“The thermostat was important, of course, but it occupied only a tiny fraction of the customer journey: 10% of our customers’ experience was the website, advertising, packaging, and in-store display: first we had to convince people to buy it or at least consider and research it. 10% was installation: following the instructions to get it onto your wall with minimal nervousness and power outages. 10% was looking at and touching the device: it had to be beautiful so people would want it in their homes. But after a week it learned what you liked and when you were away, so you didn’t really need to touch it much. If we did our job right, customers would only interact with it here and there, during unexpected cold snaps or heat waves. 70% of the customer experience was on people’s phones or laptops: you’d open the app to turn up the heat on the way home, or you’d see how long the AC was on in Energy History, or you’d tweak your schedule. Then you’d check your email and see a summary of how much energy you used that month. And if you had an issue, you’d go to our website and use the online troubleshooter or read a support article. If we didn’t execute well on any one of these parts of the customer experience, Nest would have failed. Each phase of the journey has to be great in order to move customers naturally into the next, to overcome the moments of friction between them.”