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.

[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.

[DanielaZepeda]

Una mala experiencia al cliente, fue cuando tuve un problema con una compra, donde el producto que compre no venía dentro de la caja. Al ir a atención al cliente, me comentaron que ellos no podían hacer nada por mi puesto que no sabían si yo lo había robado (parte que entiend) pero el tema aquí fue que al hacer la compra nunca me enseñaron que venía el producto y la cejra se ofreció a envolverlo en cuanto lo pague, perdí mi dinero y el producto pero lo peor perdí la confinza en la tienda.

[JoshuaP]

1. Customer experience is so important when generating revenue through new and repeat customers. An organisation I previously worked out was acquired by a larger organisation. We were merged into the Ops / Customer Success team and took their response rates to customers from 20 minutes to 5 minutes as we understand from the customer feedback that this was a large friction point. We did this through building customer centric pathways and guidebooks.
2. A friend previously worked in the marketing team of an online retailer which would advertise quick delivery times but would often not have products in stock. This meant once a product had been puchased and the delivery time missed the customer would be updated about a longer wait. This set the customer journey off on the wrong foot before the product even arrived and meant cancelled orders, returned products and unhappy customers leading to them not returning.

[CBoersma]

I have seen an effort to reduce friction cause negative impacts to a sales process. I worked at a company where the sign up flow did not account for potential duplicative accounts being created and just allowed anyone to create new accounts without confirming if there was a duplicative account. This created a lot of wasteful efforts from sales teams trying to engage existing customers instead of new business. This also required manual efforts from each person that received a duplicative account to merge the accounts which also wasted selling time

[TAllerby]

Good CX

I asked a Live Chat function to explain the difference in price and value between two products. They pointed out the differences (not listed on the website), but also then made recommendations for products, based on different things that might be important to me.  I ended up buying one of the recommendations!

Bad CX

I recently checked out an online shopping fashion site. Only after the order had processed did it show that not all the items in my cart had been included in the order. I contacted customer service by Live Chat asking them to add the remaining items to the order (as to order them separately would have incurred an additional delivery charge). They couldn't do it, refused to offer free shipping for the items that had not been captured in the checkout process, and in the end offered a measly 50cents (in 'customer points') to use on a future purpose.  I was so unimpressed!

[cmarano]

1. Hockeystack removes friction from getting started with their product by creating reports and dashboards for the customers and turning brand new customers into champions of the brand. 

2. Making prospects who have used your customer previously go through the same long sales process as any other prospect. 

[WSmith88]

Good customer experience:

Ordered item from an online retailer and it arrived in a broken box, presumably through poor delivery method, and I reached out to the retailer and received quick reply, informing me I could return the item free of charge and receive a replacement next day delivery. 

Poor customer experience:

Ordered food via app, food arrived and they had forgotten our drinks. I called them and they told us that our drinks were included despite us not receiving them, they did not offer to compensate or refund the items and we decided to not use them for takeaways again.

[JD11]

Amazing Customer Experience and Business Growth:

"I purchased a laptop from a tech company some time ago. Shortly after the purchase, I encountered a minor issue with the device. When I reached out to their customer support, they responded promptly and with a genuine desire to help. The support agent not only resolved the issue but also provided additional tips for optimizing my laptop's performance. Impressed by this service, I shared my experience on social media (tagging the company on Instagram), praising the company's commitment to customer satisfaction. I believe some of my friends, as well as their connections, decided to try the company's products based on my recommendation. This fact should have contributed to the company's reputation, leading to increased sales and improved business performance."

Poor Customer Experience and its Impact:

Some time ago, I ordered a home appliance from an electronics retailer. Unfortunately, the product arrived damaged, and when I contacted customer support, the response was slow and unapologetic. The replacement process was cumbersome, involving multiple follow-ups and delays. Frustrated by the poor service, I shared such an experience with friends and family. As a result, I strongly believe that the company must have lost potential customers who were considering making purchases. Such poor customer experiences can act as significant friction in business growth.

[Susan11]

The marketing team is driving a high volume of leads, but due to poor communication or alignment with the sales team, many of these leads are not properly followed up on or converted into sales.

[JMuñozCorrea]

Perfect Balance Between Force and Friction

I looked up the insurance company's number to speak with an advisor about activating unemployment insurance. The communication was straightforward (FORCE). They explained the process to me and mentioned that from now on, all interactions would be through WhatsApp, and I couldn't proceed over the phone (FRICTION). Messaging on WhatsApp made it easy to attach documents and monitor the status of my request.

I saved on follow-up calls, signing papers, and sending emails. This is an example of how to use force and friction to benefit customer service. I'll certainly be recommending their services.

[uma_s_91]

Great customer experience: 
I have been working out with a Gym for the past 3 years. One day, I had not slept well and yet I woke up early in the morning to show up. I was very tired and I did not have the energy to follow the workout plan. One of the instructors asked me to go home and get some sleep so that I'd be able to get through the day. This happened a few more times and I got annoyed because I felt bad to go all the way back without getting my workout done. I started making it a point ot sleep properly so that I can get a good 1 hour workout. In the next 3 months, this started becoming a habit and my performance improved gradually. As a customer, I was happy ultimately. 

While typing this I am not sure whether this was a Force or a Friction. The instructor being well aware of the client's state is a Force and asking the client to go back is a Friction. Would love to know more thoughts here 🙂 

Poor customer experience: 
I ordered food from a restaurant recently and I had forgotten to specify the dietary constraints that my friend has. I called up in the next 5 mins and the phone line was busy. I had to wait for 5 more minutes and make another call. When the call was picked up I apologised for missing to mention the specifications and asked if it is possible to customise. Instead of addressing my concerns directly, he said they can only take customisation requests if it was placed within the next 5 minutes from the time of order and I had called up only after 10 minutes. I tried to explain that the line was busy and then he started going through the call logs and said I had only called them 6 mins later and not 5 minutes. A simple explanation saying that the chef has started preparing would have saved a lot of time and energy for both of us.