Friction and Your Bottom Line - How CS Leaders Create a Positive Impact

By Irene Lefton

FRICTION IN BUSINESS

Friction occurs naturally in most businesses. It can’t be avoided, but it can be managed to prevent negative impacts to your business, your customers, and your bottom line. Friction could be defined as resistance. In the physical realm it refers to what occurs when two things are rubbed against one another. In business, the friction occurs in interactions with customers or when performing normal business processes internally.

Friction happens when:

· There is a lack of strategy or resource alignment

· Staff and customers clash due to personal/intergenerational styles

· Global cultural differences are not addressed

· Outside factors occur - like pandemics / recessions / war

· And many other situations…

When friction occurs, the immediate response is often reactionary. In some cases, that is perfect. Friction can be healthy, for example when the sales team is pressuring the CS team to a higher standard of service, or when CS is pressuring sales to bring in customers who are a good fit. This friction shows up internally and when it gets properly resolved, it improves the business. There is also friction between companies and their customers, due to pricing, delivery issues or product deficiencies. This internal friction or lack of alignment between departments often shows up in customer interactions and creates friction with customers.

When there is friction, there is a desire to fix it quickly and move on. Positive friction will cause companies to react properly and fix the root cause issues. There is also friction that never gets solved. When solving situations of friction, especially customer centered friction, companies often turn inward to address the problem, and this “inside-out” focus can cause them to lose sight of how the same friction or issue might impact their customers.

Since friction exists, why not take the time to understand how it impacts your customers and when it is giving you important signals for your business? Whether you acknowledge it or not, friction eventually leads to a negative impact for your customers, which usually leads to low retention or limited expansion, and poor results for your bottom line.

CUSTOMER SUCCESS ROLE

For many companies, especially those that are not customer centric, CS is relegated to a single lane. CS Leaders are asked to “focus on the customers, retention, happiness, NPS, onboarding, etc.” and stay out of the other functional areas – “Let the product / sales /marketing team deal with that…”. This approach doesn’t work. Customers are actually impacted by many functional areas. They interact with your website, your sales team, your product and your operational teams, and all of these non-CS functional areas have the potential to create customer friction that the CS team eventually has to handle. Sound familiar? Unfortunately, it’s a common scenario.

As a CS Leader, you are likely empathetic, and because of that you might be in a great position to help your company navigate these situations in a way that doesn’t turn into a negative customer experience. You probably already handle customer escalations, friction among team members, and other company friction that derives from bad product/market fit or from different working styles and perspectives each and every day. You might even be known as somewhat of an expert at mitigating, a person that manages friction well. You might be called “the glue” or “the peacemaker” or “the problem solver”. Wouldn’t it be great if you could use those skills to set-up your company to understand the friction and to identify and work through the root causes? You can!

ACTIONS TO ELIMINATE FRICTION

Ask yourself – Am I spending enough time focused on identifying customer friction and calling out the impact? Am I communicating solutions and building alignment around strategy that would address the friction I see? As CS Leaders we naturally focus on our customers and that leans us towards an “outside-in” approach. We understand the friction that the customer experiences very well. We don’t always make the time to ensure that others within the company have the opportunity to understand it as well. The strongest CS leaders call it out, address it, and suggest solutions that will mitigate the friction to customers and enhance the company business plans. This is your “inside-out” responsibility. It makes your business stronger. You need to balance the time you spend outward facing with the appropriate internal focus. If you aren’t doing this today, there are some clear actions you can take to ensure that customer input, voice, and synthesized feedback is appropriately incorporated into your company’s business strategy. Once you do that, you are able to minimize or eliminate at least some of the friction that exists.

ACTION 1

First make sure that you map the Customer Journey and adapt it when things change. This is your foundation for understanding the touchpoints, interactions and friction that customers experience in working with your company. Too often, Customer Journeys are treated as “one and done” and never revisited or fully integrated into business strategy. They become an interesting set of content that eventually sits on a shelf or in a spreadsheet and isn’t actionable. It’s up to you as a CS Leader to ensure that the wisdom gained from the customer journey exercise is turned into actions and that the knowledge is applied throughout the company. It’s up to you to ensure that the journey becomes a living part of your business process so that your company remains customer centric even after the journey mapping exercise is completed. In early stage companies, this will be a very continuous process until you find your product/market fit. In later stage companies this is more of a process of adapting to changes in the market.

