Tag Archives: friction

Your Digital Transformation Starting Point

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by Braden Kelley

Welcome, innovators and change-makers! In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, the concept of digital transformation isn’t just a buzzword; it’s a strategic imperative for survival and growth. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I’ve dedicated my work to helping organizations navigate these complex shifts successfully. This article offers a preview of the Human-Centered Change™ methodology, a visual and collaborative approach designed to get everyone literally all on the same page for change. It’s introduced in my latest book Charting Change – now in its second edition!

The world is moving faster than ever, and the pace of technological advancement demands that companies adapt or risk becoming obsolete. Consider the fate of Blockbuster, a titan in its industry that ultimately succumbed to the digital revolution. This serves as a stark reminder: to defend your company’s very existence, you must start thinking like a technology company or go out of business. This isn’t just about adopting new tools; it’s about fundamentally re-imagining how you structure and operate your business.

The Essence of Human-Centered Change™

Charting Change introduces a unique Human-Centered Change™ methodology. This approach isn’t about imposing change from the top down; it’s about empowering people within your organization to understand, embrace, and drive the transformation process. It’s about fostering a shared understanding and a collaborative spirit, ensuring that everyone is aligned on the vision and the path forward. This flipbook provides a flavor of what you’ll find in the comprehensive Charting Change book and the more than 70 tools and frameworks that constitute the Human-Centered Change™ methodology.

To succeed in this digital age, you must critically examine your business and your industry through the eyes of a digital native startup – one that seeks to disrupt and capture market share. This perspective is crucial for identifying opportunities and threats that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Digital Transformation Starter Download

Five Foundational Questions for Digital Transformation

To make this challenging yet vital self-assessment easier, I propose five foundational questions that can guide your digital transformation journey. These questions are designed to provoke deep thought and reveal areas where innovation and change are most needed.

1. Redesigning Your Business from Scratch:

“If I were to build this business today, given everything that I know about the industry and its customers and the advances in people, process, technology, and tools, how would I design it?” This question encourages you to shed preconceived notions and imagine a greenfield approach. What would a truly optimized and digitally-native version of your business look like? This thought experiment can unlock radical new ideas and solutions.

2. Uncovering Customer Value:

“From the customers’ perspective, where does the value come from?” Understanding value through the customer’s lens is paramount. Often, what we perceive as valuable internally may not align with what truly matters to our customers. By focusing on their perspective, you can identify areas for significant improvement and innovation that directly impact satisfaction and loyalty.

3. Maximizing Value, Minimizing Waste:

“What structure and systems would deliver the maximum value with the minimum waste?” This question pushes you to consider efficiency and effectiveness. Digital transformation isn’t just about adding new technology; it’s about optimizing processes and systems to deliver greater value with less overhead. Think lean, agile, and customer-centric in your structural design.

4. Overcoming Barriers and Obstacles:

“What are the barriers to adoption and the obstacles to delight for my product(s) and/or service(s) and how will my design help potential customers overcome them?” Even the most innovative products and services can fail if they face significant friction in adoption or if they don’t truly delight the user. Identifying these hurdles early allows you to design solutions that proactively address them, ensuring a smoother and more positive customer experience.

5. Eliminating Friction:

“Where is the friction in my business that the latest usage methods of people, process, technology, and tools can help eliminate?” Friction can exist anywhere – in internal workflows, customer interactions, or supply chains. The power of digital transformation lies in its ability to smooth out these rough edges, creating seamless experiences for both employees and customers. Pinpointing these areas of friction is the first step towards a more efficient and effective operation.

Embark on Your Transformation Journey

These five questions are your starting point, a catalyst for deeper investigation and strategic planning. They are designed to ignite the conversations and insights necessary for successful digital and business transformations. The Human-Centered Change™ methodology, with its rich collection of tools and frameworks, provides the structured approach and practical guidance you need to answer these questions comprehensively and to make change stick within your organization.

