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.

[dyg]

1). I worked for an organization that had an incredible customer service team. Their response times were super quick whether you emailed, sent a DM, or even left a comment on social media, you always got a fast, helpful reply. That kind of responsiveness builds trust and really strengthens the relationship with the brand.

2). On the flip side, I’ve had a negative experience with a company that had terrible response times, even though their product itself was great. It took multiple follow-ups just to get a reply, and when support finally did respond, there was no real urgency to fix the issue. So even though the product was solid, the poor customer service made me want to take my business elsewhere.

[Ygorbuenobr]

I once had an amazing experience with an online store that always responded quickly and solved my problems with great attention. Over time, I noticed more people recommending and using their service, and the company kept growing.

I had a bad experience with another business where my issues were ignored, and communication was slow. Later, I saw they lost many clients and received negative reviews.

[SEmmett1]

I once worked in a different warehouse position, I saw the management offer classes for forklifting and all the employees whom signed up got certified, but only one did not. They decided to keep him where they wanted him to stay at for the rest of his life. No room for growth for him, all because he was so good at his job. The problem with this way of business planning. Is the fact they put the companies success on one man's shoulders. So when he left it put the company in an jam and now that company is no longer working at that location.

[aguerrau90]

When force and fricttion dont have sense

[PAnantharaman]

1. Inbound: The most preferred channel, with the best conversion. However, it isn't easy to generate content of value and inspire customers. 

2. Flywheel: The continuous process of driving for continual value delivery, b2b SaaS companies have 80% revenue from upsell/ crosssell. As we best understand the customer usage, context, we are best prepared for coming up with other services or offerings for customer segments.  

3. Force: The force for all customers is success; identifying ways to make their success simpler is the best way to automate

4. Friction: The complexity of the B2B environment brings in friction; some of the friction is useful, like security and personalization/customization 

[SNiston]

Friction - I have seen a company have ample internal friction by having a weak to onboarding/trianing process resulting in personnel not adequately trained even a year after their start date. This led to slow project progress, frustrated employees, frustrated clients, and a general reduction in morale and confidence. 

Force - Introducing an interactive vlog with existing/former/prospective clients on a highly relevant topic to the audience where it garnered much enthusiasm

[HLee8]

While I will not be naming this video editing software company, everybody who is a content creator or an aspiring content creator will know who it is.

Here's an example of how it used force - it has provided a professional-grade end-to-end video and audio editing suite end-to-end for free, for well over a decade and counting. This enables aspiring content creators and indie filmmakers to get onboarded to the software when they're just starting out and don't have much money. And as they grow more sophisticated,  they use more and more of its features and get entrenched. To help them with the considerable learning curve, this company provides detailed training courses and manuals, including sample footage to practice with, all for free.

But there is also friction in this experience because, as you can imagine with any software that does complex colour grading, video editing and animation, it is very demanding on hardware. A budget-strapped creator who has a low-end laptop may feel frustrated if their machine crashes after they stretched their system too far. To mitigate this, the company has published some system requirements to help people understand what hardware they need to invest in to make the software work well for them. And although there is this kind of friction for people who are budget-strapped beginners expecting "free software", it drives value because the beginners who want to get serious about video production will have to invest in a computer with bigger RAM and a better graphics card early in their journey. So, this software will provide value to the people who are investing in their growth as film or video makers, and it is better to give them a full-featured but resource-demanding product than to reduce the features but make the software less capable.

[Abdulk]

I had to purchase Loom video recording for my enterprise, and had some issues with the test account. The loom team immediately sent me a loom recording on how to fix that issue. This led me to refer them to my friends' orgs as well.  Any example of friction would be that once I bought a tool, and had an issue with it in the integration phase, despite sending the customer support several emails, I still did not hear back from them. I am sure would not recommend them to anyone. 

[LBrawner]

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.   The moments that tend to stand out for me are the ones where the company I am working with genuinly seems to want to do right by the customer.  I can think of a number of examples, but a very recent one was at a restaurant.  My child has a food allergy,  and the restaurant acknowledged that they did not have many options he could have but worked with us to find something he could and made it afforable at the same time.  The restaurant did not have to go above and beyond but they chose to, which improved my experiance as the customer.
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.  We had a company sales person working door to door sales during covid times.  They insisted on coming into the house and would not take no for an answer.  It was extremely unprofessional and pushy.  This experiance created a bad interaction with the company to the point where I would not do business with them even if they had better prices etc.

[Paul-Ajose]

Let me reply to the first question:

I remember visiting a friend years ago when he got a call from a marketing agency, just checking in to see how his business was doing.

He immediately recognized the company and told the rep, “You don’t need to worry about me, because I have paid for the service of your CEO when he started this agency alone, and I’ve seen him grow this agency from a one-man team into many employees. He’s always delivered value and genuinely cared about my business.”

That conversation stuck with me because I wasn’t even the customer, yet I found myself impressed and curious about the company.

It showed me the power of genuine care, and that when customers feel valued, they naturally become advocates.

That kind of word-of-mouth marketing is priceless and often leads to the type of growth you can’t buy with ads.

[Atush_Sharma]

In my role as a Visa Filing Manager, I’ve seen firsthand how a positive customer experience creates momentum. For example, when we managed a client’s application with clear communication, accurate documentation, and timely updates, the client felt supported and stress-free. They later referred several of their friends and colleagues to us. That’s a direct example of force—a delighted customer becomes a promoter, which accelerates the business flywheel.

