Why Friction Sells: The Science of Counterintuitive CX

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Live Webinar // Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025 // 1:00 PM CDT

While most organizations obsess over removing friction and perfecting personalization, industry leaders are quietly implementing the opposite strategy—and seeing exponential results.

Join SHIFT and Optimizely for this 45-minute webinar to uncover how organizations need to change their approach from traditional UX ‘best practices’ to counterintuitive CX. 

What You'll Discover

The Great CX Deception: Why 70% of A/B tests fail and how Netflix’s $15 billion algorithm mistake proves that engagement metrics can destroy customer satisfaction. Learn why companies following industry best practices are optimizing themselves into mediocrity.

Four Counterintuitive Principles That Drive Revenue:

Strategic Friction Design: How the IKEA Effect and Pain of Payment research prove customers value what requires effort

Contextual Relevance Over Personalization: Why privacy-first contextual strategies outperform tracking-based personalization by 2-4x

Customer Capability vs. Convenience: How building customer expertise creates 89% higher lifetime value and switching costs competitors can’t match

Technology Implementation: Optimizely’s Marten Bokedal demonstrates how their platform’s contextual bandits, warehouse-native analytics, and AI-powered agents enable each contrarian principle—from testing strategic friction levels to measuring customer capability growth over time.

Who Should Attend

Senior leaders in customer experience, digital marketing, product management, and technology at enterprise organizations ready to move beyond incremental optimization toward breakthrough competitive differentiation.

Key Takeaways

  • Frameworks for implementing profitable friction strategies
  • Measurement models that track customer capability, not just satisfaction

Exclusive Offer: Attendees receive a complimentary CX SpotCheck—a comprehensive analysis of conversion leaks and optimization opportunities across your customer journey, delivered by SH/FT’s senior strategists.

This session challenges everything you think you know about customer experience optimization. Prepare to question conventional wisdom and discover why making things harder might be the smartest business decision you make this year.

Can't Attend Live?

Register anyways and receive the recording and exclusive resources after the webinar.