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.
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’s aged well
Recent and grounded in a substantial number of practical cross-industry examples.
What feels outdated
Nothing significant given recent publication.
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.
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- Traction (Gino Wickman)
- This Is Marketing (Seth Godin)
