Friction and Motivation: The Perspective That Should Drive Innovation

Business, all business, and even the most traditionally low-technology businesses are undergoing a radical technological innovation transformation. Baseball is no exception. My friend recently purchased a $20,000+ piece of equipment meant to capture and analyze all the data generated on a baseball field. The technology is game-changing.

As part of this purchase, he received some hardware to mount this technology inside the stadium. You can see what arrived in the picture he took.  You may also notice one thing missing. Instructions! There were no instructions on how to actually put this all together and they were never sent. Not printed, no emails, no YouTube videos, nada.

He sent an email to the company saying how intimidating this was and their response was “maybe all product instructions are intimidating.” How would you rate this as customer experience? Does this feel seamless? Friction-free?

In contrast, another similar company in the same space sends someone over to help you get their product setup and configured properly so that you can begin enjoying the product right away.

Maybe you have experienced the same with a physical or SaaS product? The potential value of the innovation seems amazing. However,  if the customer experiences friction while trying to use it, they often fail to continue using the product regularly. It is like the KonMari phenomenon,  these products fail to bring joy. The motivation to use the product becomes an issue.

Why do we buy innovative technology?

In our 2006, New York Times Bestseller Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, we wrote:

“The goal has been to remove friction from the sales process. Friction results from the customers’ experiences of cognitive dissonance, an inability to feel that the sales process alone has met their ultimate needs. The piece missing for customers is confidence—the lower the degree of confidence, the higher the friction. Smart merchants know the secret to success is not to make it easier for the seller, but to make it easier for the buyer.

The introduction of new technologies has always provided lubrication to ease the friction. Transportation technology, communication technology, and payment technology have all improved over the years. Those merchants who took advantage of the new technologies prospered. Those who pooh-poohed them were left behind...”

The experience economy, first identified by management thinkers, B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore is upon us. It signifies the final blow to the notion of mass marketing. Today, the experience of the product or service—the experience of the exchange itself—defines delight and ultimately spells success or failure for the business and the brand.

Experience is not objective. And it is your customer’s perception of the experience that you must strive to improve. The more you reduce friction in your sales process, the more you accommodate your customer’s buying process, the more confidence the customer gains, the better the customer experience.

The increased intimacy of that experience is what allows customers to ascribe a deeper connection and more value to products and services.”

There is too often a huge gap between product innovation and customer-centric innovation

Customer-centric innovation invests in planning for the customer experience not just on the technological innovation. For example, if you invest in technology to improve your supply chain it should improve the experience for the customer by having the proper inventory, delivery times, etc.

If we look at the history of customer behavior, we find three major technological areas that have impacted the way people buy. Innovations in financial technologies, transportation, and communication. The key to the adoption of innovations in those categories has been the reduction of friction in the customer experience and increasing the motivation of consumers to want to use the new technology. Greater adoption occurs when the reduction of friction benefits both the consumer and the merchant.

Innovation requires more than something innovative to get adopted

The first modern car was invented by Karl Benz in 1886. Cars became widely available in the early 20th century. However, it wasn’t until the 1908 Model T, manufactured by the Ford Motor Company that cars started to replace animal-drawn carriages and carts in the United States. But it took much longer to be accepted in Western Europe and other parts of the world. Innovation alone did not cause adoption. It was only when the friction to own and maintain a car was low enough that the motivation to replace the horse and buggy that the momentum shifted. We are witnessing this same friction/motivation continuum with electric/autonomous vehicles today.

Selling in Person to Selling on Radio to Selling on TV and Then Online

Let’s look at a communication innovation that changed the way consumer’s and retailers behave.

It’s 1977. In Clearwater, Florida, DJ Bob Circosta has a news and talk show on a local AM station. A short-on-cash advertiser asks station manager Lowell “Bud” Paxson if he can pay with merchandise. He offers 112 Rival electric can openers. In avocado green. It was the ’70s.

The can opener retailed for $9.95. Circosta would sell them on-air. Listeners could drive down to the station and pick them up. Circosta recalls his horror. He was a newsman. He had ethics, integrity. Paxson told him he’d get a dollar for every can opener sold. Circosta replied, “Boy, that’s a great looking can opener.” They sold out. Paxson quickly realized this was easier and more profitable than selling air time.

