Forces of Change
Data / Effort Switching Cost
The work required to migrate existing data, workflows, and customizations from an old product to a new one.
Data and effort switching cost is the tangible work of migration: exporting data, reconfiguring settings, rebuilding workflows, and recreating customizations. This is the switching cost users feel most acutely because it is visible and immediate. A user with 10,000 emails in one system faces a massive data switching cost to move to another. Products that provide one-click import, automated migration, and data preservation dramatically reduce this barrier. Products that ignore it lose users at the final step of the switching moment.