From the authors of The Best Service Is No Service, this book gives a structured methodology for reducing 'customer effort' — the unnecessary friction customers face that generates avoidable contact — with practical examples from companies across several industries who've successfully designed friction out of their products and processes.
Contact is a symptom, not a service opportunity
Price and Jaffe's core argument, continuing directly from their earlier The Best Service Is No Service, is one most businesses find slightly insulting on first hearing: the majority of the customer contact you receive is not evidence of engagement, and it is not an opportunity to shine. It is evidence that something upstream — a confusing bill, an unclear delivery promise, a form that doesn't explain itself, a product that doesn't do what the marketing implied — forced a customer to stop what they were doing and come and find you. They didn't want to talk to you. They had to.
The consequence of getting this wrong is expensive and self-perpetuating. If every contact is treated as a service moment to be handled well, the organisation optimises for handling: more staff, better scripts, faster response times, higher satisfaction scores on calls that should never have happened. The underlying defect is never touched, because nobody in the contact centre owns the billing template or the delivery notification, and the people who do own them never see the queue. So the business permanently staffs up to manage a problem it keeps manufacturing, and calls the resulting cost "customer service".
The authors' reframe is to start every analysis with a question that sounds obvious and almost nobody asks systematically: why is this customer contacting us? Not what did we do about it, or how quickly — why did the contact exist at all. Sort a month of contacts by reason rather than by outcome and the pattern is usually stark: a small number of avoidable causes generate a large share of the volume, and most of them have a one-off design fix rather than an ongoing staffing answer.
The value-irritant matrix
The book's most practical tool is a simple two-by-two that stops the analysis being a general moan about friction. You take each reason for contact and score it twice: is it valuable or irritating to the customer, and is it valuable or irritating to the company? Four cells, four different responses — and the point of the grid is that lumping them together is what makes friction reduction fail.
Contact that irritates both sides gets eliminated at source. A customer ringing to ask where their order is, when they'd rather not have to and you'd rather they didn't, is a design failure with a design fix — a tracking link, an SMS, a clearer despatch email. Contact that irritates the customer but the company genuinely needs, such as verification or data collection, gets simplified and digitised: keep the information, remove the phone call. Contact that customers value but the company finds burdensome — routine status checks, straightforward account changes — is the natural candidate for genuine self-service, provided the self-service is good enough that people prefer it rather than being herded into it. And contact that's valuable to both — a real sales conversation, a genuinely complex problem — you should be doing more of, with the time freed up by killing the other three.
That last cell is the one that makes the book more than a cost-cutting exercise. The argument isn't that talking to customers is bad. It's that most businesses spend their entire human-contact budget on the cells that should have been designed away, and have nothing left for the conversations that would actually earn something.
The other lever they keep returning to is proactive contact — telling the customer something before they have to come and ask. It looks like adding communication rather than removing it, and it is, but the arithmetic is not close: one automated message that costs pennies removes a call that costs pounds and a customer's afternoon. The despatch notification, the we've-received-it acknowledgement, the your-price-is-changing letter sent early rather than in the week it takes effect. Nearly every where-is-my contact in any business is a proactive message that didn't get sent.
Self-service is the lever most often reached for and most often botched. The authors are clear that pushing customers into a portal, a chatbot or an FAQ that doesn't actually answer their question doesn't remove the contact — it delays it, adds a failed attempt to the customer's effort, and produces a second, angrier contact from someone who has now wasted ten minutes proving your website useless. Self-service only counts as friction removal when customers choose it because it is genuinely faster, which is a much higher bar than making it the only visible option.
Effort beats delight, reliably and unglamorously
Running underneath the whole book is the case for reducing customer effort rather than chasing customer delight. The delight instinct is powerful because it's visible: the free upgrade, the handwritten note, the recovery gesture after a failure. It gets talked about internally, it makes a good slide, and it feels like caring. The problem is that it is expensive, occasional, and often applied to fix a problem you caused — which the customer notices.
Effort reduction is the opposite in every respect. Nobody writes a case study about the invoice that didn't need explaining or the delivery that arrived when it said it would. There is no moment of delight, because a customer who never has to contact you experiences precisely nothing. Price and Jaffe's argument is that this nothing is worth more than the gesture: the customers who quietly keep buying are the ones you never made work hard, and the effort you removed compounds across every transaction rather than landing on one.
This has an awkward internal politics that the book is honest about. Friction reduction produces no hero, and it usually reduces the headcount and call volume of the department that reports it, while the fix has to be paid for by a different department that gets no credit. That structural disincentive, more than any failure of insight, is why so many organisations know exactly what's generating their contact and never fix it.
Measure the right thing, and put the fix where the cause is
The metric argument is the sharpest operational content in the book. Contact centres are traditionally measured on volume handled, average handle time and satisfaction — all of which reward processing contacts efficiently and none of which reward there being fewer of them. Price and Jaffe push instead for a ratio: contacts per order, contacts per customer, contacts per unit shipped. It's a small change with a big effect, because it makes success look like the number going down as the business grows, and it makes an avoidable contact visible as a defect rather than as work.
The second half of that argument is ownership. If the root cause of a contact sits in billing, product, logistics or marketing, then the fix has to be owned there, with the contact data routed to them and someone accountable for the number coming down. The book's case studies are mostly stories of exactly this: a business that rewrote a bill from scratch because it was generating thousands of calls, or started proactively telling people about a delay before they had to ask, or gave frontline staff the authority to resolve something in one contact instead of routing it through three teams and creating two more contacts in the process.