ACTION 2

Bring the customer voice to the company. You and your team have to facilitate this. Have your customers be the ones to explain how the friction impacts them. Too often when the CS Team is the one doing the talking, it is received as a “whining child who never stops complaining”. Schedule cross functional focus groups, where customers explain what is working and what is not working. If you are large enough, convene a customer advisory board, set them up with a topic, and let them talk amongst themselves, and sit back and listen and learn. Regularly invite sales, product and operations leaders to sit in on executive business reviews or key customer meetings or have them shadow help desk calls. If that isn’t possible, record them (with the customer’s permission of course) and make it an actionable goal for all leaders to spend some time listening. It’s up to you to help the other functional leaders understand exactly how friction is impacting the customers – in the customer’s voice.

ACTION 3

Know your boundaries. Friction is going to occur and you won’t be able to address or solve it all. Set priorities for the things that you can do given the resources that the company has. Build the business cases that tie your revenue and churn to the friction that you see with suggested solutions and actions. This is your opportunity to improve the company when constructive friction shows up due to some deficiency that can be solved. You have the potential to inform discussion across functions and solve the challenges. Sometimes friction is completely out of your control and can’t be solved. Often no one can control how businesses are impacted by external factors like pandemics or war. In those cases, identify the cause, agree that it won’t be addressed and decide how you will adapt to living with that friction or adapting the business to avoid it. It might mean a certain customer segment fails. It might mean you need to shift your business. At least you have an understanding of what to expect.

ACTION 4

It’s your job to communicate, align and promote. You have to amplify the key findings and messages to the appropriate teams across the company. Speak for the customers. Frame the challenges and share both the impacts to customers, and how proposed solutions that address the friction improves their outcomes. It’s helpful to use clear business cases. You have to “manage-up” to your senior management team and sometimes you have to allow a failure to happen as an example.

YOUR IMPACT TO THE BOTTOM LINE

It’s not easy to address friction, align on strategy and define cross functional goals. It’s even harder to get buy-in for the changes the company needs to make to eliminate the root cause of friction, or at least to limit the friction that impacts customers. There can be a lot of background noise, and conflicting priorities, especially when the friction is caused by un-aligned strategy or metrics, or by key differences in culture, styles and generational values. That’s no reason to give up. How would you handle it with a difficult customer? You would prepare, plan, communicate, and be patient in negotiating and reaching a solution. Use the same techniques with your “internal customers”. Connect the bottom-line results to the friction in the customer’s voice and be persistent.

As a CS Leader you can guide the company by balancing “outside-in” feedback with “inside-out” plans and business cases. Do it by balancing your own time and efforts between an outside / customer focus and an internal / company focus.

Interact regularly and strategically with other functions inside your company. If you are doing it right, you are doing this at the strategy level, you are the valued voice of the customer. You fully understand the impact to the bottom line, and you know how to make the business cases to help drive the company in the right direction. In addition to managing the CS team, helping customers achieve their goals, ensuring customer value is realized so that your customers adopt and expand, you pay attention to how the customer experience impacts the overall business results.

You measure and you communicate and you ensure customers are successful and happy. You hire, you build processes, you communicate and you meet your objectives. When your CS Team brings the voice of the customer to the company strategy, you ensure more than just revenue retention, customer adoption and expansion. You ensure that information gets where it needs to go across the company to minimize customer friction and contribute positively to company results.

It’s a lot of work to maintain a customer focused organization that operates on an “outside-in” basis. One key way to do this is to minimize friction with your customers while they are on the path to get value from your offerings. Pay attention to and fix the friction before it becomes bigger problems. I can promise you, it’s very rewarding. You are valued for this contribution in your company and when the friction pushes the company to improve it also improves the bottom line.