I invite you to delve deeper into the Human-Centered Change™ methodology. Charting Change is more than just a book; it’s a visual toolkit that empowers you and your team to collaboratively map out your change journey, overcome obstacles, and ultimately, succeed in the digital age.

For more information about the book and to explore the extensive collection of tools and frameworks:


Accelerate your change and transformation success
Content Authenticity Statement: The ideas are those of Braden Kelley, shaped into an article introducing the flipbook with a little help from Google Gemini.

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The Two Main Opponents of Digital Success

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The Two Main Opponents of Digital Success

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

I have written before about the importance of the role that emotion plays in driving your customer’s or audience’s behavior in digital channels.

When creating digital touch points, it is natural to focus on the capabilities and content that we believe customers will want, need, and hopefully love. This is essential as your digital touchpoint must have a strong core value proposition to the visitor in order to be viable.

However, it’s important to be aware of a psychological factor called Negativity Bias. What Negativity Bias says is basically that our negative emotions are more powerful in our psyche than our positive emotions. We might be excited about going on vacation, but if we are worried it might rain, those negative feelings can outweigh the positive ones.

At FROM we spend a lot of time testing websites, mobile apps and other digital experiences with real end-users and we get to observe their emotional reactions first-hand. After watching hundreds of these tests, I would have to say that our research confirms this idea of negativity bias. Simply put, no matter how promising or worthwhile a site is when it starts to trigger negative reactions in users, they usually abandon it quickly, no matter how initially interested they may have been. Note there is an exception to this rule which we call the Bruce Springsteen Rule – perhaps showing our age. For many years the TicketMaster site was quite terrible and yet when the moment came that a new Bruce Springsteen concert opened up for sale, tens of thousands of people would flock to the site and frankly just suffer through the purchase experience in order to get those tickets. So if your site experience is the digital equivalent of a Bruce Springsteen ticket (Millennials, please substitute Justin Bieber), then you may have found a way to neutralize negativity bias. Otherwise, read on.

So what are these negative reactions we get from users? There are a variety of possibilities, but there are two primary emotional villains that lead the pack: confusion and frustration.

Confusion is usually the first emotion we see. A user begins perhaps looking for a product or researching a topic, but he/she doesn’t fully understand the interface, the results they are getting or the labeling or language used. They start to feel confused. Confusion is a harmful emotion because it tends to make people feel that they are at fault. They are perhaps too stupid to figure out how to use the site or app. You might think,” Well that’s better than them blaming us!” but in fact, it’s not. They say the best thing you can do to have a great first date with someone is to leave them feeling great about themselves, and so it goes with digital experiences. If a user feels they aren’t smart enough to figure out your site or app, they may not blame you, but they leave nevertheless, so the outcome is basically the same.

And by the way they may in fact subconsciously blame you for making them feel dumb.

So how to avoid confusion? Study users’ paths through the site via task analysis, as we do here at FROM. Anytime we test a site, even a very successful one, we always find many points of confusion. It’s a matter of basic hygiene: sites are constantly changing, and it’s hard to make sure that every tweak is totally clear to everyone. Doing quarterly or at least annual user tests to make sure you are aware of any confusion “bombs” that may have been planted on your site is just good business. Furthermore, confusion-related problems are often inexpensive to fix. Sometimes it’s simply about rewording a button or moving a call to action. Sometimes it’s about just removing a feature that’s causing more confusion than benefit.

The second emotional villain is frustration. When you are frustrated you aren’t feeling at all confused — generally, you know exactly what the site is supposed to do; it just isn’t doing it! Frustration can be triggered by site defects, slow performance, check out process that are more steps than the user feels they “should be,” policies that don’t give the user the outcome they want, or missing features that the user perceives “everybody else has” which may actually just mean that Uber and Amazon have them. It’s quite easy to frustrate users today as their expectations are so incredibly high. Creating frustration in digital users is super-damaging to your brand because many users create a meaning around the frustration which is that the brand just doesn’t care. Users believe that brands should know what they expect and that if they aren’t providing it, there can be only reason: they just aren’t bothering. This, of course, may be a completely erroneous conclusion… in our experience very often clients don’t realize the points in their customer experience that are creating frustration until we conduct the user tests that reveal these problems.