Paxson and station owner Roy Speer thought the gambit would work on TV. The Home Shopping Club launched on local cable in June 1982. Two years later, sales were $11 million. In 1985, the Home Shopping Network (HSN) was born. It changed the way we perceive television and how the television business operates.

HSN was the first network composed entirely of infomercials. A perfect marriage of TV and retail. Dr. Josh Meyrowitz, professor of communications at the University of New Hampshire, explains, “The appeal of HSN is that it has all the positives of the personal interaction, but you don’t have to worry about being in danger, or what you’re wearing, or whether you’re polite.” Paxson eliminated a friction point for consumers. Every advance in retail involves a reduction in consumer friction, from barter to stores to strip malls and mega stores, catalogs, TV shopping, and, of course, e-tail.

Morley Safer of “Sixty Minutes” asked Paxson in an interview why HSN sells so much jewelry. Response: “Because they buy it.”

Paxson understands it’s easier to give an audience what they want than try to create an audience for what you have. Obvious — but how does he know what the audience wants? Testing, scrutinizing data, optimizing schedules. HSN has limitations. It sells products sequentially. It must sell what sells best at given time slots to reduce customer friction further. Jim Novo, former HSN VP of marketing, explains, “If data showed blenders sold best from 3 pm to 4 pm, we sold blenders from 3 pm to 4 pm.”

HSN created models based on customer behavior. Selling works best when friction is reduced. Barriers to access are eliminated. When a customer needn’t get into a car or find time to go to a store, there’s less friction. Novo elaborates, “The World Wide Web is essentially a frictionless environment, or should be if people paid attention to their audience.”

What does your audience want to buy?

Find what motivates your buyers and reduce their friction and you can leverage the opportunity.

We could look at the same thing for transportation innovations like autonomous vehicles and drones or financial innovations like blockchain and mobile payment solutions provider. However, I want to focus on some of the future technologies we are already witnessing like voice assistants (Siri, Alexa, and Watson) in the communication technology space and Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications? AI has the power to impact all 3 categories.

Power of Voice

We are seeing Amazon's heavy push of their Echo devices. Other digital assistants such as Google's, Microsoft’s, IBM’s and Apple’s are all changing the playing field. The next generation of interfaces will be driven by voice and gesture. When you watch young kids interact with their devices they will often prefer to respond to messages and interact with voices and quick “snaps” than to type in messages. Typing on small screens is not frictionless. Voice or conversational UX provides opportunities to remove friction from the buying experience. I can also see how voice interfaces can help motivate your business’s staff by interacting and providing answers for customers. That would allow your people to provide more value than just repeated “stored” information.

We also need to understand that there is a prediction that the next billion people to join the internet will be less educated and prefer video and voice. We will begin to see these voice interfaces in all kinds of applications.

Even B2B companies like Staples have started creating voice-enabled “Easy” buy buttons to foster voice commerce. It’s not hard to imagine manufacturers using them on production lines.

Looking at voice technology from the framework of reducing friction and increasing motivation I believe that voice technology should be a high priority for most businesses today.

The technology is not flawless, but is certainly improving daily and will continue to see increased adoption as people and businesses realize the benefits it provides.

Artificial Intelligence seems like a Smart Choice

Artificial intelligence has the power to impact all aspects of the customer experience. We see it being used to assist in communications alongside voice technology using chatbots, particularly in the area of customer service. We see it being used to improve personalized customer experiences. There are numerous financial services using AI to prevent fraud and categorize spending. There are countless other applications for logistics and operations where AI is streamlining resources and of course, it plays a role in autonomous vehicles. We can easily see numerous ways AI is both reducing friction on all sides of the business and increasing motivation of customers and staff by improving content, offers and minimizing the time staff has to spend on tasks that the AI can perform quicker.

Use Friction and Motivation to Filter Innovation

Using friction and motivation as a way to evaluate future technology choices should help guide you to make effective customer (even employee) centric decisions. The greater the friction you reduce for most people, the greater the chance for a significant impact on your business.

If you would like to begin experimenting with removing friction with voice UX or AI, this link will give you 12k cloud credits. Or dive further into the topic with a webinar  covering leveraging open platforms, multi-cloud environments, hybrid ecosystems, embedded strategies, and other opportunities. We will also look at the new buyer of emerging technology – specifically the changing journey, psychology, and behaviors driving this change.

If you would like to brainstorm on how to decrease friction and increase the motivation of your buyers then please feel free to reach out to me.