For thousands of years, innovation has hinged on simplicity. The KISS acronym (Keep It Simple, Stupid) created by the US Navy in the 1960’s states that the simplest solutions are often the best. However, this concept did not originate in the 60’s. Occam’s razor, dating back to the 13th century, predicts that when choosing between solutions, the solution with fewer assumptions is most likely correct.
Today, product managers are often overheard talking about the creation of frictionless solutions. In fact, the reduction of friction between a product or service and a consumer of that solution is a solid indicator of future success. Let’s explore a few examples together.
Amazon and One-Click Checkouts
In 1999, the US Patent Office issued a patent to Amazon for one-click checkouts for goods or services. This caused an immediate uproar across the Internet. Further examination of this patent narrowed it to online e-commerce sites, and in much of Europe the patent was rejected. Why the uproar? Why the pushback? Because single-click checkouts are the ultimate form of frictionless shopping. The consumer finds a good they like with a single click, they select it for their shopping cart, and complete the purchase. The underlying technology around single-click shopping is trivial. Just store the customer’s credit card and shipping information ahead of time and display a “1-click” checkout button at the time of purchase. Simple, but very effective.
The reduction of friction in transactions and services is not limited to e-commerce, and it is not just about the simplification of a solution. Steven Sinofsky writes in the Learning By Shipping blog that simple solutions may actually be high friction:
“A design can be minimal but still have a great deal of friction. The Linux command line interface is a great example of minimal design with high friction. You can do everything through a single prompt, as long as you know what to type and when. The minimalism is wonderful, but the ability to get going comes with high friction. The Unix philosophy of small cooperating tools is wonderfully minimal (every tool does a small number of things and does them well), but the learning and skills required are high friction.
Furthermore, the reduction of friction applies to both online and offline transactions and is not always obvious.
Removing Friction Is Disruptive in Different Ways
Starbucks, for example, succeeded because they reduced the friction of a transaction, yet one could argue that the Starbucks experience of ordering a “tall no-fat one pump vanilla latte” is far from simple. Still, the Starbucks experience worked because at one point ordering an espresso-based drink involved an even more complex transaction. In 1971, making an espresso-based drink at home was both expensive and complex. Fast food restaurants rarely offered espresso-based drinks and they we extremely expensive in high-end restaurants. Starbucks brought espresso to the masses and, on a relative scale, the Starbucks experience has reduced friction.
The reduction of friction is also disruptive to device-centered marketplaces. The Apple iPhone was far from the first smartphone, and PDAs existed for many years. I used a Psion Series 5 pocket computer in 1997.
While this PDA was innovative, it was high-friction. It was not a phone, and it basically functioned as a very small laptop computer. Exchanging information with other devices required connecting it via a cable.
Then in 2007, ten years later, Apple introduced the iPhone. How did the iPhone reduce friction? I believe the killer feature on the iPhone was a web browser that properly rendered traditional web sites. Sure, the screen was small, but as long as the site did not include Flash, it worked. In conjunction with a user interface that was obvious to a young child—big icons, clear text—and the basic applications for email, calendar, and address book that made sense to have in your pocket, the iPhone’s reduction of smartphone friction resulted in a revolution. 
What does it all mean? If you reduce friction in a product or service category, you have an opportunity to create a new market. So what’s next? I believe the telephone industry is ripe for an application of oil that reduces the friction required to communicate via voice with customers.
Frictionless Customer Conversations
For many years “experts” have recommended that businesses move transactions out of call centers and toward self-service and e-commerce solutions. However the data demonstrates that consumers are revolting. They are searching for products and services on their smartphones and then instead of filling in complex contact forms, they are clicking on phone numbers and placing calls. Research firm BIA/Kelsey estimates that mobile search in the US alone will generate 73 billion calls to businesses in 2018, up from 30 billion in 2013. In mobile, calls are the new clicks.
Unfortunately, many businesses are unprepared to handle an increase in call volume like the one BIA/Kelsey predicts. The idea of replacing their PBX, moving to a cloud-based PBX, or licensing call center software is daunting. There must be a better way.
There is, but it requires a bit of a paradigm shift: separate your phone system from your voice-based customer engagements. By thinking of voice and phones as separate applications we are able to leave a company’s existing phone system in place and provide the added value applications over the top of their telephone solution. There is no reason that call tracking, FindMe applications, IVR solutions, contextual routing, and full call center capabilities cannot be delivered to existing phones.
The key to over-the-top voice solutions that work with existing infrastructure is to further disaggregate telephone technologies. Instead of thinking of a phone call as a connection between two devices, think of it as a voice connection between a caller and an application and then a second connection between an application and a recipient of the call. From a slightly different perspective, instead of publishing phone numbers associated with an in-house or cloud based PBX, a company publishes a “virtual” phone number provided as part of a suite of “frictionless voice” applications. After accepting the call, while the originator of the call hears a ring provided by the application, the “frictionless voice” suite dials the intended recipient and “bridges” or “conferences” the call. It sounds complicated, but it’s not. The technology behind it is easy and from the point of view of the originator and the recipient of the call, it feels like a traditional phone call.
How does this reduce friction? Since the “frictionless voice suite” is in fact in the middle of every call, it is able to add advanced capabilities to the voice experience. The calls can be tracked back to marketing sources, recorded, transcribed, redirected, enhanced with an IVR, or managed with call center capabilities.
Before you panic about the idea of supporting customer calls, you should reach out to a “frictionless voice suite” provider such as DialogTech and enhance your voice-based customer engagement without bringing in a forklift to replace your phone switch. If you are a new business, consider rejecting completely the idea of ever buying a PBX: just pay for your employees’ mobile devices and use a “frictionless voice solution” to provide a unified presence to your customers.
By separating voice from phones, DialogTech is reducing the friction associated with voice solutions and powering tens of millions of customer engagements a month. It may be disruptive, but the future is here and we’re meeting it head-on.
