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.

[FHerrera6]

1. I think companies that have a good impact on the society or environment have a force within.

2. When I get cancelled or have to wait too much for riding apps

[MNikitchuk]

1. 24/7 support [Intercom] that instantly deals with the questions of any customer, so they share their excitement even on LinkedIn

2. Anytime a new corporate client wants to join - he needs to schedule a demo with a sales person and another onboardig person needs to set a corporate account, because the tool is self-serve built 

[TFlatt]

1. An occasion when I had an amazing customer experience was ironically off the back of a bad customer experience I was complaining about. The organisation addressed all the points in my complaint, took the time to go through each one with me and offered solutions and acknowledged areas of improvement and acted upon it.

2. An occasion where I had a poor customer experience, I enquired with a jewwllery a company for bespoke piece of jewellery with specific attributes that were not already existing on their ready to ship pieces. I gave a detailed description on their enquiry platform and was disappointed ot receive a link of an already existing piece that didn't contain the specific attribute I was looking for. It gave the impression that my enquiry was not properly read and immediately put me off trying to work with that company for the piece I wanted. 

[SPayara]

One should do all the necesitties to avoid all the bad frictions in the the process inorder avoid interruptions.

[rista]

I've had an amazing customer experience with USAA insurance. They answer the phone promptly and answer all my questions thoroughly.

I had quite the opposite experience with a different insurance company. I was on hold for 50 minutes and hung up. Tried again and was on hold 30 minutes before someone answered. Switched from them to USAA in part because of very short hold times. I don't have time for that!

[Heni1]

1. To me it's probably how slow-fashion or local brands can survive in this cut-throat fashion industry.  They don't have a product catalogs with 1000 pieces but the pieces that they carry in store are usually much better in material quality and finishing. On top of that, the customer care is calm and not to pushy as their goals aren't always returns optimization. Nonetheless, they tend to perform very well in the long-term as the values they created are more sustainable.

2. Bad experience is when you constantly have to play mind-games with sales people to get a good quote. Some encounters can be so awkward, it can turn the people away from the business.

[sarahdaily]

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.
   When I've had amazing customer experiences, the company met me right where I was at in my research and evaluation process with relevant content, at my pace. They weren't pushy, but provided contextual value right when I needed it. This set a good impression for the rest of my experience with the company. 
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.
   In poor customer experiences, companies created too many steps to get information I was looking for, when I was looking for it. I had to book a "demo",  which was in reality a BDR discovery call, which pushed me to another sales call before I could factual solution-based information and accurate pricing. 

[CBlandini]

When I had my car serviced they help take of me and gave me a free rental to show apprciation of my business. 

When I ordered out food and they gave me the wrong order and did not compensate me for it. 

[LCinelus]

for me the thing I hated the most is poor customer service and the ability to sort things out the ways it should be.They had high value when it comes to marketing the customer satisfaction is the most important things  .

[FrancoFerraro24]

No excuse returns may seem strange to some, but it has really made me faithful to REI. With that policy, I feel comfortable to buy knowing that the company is giving me the insurance of me getting a quality product; either the first try, or the second. I return 1 of 10 orders aprox. and I'm sure it makes sense to their bottom line. 

Response time is a big one for me. I understand some industries, like FF&E, have outstanding friction in sales & quoting to repel bad clients. The truth is, this makes it incredibly difficult for people that are serious about purchasing a product. I wonder if there's a way to apply "selective friction", in order to customize the flywheel depending on the type of customer. Slow down the impulse buyers, expedite the serious ones.

[JakeBoyd]

The Cake Bake Shop gives a fantastic and consistent experience. This removing of friction on the clients experience adds friction to the employees and, now the reservations. They have to book weeks in advance and for holidays, months. It's so popular that the company has grown and gotten attention from the likes of Disney. They now have a location INSIDE Disney from their humble beginnings of Indianapolis.

There's a company I worked for that has no employee or client on-boarding. I've watched they hemorrhaging money and in turn, underpaying employees and under-delivering customers.

[JessicaHead]

1. I reached out to a RevOps agency following a portal membership. They indicated upfront the revenue of companies they typically work (saving me time) with while also providing resources for companies who didn't meet their requirements, ensuring their pipeline had educational experiences at every stage of growth. 

2. I once attended a meeting in which, instead of asking questions about my needs, the salesperson presented a deck and went over the allotted time talking about how they could solve my problems, even though they weren't aware of the problems I was looking to solve. 

[RBeck2]

Part of a cmopany that grew rapidly due to prompt customer service and reliably answering customer questions to great satisfaction.

Failure: Company delayed response time in installation of products. This caused bad reviews and complaints.

[SCaniff]

One example I see alot is when marketing collects high value leads, but due to communication between marketing and sales and lack of insight and transparency of the sales process, leads fall through the cracks and don't get proper follow up from sales.

[TSavvy]

1. When dealing with a telecommunication company, I saw their business scale and grow when they added new gadgets for their business and offered discounts for their price plans on their website! As a result of this change, this company had a decent amount of support representatives with amazing customer service skills and quick response time. As a result of this customer success, the company scaled even more over a period of time.

2. Due to competition and market changes, the same company decided to upsell their price plans without discounts as well as reduce the number of support representatives in their team! As a result of this change, the business ended up downgrading their reputation in terms of customer support. The response time on the phone was delayed and the new support team were more concerned about their call metrics than providing excellent customer support! Because of the change, this business eventually lost reputation and business!

[CLobo1]

Here’s a situation that cascaded the effects of both force and friction in gaining value during our customer onboarding stage. The company in reference provides learning opportunities for senior leaders and executives. Consider this as the ‘Delight’ stage in the flywheel process.

Challenge – delays in getting schedule or commitments from team members at the customer site due to their focus or attention required on other ongoing issues.

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)

[chaitany2x]

1. Ease of product ordering and returns through major retailer. 

2. Poor customer service response leading to not having any interest in buying their products. 

[LBarbozaRey]

1. I had a good experience in the company I am currently working for. Since the first day, I realized how important is for the organization the quality of life and well-being of the employees. They constantly care about how we feel in the enterprise making a meeting every Monday to share how was our weekend showing interest in the employee and having the opportunity to share in case your facing new challenges at work. All this made the employees feel comfortable and valued in the company and motivated to do a good job for the success of the organization.

2. I had a bad experience in the company I did my internship. The organization was a mess and didn't show interest in the employee. On the contrary, they identified the opportunities to take advantage of them. THat cause a high employee turnover and bad customer service for the organization´s clients.

[Dip1]

With a site I had an amazing experience by way of their live chat function

With another site I had a poor experience by way of their email function

[omidiazcooper]

This is a simple example of friction, but I bet this company is losing a LOT of money. I just tried signing up for a gym membership online. It took four clicks to get to the page with the "Join Us" CTA. But when clicked, it took me to a form to sign up for "emails and texts" so that someone could contact me to sign up. Sheesh!

[FLlinas]

A godd example of friction are the difficulties to share what we have been working in the operation because marketing doesn't have actionable data to communicate to our prospects. Force is something that we are still working on it, because we figure out that hiring new sales people doesn't mean increase in revenue if the sales machine is not working properly.