On the other hand, I’ve also seen how friction can slow everything down. There was a case where a client came to us after dealing with another provider who gave inconsistent information and delayed responses. Their frustration didn’t just stop them from continuing with that provider—it also spread to others in their circle, leading to negative word-of-mouth. That shows how friction in customer experience can grind the flywheel to a halt.

For me, these examples reinforce why RevOps is so important—it’s about aligning processes, data, and teams so every client gets a smooth and consistent experience that builds trust and fuels growth.

[MaciekG]

1. Returning product is a pain. This company often just tells you to keep the product. 

2. When calling customer service and they put you on hold without the option to have a call-back. 

[AStieglitz]

For me, one of the best customer experiences I’ve had was with a small outdoor gear company. I had an issue with sizing, and not only did they handle the exchange quickly, but they also followed up to make sure everything worked out. That kind of care made me recommend them to friends, and now I see their brand popping up everywhere. It felt like my positive experience turned me into part of their marketing engine.

On the flip side, I once dealt with a subscription service where billing issues kept happening and support was hard to reach. Each interaction left me more frustrated, and eventually, I canceled. I wasn’t the only one — I saw people sharing the same complaints online, which clearly slowed down their growth. It was a good reminder of how friction in the customer experience can spiral outward.

[SCorcoran5]

An example of force would be having channel teams focus on improving the conversion rates for pre-pipeline to pipeline activity and the mean time from sale to implementation/activation- this leads to topline revenue growth and post sale support cost reduction. Not focusing on these metrics/behaviors in a partner-led model results in poor customer experience/shelfware. 

[MP49]

I’ve seen how force and friction play out in real life. A great example of force was a SaaS company I worked with that followed up every support ticket with a personalized resource. Customers felt cared for and referrals spiked, which kept their flywheel spinning faster. On the flip side, I once dealt with a product where billing issues dragged on for weeks. That poor experience spread through user forums and slowed their growth — a clear case of friction grinding momentum down.

[PG0701]

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.
One of the most striking examples I’ve experienced was with a direct-to-consumer fitness brand. I had an issue with an order, and instead of routing me through endless forms and wait times, the company’s support team solved the problem within minutes, refunded the shipping cost without me asking, and followed up later to make sure I was satisfied. That effortless resolution turned what could have been a frustrating touchpoint into a moment of trust. I noticed how quickly their customer base expanded over the next year—not just through paid campaigns, but because loyal customers like me became advocates. That is the flywheel in action: exceptional customer care creating force, generating organic referrals, and reducing the acquisition cost of new customers.

Share a time when you had a poor customer experience and how you saw that type of poor care affect their business.

I once worked with a retail brand where the post-purchase experience was completely misaligned with the promise made during sales. Delays in delivery, unresponsive support, and lack of transparency left customers frustrated. Instead of amplifying growth, the customer base started voicing dissatisfaction publicly—negative reviews and word of mouth created friction that slowed their growth noticeably. What struck me was how avoidable it was: the product itself had demand, but the absence of a seamless operations and customer experience loop directly eroded revenue momentum. It was a textbook example of how friction doesn’t just stall a flywheel—it actively reverses it.

[SFrancoh]

1. My experience was through a call to purchase emergency flights. The agent understood the urgency and was actively looking for quick solutions via email, text messages, anything that could help. The guidance was reassuring at a time when I didn’t even have the presence of mind to remember my own ID.
2. With my previous internet provider, I had a contract dating back to 2012, but at some point the connection began failing constantly. Requesting support over the phone was impossible, the call would always drop right when I was about to schedule an appointment. The automated bot never offered any real support options, and at the offices, despite having a considerable number of agents, they simply couldn’t keep up. I scheduled a support visit, waited a full month, and no one ever showed up. I canceled the service, and a month after the cancellation, they called me to say I still had a support appointment scheduled.

[CNMLusitana]

1. When I first started using a scheduling link years ago, I thought that the experience was very smooth. Several people who booked time with me commented on how they really liked the process of booking a meeting with me. I ended up assisting them with setting up their own accounts!
Not sure what impact it's having, but I often make referrals to platforms that provide excellent customer service. 
2. I recall being in a long, slow-moving line for customer support at a mobile carrier store. Yet, every person who walked into the store to buy services or a phone was immediately attended by one of the many sales reps just standing around. I changed carriers and never looked back.

[OB5]

I live in a country which often had bad ideas of customer service. The introduction of Amazon and its ideas had a massive effect on the base benchmark of what was a reasonable level of service.

[chighsmith]

Hi @OB5,

That’s a great example! Amazon definitely raised the bar for customer service expectations worldwide, showing how removing friction and focusing on the customer can drive growth and push entire industries to improve.

Cassie, Community Manager

[DMay2]

The ones that stood out to me were when i was the customer. 

One of the best: My car dealer took the time to understand an issue I was having and why it was important to get it addressed. When it was time to check out, the rep went over my issue and how they fixed it and took the time to check out other things that could go wrong during my trip and address those as well. Explaining why they did the extra services (which i gladly paid for)

One of the worst was my internet (former) provider: I called with an need for more speed (who doesnt have that) 30 minutes on hold (with "sales" messages laying every 60 seconds), a live person who needed to connect me elsewhere (without questions to determine the issue) and a disconnected line, I switched.