Building the “Frictionless” Organization:

An Interview with Bill Price

Bill Price is a longtime friend and industry colleague in the customer service space. Bill was Amazon’s first global vice president of customer service and is the founder and president of the consulting firm Driva Solutions. He and David Jaffe authored The Best Service Is No Service, Your Customer Rules! and, most recently, The Frictionless Organization.

Bill and David believe that customer contacts provide valuable insight into where organizations can reduce friction through better processes, services, and products—a view I’ve long shared. In The Frictionless Organization, they contend that “very few organizations effectively measure the reasons customers are forced to contact them for help. Fewer of them have data on how well these contacts are resolved, and fewer still have analyzed the causes of those contacts and who in the organization is responsible for fixing the problems.”

Here's the dialog Bill and I had on this opportunity. (Note: the conversation appears as is, and if some of the terms or abbreviations are unfamiliar, you’ll find contact center and customer experience glossaries here.)

In The Frictionless Organization, you write that becoming frictionless is "a strategic imperative." How do you define frictionless, and why is it so important?

We define friction as unnecessary contacts that customers have to make and, more broadly, anything that interrupts customers’ lives by introducing confusion or the stuff that doesn't work.

My co-author and I interviewed more than a dozen companies recognized for delivering excellent customer experiences around the world and then conducted secondary research into many more organizations that are striving to become frictionless. Among these organizations are Airbnb, Amazon, Apple, Australian Tax Office, Blizzard Entertainment, CableOne, E.ON, N26, Nike, RedHat, T-Mobile, Tesla, Trek Bikes, Uber, United Airlines, USAA, Vodafone, Xero, and Zoom. What we discovered was their customers are increasingly expressing their frustration when they encounter friction, including taking their business elsewhere, and that removing friction creates these great customer experiences...Read more