Frustration problems are often easy to fix, but sometimes they can be very challenging because they may stem from underlying technology issues that are expensive to remediate. Nevertheless, it’s essential to understand where these problems exist and gauge the impact they are having on your business results, so that you can make an informed decision about whether or when to invest in addressing them.

In our experience, sites that offer something of value and manage to avoid creating confusion or frustration for their visitors are winners. The first step to getting there is a user-research focused assessment so that you can face the reality of the emotional reactions you are creating. Once that is understood, a roadmap to improvement can be developed and results measured along the way.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: Pixabay

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Five Keys to Personalizing the Customer Experience

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Five Keys to Personalizing the Customer Experience

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Earlier this year, we surveyed more than 1,000 consumers in the U.S. for our 2024 State of Customer Service and Customer Experience (CX) Study. We asked about the importance of a personalized experience. We found that 81% of customers prefer companies that offer a personalized experience, and 70% say a personalized experience in which the employee knows who they are and their history with the company (past purchases, buying patterns, support calls and more) is important. They also want the experience to go beyond people and include the platforms where they prefer to do business.

For a recent episode of Amazing Business Radio, I talked with Elizabeth Tobey, head of Marketing, Digital & AI of NICE, which helps companies apply AI to manage customer experience. The focus of the discussion was personalization. Here are some of the highlights from the interview:

1. Channel of Choice: This is where the modern-day concept of personalization begins. Tobey said, “In a world where people carry computers in their pockets (also known as mobile phones), it’s important to meet your customers when and where they want to be met.” Customers used to have two main choices when communicating with a brand. They could either walk into a store or call on the phone. Today, there are multiple channels and platforms. They can still visit in person or call, but they can also go to a website with self-service options, visit a social channel like Facebook, conduct business using an app, communicate with a brand’s chatbot and more. Customers want convenience, and part of that is being able to connect with a brand the way they want to connect. Some companies and brands do that better than others. The ones that get it right have educated customers on what they should expect, in effect raising the bar for all others who haven’t yet recognized the importance of communication.

2. Communicate on the Customer’s Terms: Tobey shared a frustrating personal experience that illustrated how some customers like to communicate but a brand falls short. Tobey was getting home late from an event. She contacted a company through its support channel on its website and was communicating with a customer support agent via chat. It was late, and she said, “I have to go to sleep,” expecting she could continue the chat the next morning with another agent. But, when she went to resume the conversation, she was forced to restart the process. She logged back into the website and repeated the authentication process, which was expected, but what she didn’t expect was having to start over with a new agent, repeating her conversation from the beginning as if she had never called before. Tobey made a case for technology that allows for asynchronous conversations on the customer’s timeline, eliminating the need for “over-authentication” and forcing the customer to start over, wasting time and creating an experience marred with friction.

3. Eliminate Friction: How could an interview with an executive at a technology company like NICE not bring up the topic of AI? In the story Tobey told about having to start over with a new agent, going through the authentication process again and repeating her issue, there is a clear message, which is to eliminate unnecessary steps. I shared an experience about visiting a doctor’s office where I had to fill out numerous forms with repeat information: name, address, date of birth, etc. Why should any patient have to fill in the same information more than once? The answer to the question, according to Tobey, is AI. She says, “Take all data that’s coming in from a customer journey and feed it into our AI so that the engine is continuously learning, growing and getting smarter. That means for every customer interaction, the automation and self-service can evolve.” In other words, once AI has the customer’s information, it should be used appropriately to eliminate needless steps (also known as friction) to give the customer the easiest and most convenient experience.

4. It’s Not Just About the Customer: In addition to AI supporting the customer’s self-service and automated experience, any data that is picked up in the customer’s journey can be fed to customer support agents, supervisors and CX leaders, changing how they work and making them more agile with the ability to make decisions faster. Agents get information about the customer, enabling them to provide the personalized experience customers desire. Tobey says, “Agents get a co-pilot or collaborator who listens to every interaction, offers them the best information they need and gives them suggestions.” For supervisors and CX leaders, they get information that makes them more agile and helps them make decisions faster.

