Friction, Dissonance, and Separation, the three cardinal sins of Customer Experience
Of the multitude of sins that can send us to marketing hell, few are worse than that three cardinal sins of customer experience: friction, dissonance, and separation. They disrupt the experience, deviate the journey, and can kill the engagement. Even worse, they are very easy to commit.
Friction happens when the product/service suffers from instances of difficulty, moments when the customer is forced to make an effort in order to get it to work or to use it. Dissonance is a lack of harmony between the customer’s expectations and the customer experience, a contrast that slaps the customer on the face. Separation is the lack of a unified customer experience, when physical and digital experiences are disjointed and have no rapport.
Instances of difficulty, the cause of customer experience friction, happen for a variety of reasons, for example, poorly designed packaging, a screw that wears out, a call that takes too long to get through, poor usability on an application, or bugs that cause crashes. The gravity of the moment of friction depends on how much effort the customers are required to make in order to overcome the difficulty. It also depends on whether the customer engagement systems have in-built fail-safes that the customers can call upon to aid them. Typically, friction interrupts the user when s/he is in the middle of using the product or service, but it can happen at any time and point of the customer experience.
Instances of difficulty can be the product of carelessness, of cutting corners, of taking too many risks, or of being too liberal when assuming how much tolerance the customers have but generally they are just honest mistakes. Nothing is perfect and friction is a consequence of that. Friction is part of what we marketers need to be aware of and work hard to reduce — if possible to eliminate.
Here is where the opportunity with friction lies: its elimination. Every moment of friction is a moment of truth which means that it has the potential to become a moment of delight. Each instance of difficulty that gets resolved results in an immediate increase in the quality of the product or service which means a better experience — with all the beneficial long term effects that implies.
Dissonance is a problem of marketing performance and consistency. It happens as the customer flows from one moment of truth to another, when the last experience in the sequence is off-par enough that it generates a contrast with the preceding moments. It does not even have to be a bad moment in the experience, just underperforming enough to be felt as contrasting with the previous experiences or with the expectations the customer has. Dissonance is insidious.
The only way of avoiding harmful dissonance is to deliver a consistently good customer experience, at every step, all similarly good. This requires having not only services and products that meet or exceed expectations but also a well organised and high performing layer of service and support wrapped around it.
The first goal of this layer is to ensure the service quality and consistency of the experience that is being delivered. The second goal is to be a failsafe, to be there to soothe and repair when the customer meets friction and feels dissonance. The third goal is to feedback to the rest of the organisation all instances of dissonance and to push for their elimination.
Dissonance is an operational marketing performance problem. Fortunately, it can be solved when an organisation makes service quality and experience consistency one of its long term objectives.
Separation is harder to overcome because it is a structural problem. It is set in the digital infrastructure and in the organisation of the marketing operations. It happens when the digital engagement objects and systems are built and operated under the assumption that: (a) customers in a digital journey will stay on it and travel down a prescribed digital funnel or (b) customers limit themselves to mostly experiencing the product/service digitally. We now know that customers define their own journeys and experiences as they go, moving to and fro between digital and physical points of engagement at their whim and convenience.
Therefore, the infrastructure (objects, services, activities, systems) for marketing and the way the marketing operations are organised must allow for customers to move, seamlessly, between physical and digital moments of engagement.
Furthermore, customers who move from one moment to another one across this physical-digital boundary expect the same level of quality and performance they experienced in the preceding moments (all of their previous experiences with the brand). In order to achieve this, the marketing system must be able to transfer information between physical and digital moments (or events, or activities), something that can be quite an operational challenge. Only by having this ability can the level of quality and the performance be preserved along the customer experience. This transference of timely information, while necessary, is not sufficient.
Additionally, crossing the boundary creates new opportunities for friction and dissonance to occur. Therefore, the marketing organisation has to be proactive in mapping the customer experience in order to define, design, and deliver a unified customer experience, resilient to friction and dissonance at the boundary.
Customers do not differentiate whether they interact with a firm online or offline. Their point-of-view is that they are interacting with the firm. However, wherever, whenever, they choose to interact with the firm, their expectations must be met or exceeded. That is the level at which the benchmark stands and the reason why all customer experiences must become unified.
To meet the purpose of engaging with customers, the boundary between physical and digital, off-line and online, must be eliminated. A great experience is one that is so seamless and so well-flowing that it feels as an uninterrupted pleasant conversation.
Friction, dissonance, and separation, left unmanaged, will hurt your brands and your firm. They are problems that have to do with the performance of the marketing organisation and with the unification of the customer experiences. The best time to address these issues is now.
Convergnce can help your firm to start looking into the performance and the unification of its marketing. Our Acceleration practice focuses on improving the performance and the operational agility in a marketing organisation. Our Unification practice focuses on breaking the silos and barriers that get in the way of a consistent customer experience across physical and digital touchpoints.