It's also why the authors are lukewarm on satisfaction scores as a diagnostic. A high CSAT on a call that should never have happened tells you the agent did well and tells you nothing at all about the defect that caused it; a customer can be perfectly satisfied with how they were handled and still resent having had to make the call. Root-cause reporting — this many contacts, this cause, this owner, trending this way — is unglamorous, harder to collect, and vastly more actionable.
The throughline is that this is a product and process design job wearing a customer service badge. Almost none of the real fixes are available to the service team, which is why almost none of them happen until someone senior enough to cross departmental lines decides the contact volume is a defect log rather than a workload.
Key lessons
- Most customer service contact volume is avoidable friction the business itself created, not genuine, unavoidable need for help.
- Reducing customer effort measurably improves loyalty more reliably than trying to delight customers with occasional grand gestures.
- A structured methodology for identifying and removing friction outperforms ad hoc customer service improvements.
- The goal is customers never needing to contact you for the wrong reasons, not just handling contacts more efficiently once they happen.
Most customer service volume is a symptom of friction the business built in somewhere upstream — fixing the friction at the source beats getting better at handling the complaints it generates.
What this means for a UK small business
You don't need a contact centre for this to bite. Any UK business fielding where's-my-order calls, can-you-confirm-you-got-my-email messages, or what-does-this-line-on-the-invoice-mean queries is looking at avoidable friction, not demand. Each of those has a cheap, permanent fix — a tracking link, an auto-acknowledgement, a plain-English invoice with the VAT shown the way a customer would expect — that removes the contact entirely rather than handling it faster next time.
The cheapest version of the whole methodology for a small firm: for one month, keep a tally sheet of every inbound query and why it happened. No categories, no software, just a line each time. The pattern will be obvious by week three, and it will almost certainly be three or four causes doing most of the damage. Fix those and you've bought back a day a week.
The effort-versus-delight point also cuts against a common instinct in trades and small retail, where the answer to a service problem is a discount or a gesture. A quote that's actually clear, a text when you're running twenty minutes late, and a bill that doesn't need a phone call to decode will do more for repeat business than an occasional bit of generosity, and cost a fraction of it.
What’s aged well
Recent and grounded in a substantial number of practical cross-industry examples.
What feels outdated
Nothing significant given recent publication.
Where it falls short
It's written for organisations with real contact volume and the data to analyse it — a sole trader fielding a handful of queries a month has no pattern to mine, and the formal apparatus of effort audits and contact-reason taxonomies is disproportionate well above that scale too. The tone is consultancy-dry, heavier on structured methodology than the more narrative books on this list, and the case studies lean on large, well-resourced companies whose fixes assumed budgets and systems teams a small firm doesn't have. There's also a fair amount of restatement from The Best Service Is No Service; if you've read that, expect real overlap rather than a wholly new argument.
The Business Stuff verdict
A genuinely useful operational framework for any business generating avoidable customer contact, worth the effort of implementing systematically.
Three things to actually do after reading it
- Audit your last month of customer service contacts for how many were avoidable friction versus genuine need.
- Pick the single most common avoidable contact reason and redesign the process that's causing it.
- Set a goal to reduce, not just handle more efficiently, one specific category of customer contact.
If you liked this, read next
Five similar books
- Delivering Happiness (Tony Hsieh)
- The Checklist Manifesto (Atul Gawande)
- The Goal (Eliyahu Goldratt)
- Traction (Gino Wickman)
- This Is Marketing (Seth Godin)
Common questions
Do I need to have read The Best Service Is No Service first?
No — this one stands alone and is the more developed of the two. But be aware there is real overlap. The earlier book established the core argument that most contact is a defect rather than an opportunity, and The Frictionless Organization restates it at some length before extending it with newer case studies and a broader set of levers. If you have read the first, you are buying an update rather than a new thesis, and the opening third will feel familiar. If you have read neither, start here and treat the earlier book as optional background rather than a prerequisite.
What is the very first thing to do after reading it?
Count. For one month, log every inbound query and one line on why it happened — no software, no categories, just a tally sheet by the phone. Then turn it into a ratio rather than a total. Say you take 180 queries against 600 orders: that is 0.3 contacts per order, and if 70 of those 180 were where-is-my-order, that single avoidable cause is 39% of your inbound and roughly 12 hours a month at ten minutes each. A tracking link removes most of it permanently. The ratio matters more than the total because it keeps falling as you grow.
Is this any use if I don't have a contact centre?
The formal methodology assumes volume and data, so a sole trader fielding six queries a month has nothing to mine. But the logic scales down considerably further than the apparatus does. Any business with an inbox has avoidable contact sitting in it, and the two questions that do all the real work — why did this contact happen, and where does the fix actually live — cost nothing to ask. A small firm typically finds three or four causes generating most of its interruptions, and the fixes are usually a clearer quote template, an automatic acknowledgement, and an invoice that explains itself without a phone call.
Isn't cutting contact just a way of avoiding customers?
That is the obvious objection and the book meets it directly. The argument is not that talking to customers is bad — it is that most businesses spend their entire human-contact budget on conversations nobody wanted, and have nothing left for the ones that would actually earn something. The value-irritant grid has an explicit cell for contact that is valuable to both sides, and the instruction there is to do more of it. Removing the where-is-my-order calls is what buys the time for the conversation about what the customer needs next. Done badly, by herding people into a useless chatbot, the objection is entirely fair.
