Utility, friction and why the little things matter more than you think

The little things are the big things.

This has always been true in life and in business. You’d be hard-pressed to find a self-help book that doesn’t include a phrase or concept along these lines, and anyone who has ever bought anything (so, everyone) innately understands that this is often the difference between loyalty to a brand and looking elsewhere.

So, why are we still talking about it? Because, even as business owners and organization leaders nod in agreement and clap for the motivational speakers telling them these things, they’re often doing the exact opposite.

It’s hard to pin down exactly what’s causing this irrational urge to destroy our own experiences. Here are just a few that haven’t helped:

• Trying to make things a subscription that should absolutely be one-time purchases

• Trying to automate the most important interactions an organization has with its customers

• Trying to eke out every extra dollar from current customers while offering ludicrous deals for new business

• Trying to force AI products and features down our customers’ throats when they haven’t asked for and don’t need them, then increasing our prices to accommodate those features that no one will ever use

• Trying to make everyone download our app that provides the same services as our website with a much worse user interface and experience

If I had to choose one overarching reason, though, it would be that there’s often not a person or even team in organizations who owns experience. Individuals often own parts of it, but there’s not one single authority whose sole purpose is to stop these things from happening. 

I think of it like having a customer who sits in every meeting and is able to say, “Uh, no, that’s going to make everything harder for me. Why would I want or need that?”

If you don’t have that person, consider hiring them and actually giving them the power to stop projects and people, including you, from firing torpedoes at your own submarine. Until you do that, the simplest way to look at what you’re doing in product, service, marketing, sales and otherwise is through the lenses of utility and friction.

Utility – “Does this do something that my customer or prospect needs or wants done by a product and service like ours?”

 If you can’t immediately answer “Yes” to this question, it doesn’t matter how excited your CTO or CMO is about it, it doesn’t matter how great it works in the demo, and it doesn’t matter how much more money it’s likely to bring in per month. It’s either for the customer or it isn’t. If it isn’t, it’s a waste of your and your team’s time.

Friction – “Does this create friction for the customer or prospect anywhere in the process or how they interact with us?”

This is bar none the biggest mistake I see the most organizations and leaders making today. The company makes an internal change to make lead qualification easier for BDRs and adds a half hour and multiple new steps for people who are already trying to buy, ultimately costing the company sales. The organization fires its customer service team, making it impossible to get a hold of them, ultimately costing three times the amount of the customer service team’s salaries in lost retention dollars.

When we get bogged down in unnecessary tools, too many spreadsheets, too much data, we tend to forget why people buy and keep buying from any company. Regardless of what product or service you’re selling, it’s virtually a guarantee that someone is selling something very similar.

That means that the big things – products, offers and core pricing – are all determined by the market, making them an expectation. You obviously have to get these right, and assuming you have, then the little things are what make the difference to your customers and prospective customers. 

When these things – service, add-on pricing and value-added features, onboarding and communications – are neglected, companies lose even when their big things are superior to their competitors.

One example and one piece of advice

If this wasn’t an extremely easy trap to fall into, the tar pits wouldn’t be full of the bones of well-meaning organizations.

I think the two questions above are a great place to begin and, at the very least, a reminder to think twice using the customer lens before greenlighting something that’s going to negatively impact experience. When considering friction, I like to start by mapping out how things work today, and then cutting everything away I can to get to the simplest possible process and experience.

We tend to overthink a lot of these types of things when a simpler approach would actually be much more effective. 

I was reminded of this today when we replaced our kitchen water filter. GE, who are apparently still trying to engineer flying cars, provide water filter customers with a magnetic button that flashes orange when it’s time to replace your filter. The customer manually resets it each time the filter is replaced by pressing down on the big blue button for a few seconds.

The customer doesn’t need to download a clunky app that they’ll use once every six months (and probably get hammered with ads in the process).

They don’t need to go through a lengthy registration form that also gives the company license to send useless promotional emails multiple times a week.

They don’t get notifications creating an artificial sense of urgency and causing completely unnecessary stress about waiting a few extra days to replace a filter.

They get one blinking button that attaches to the fridge. And it just…works.

GE doesn’t have any control over which filter I buy. I could just as easily use the button for another filter. But they’ve decided that doesn’t matter. It’s more important to give me something useful, something that solves a problem and makes my life easier; hopefully I do buy from GE, but that’s not the number one goal.

Now, contrast this with the last time I bought an HP printer (finally trashed it a few weeks ago). You are forced to download a horrendous app to do even the simplest things, and the product still doesn’t work after you go through all those steps. Which brand do you think I hold in higher regard? Which will I tell people to look into when given the chance?

It sounds simple because it is. So, here’s my advice:

If you can reduce friction and increase delight by giving something useful away for free, then you should do it.

You can go through all the stages of trying to rationalize overcomplicating and introducing friction. Some of them might even end up sounding pretty good. Trust me when I say there’s not a light at the end of that tunnel.

You can say you’re “customer-centric” or “audience-centric” or you can be those things. Your customers are either shaking their ink-stained fists at your awful printer and app, or they’re smiling at your ingenious filter replacement button.

Choose which one you want to be and act accordingly.

Thank you for reading!

If you’re interested in talking through any specifics or have questions for me on applying any of this information to your work or organization, email me at dan@heliosmarketingllc.com or send me a message through my contact form.

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