5. Knowledge Management: To wrap up our interview, Tobey said, “AI management is knowledge management. Your AI is only as good as your data and knowledge. If you put garbage in, you might get garbage out.” AI should constantly learn and communicate the best information and data, allowing customers, agents and CX leaders to access the right information quickly and create a better and more efficient experience for all.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com

Image Credits: Unsplash

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Are You Giving Your Customers Friction or Function?

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Former VP Of Amazon Preaches a Frictionless Experience

Are You Giving Your Customers Friction or Function?

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Customers hate friction. They want easy, no hassle, low/no effort experiences. In short, they want convenience. Our 2022 customer experience research findings confirm:

  • 70% of customers would pay more if they knew they would receive a convenient experience.

  • 75% would switch to a competitor if they found it more convenient to do business with.

  • 68% of customers say that a convenient customer experience alone will make them come back to a brand or company.

Examples of friction include long wait times, difficulty finding contact information on a website, too many steps to make a purchase online and more. Frictionless is almost not noticed—until it is. At some point, customers realize how easy it is to do business with a company, and they like it. In fact, they like it so much, as the findings show, they will pay more and keep coming back.

There have been several books that focus on creating a frictionless, convenient experience. The first was The Effortless Experience by Matt Dixon, Nick Toman and Rick Delisi, which focused on the customer support experience. Then along came my book The Convenience Revolution, which included the entire customer experience, not just customer support. This was followed by a few more excellent contributions to the subject, the most recent being The Frictionless Organization by Bill Price and David Jaffe.

Bill Price was Amazon’s first global vice-president of customer service. When Jeff Bezos interviewed Price for the job in 1999, he asked Price what his philosophy was for running customer service. Price responded, “The best service is no service,” which became the title of his first book. Price believes that the best customer experience is to have everything set up so well that they don’t need to contact customer support.

Of course, that would be perfection, and perfection is not reality. Amazon may have perfectly executed on its side, but once the package leaves the Amazon warehouse, UPS, USPS, FedEx and other delivery companies take over. If they lose a package, who will the customer call? Amazon, of course. Even if it wasn’t Amazon’s fault, they still received the call and, of course, took ownership of the problem.

Price knows that a frictionless experience often goes unnoticed by the customer until they realize why they like doing business with that company or brand. But it does get noticed by the company providing the experience. It shows up in the form of higher customer satisfaction scores such as NPS (Net Promoter Score). Repeat business and loyalty also go up.

In their book, Price and Jaffe share several reasons why every business should be frictionless:

  • Being Frictionless Reduces Cost – There is a cost to setting up a process that’s easy for customers (and employees), but the ROI far exceeds the investment. When a company is easy to do business with, it doesn’t get nearly as many customer support calls, which can be a huge drain on the customer service budget. There are fewer returns and refunds. Websites are more effective. And more.

  • Being Frictionless Drives Customer and Revenue Growth – Price’s experience with Amazon proves that a high customer satisfaction score translates into more business. Amazon has some of the highest ratings in the business world, and its growth proves this model works.

  • Being Frictionless Delivers a True Competitive Advantage – The stats at the beginning of this article prove that point. No/low friction and convenience can help bulletproof a company from the competition.

  • Being Frictionless Enables Business Survival – The past several years have tested the best business leaders. Survival during the pandemic, through supply-chain issues, and now a recession proves that the best companies can survive with the right strategies. A frictionless experience is more important than ever.

When I interviewed Price on Amazing Business Radio, he made the perfect closing comments for this article. “It doesn’t matter what kind of business you have. What matters is that customers just want things to be easy for them. And if you don’t make it really simple and easy for customers, someone else will.”

This article originally appeared on Forbes

Image Credit: Pixabay

Check out my latest research in his Achieving Customer Amazement Study, Sponsored by Amazon Web Services, Inc.

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