answering my questions and she was quite rude. I got angry and I left the shop without buying anything from them. While the shop is still open the number of customers patronizing the shop had significantly reduced. 

[ALagos2]

Positive Customer Experience Example with BionicGym

When I first purchased my BionicGym, I was excited to try it out but needed some help understanding the device settings and getting started with a workout routine. I reached out to BionicGym’s customer service, and within hours, I received a personalized video response from a representative. They explained how to set up the device and even recommended a beginner’s workout plan tailored to my fitness goals.

What amazed me was the follow-up: a few weeks later, they checked in to see how I was progressing and offered tips for intensifying my workouts. This proactive approach made me feel like a valued customer and motivated me to stick with the program. BionicGym’s commitment to customer care created a loyal user out of me and, judging by the growing community and positive reviews online, clearly contributed to their increasing popularity. It was evident that the company’s focus on customer success drove their rapid expansion in the fitness tech market.

Poor Customer Experience Example

I once had a different experience with a fitness tech brand that left me disappointed. After purchasing a wearable workout device, I found it confusing to use and had trouble syncing it with my phone. I reached out to the company’s customer support, but it took them days to respond, and when they did, the response was generic and unhelpful. When I replied with more specific questions, I received no follow-up.

A few months later, I noticed that the company had stopped releasing updates for the device and that their social media presence had dwindled. It became apparent that they were losing customers due to their lack of responsiveness and poor customer support. This experience highlighted how essential it is for companies, especially in the tech space, to prioritize customer care to build trust and ensure long-term success.

[KimTenove]

1. My mobile banking is amazing and now offers all services a traditional B&M location would. They are quick to reply to urgent requests via their online chat and have self-serve options within the app, even to flag suspicious activity.

2. My telecoms provider continuously overbilled me for months, despite multiple conversations/escalations with their support team. My refund took another 6 months to receive - I will never use this company's services again.

[Francesca_sl]

Positive experience: With my bank, I had my purse stolen, losing my phone and cards. A friend lent me her phone to call the bank. The agent followed all the protocols but also offered me two helpful alternatives and provided a sense of calm and security. This was a significant plus for retaining me as a customer and sharing my positive experience with my close circle.

Negative experience: I went to buy shoes, but there was no staff available to help me find my size. After waiting 20 minutes in line, the cashier told me I had to queue again in another place to choose my size and then return to pay, and her demeanor was quite rude. I lost 30 minutes, didn’t buy the shoes, and will not return to that store.

[Amoré]

1. I have great customer care with my bank. Whether it is using the app chat function or going into a branch and the odd times I have to call in an issue. Never had problems.

2. With the same banking app, I had issue with one of their products that allowed me to pay a monthly fee for lawyer assistance and when I called in to ask a query the consultant logged it as a claim 0 which is not what it was, I was asking Qs and that then changed my premium and the product then becamse useless to me as the person wanted to assume I run a business from home - they clearly did not comprehend the hybrid situation and only IF I work more than 50% of the time from home then I have tax claims I can do for 'rent' purposes of the specified office. 

[MonicaJavvaji]

1. Amazing customer service when I was having an issue with one of my cleaning equipment. They clearly unserstood the problem and quickly replaced with a new product. The representative was very helpful and finished the work in short time.

2. I had a bad customer service when I got a pair of sandals in store they had bad sandals which were damaged after wearing for less than hour. when I went to talk to the manager she was very harsh and gave a really hard time. From then on I stopped shopping there and told my friends not to buy.

[APoole1867]

1. Amazing customer experience when returning a product. Very easy and quick to speak to a support representative, their time to resolve the issue was short, and I got the outcome I wanted. For me it was all about it being accessible, hassle free and customer focussed 

2. Going into a store for a renewal and being given a negative, closed response when asking about the products and pricing available. I haven't used the organisation since, because I didn't feel respected as a customer. 

[USingh94]

Friction – While execs did sign up to dedicate some of their time towards professional learning upgrade skills, the commitment had a time decay. This was largely due to lack of constant communication or providing regular feedback. The customer success teams ensured to conduct a program that was scheduled at a particular time (Thursday’s 12pm and 4pm ET) for 30 minutes to come and ask questions or attend a live session. The session details, flow and follow ups would be sent to their emails.

Force – When executives would attend the sessions, we encouraged them to actively participate in a joint session that contained some to-do actions that would be discussed in the next upcoming session. By introducing actions, this stirred actions of accountability and responsibility as a team. Using this approach, the attendance, combined with the actions in the friction stage, the satisfaction value of the course objectives saw a marked improvement (85% satisfied rate)

[Abayomi95]

1. So this did happen at an institution when they changed there CBA. There was really a great turnover in there business that even customers had to go to there website to give kudos to them on the change that was made. And this resulted in a great turnover in there customer base. 

2. Wow, this was a reversal of the first illustration. It's still the same institution and this was before the change occur as the CBA that was being used was imposed on them by CBN so they had no other choice than to keep using it and it's actually affecting the growth of the institution as customers account are being tampered with by the said system and to correct, it takes a longer time before solution can be provided. This resulted in customers moving there accounts from the institution to another. This continue for almost 3 years before a new management came in place and there was change in the CBA. 

[JDZawaydeh]

1. There was a productivity company that gave so much with their PLG offerings that I basically felt that I was getting a fully functional product for free. They gave most everything that one would need, but the more and more I used it, the more involved I got and the more I needed to do. They had self service options to upgrade, and I seamlessly upgraded when the tiem was right. I now am a loyal customer and strongly reccomend this to any and all colleagues. 

2. There was another company who made it very difficult to convert because they gave a "free trial" of the product but gave such limited functionality that I wasn't able to gauge whether or not this would be a good fit for my company with specific use cases or anything besides basic functionality. Also, the way that their pricing was structured, you needed to commit 6 months payment up front as well, which was a lot to ask for for hardly using the product. It felt like a low value place to introduce that friction, and although there was some justification for the 6 month committment, I ended up not converting because I didn't have enough to justify that decision. 

[NVIJ]

1.Amazing customer experience I encountered when one of my order package got delivered to some wrong address. When i raised this to their customer care, they ensured that no need to worry and refunded back the money. Plus they gave additional 10% discount on next order. 

2. Encountered poor Customer experience when using a Payment app, it asks for signin information again even when the merchant(seller) have all the info. That was one of hindrance, the company was facing while onboarding new customers. However, when raised this concern, the payment app took the feedback and removed such requirements by working with the merchant tech team to autofill the information.

[CPorvaznik]

1. The companies that impress me the most are the ones who will take care of your needs and recognize when they did something poorly and need to improve.

2. companies that I have had bad experiences with typically have so much friction in the buying process it makes me not want to buy and get frustrated very easily by every little peice of friction that keeps me from buying.