People work with you and your organization because they need help solving a problem.
That problem causes friction in their own company. If it caused zero friction, there wouldn’t be a problem and thus nothing to fix.
Your company gets chosen day after day to reduce friction.
However, the processes you go through contain friction in some fashion as nothing is ever 100% smooth sailing. When was the last time you went through your core client-facing processes and charted out whether the experience was a positive or a negative one?
For example, when we build websites for our clients, the Quality Assurance step is never fun. We’re all human and there will be errors in how we code various design elements – it’s just a part of life.
Another example: during the sales process, your clients may be really excited. At some point, they have to put “pen to paper” and actually sign away their hard-earned dollar bills. That may not be “+10” experience on the chart I drew out above.
The question to ask your team is: how can we move some of these experiences UP on the chart? Some won’t be possible to convert from a negative experience into a positive one.
But, a huge component of how you differentiate your services in a crowded market can be how frictionless your process is.
Take the Savannah Bananas for example. Yes, they did change the rules of baseball to make it more exciting and freeing. However, they reduced friction across the gambit of the game. You have direct 1:1 access to players, they give out free food and drinks at their home stadium, and they pre-scan tickets so you can just “go in” when the gates open (amongst 100s of other things as well).
They looked at every portion of the fan experience and figured out how to improve it by at least “+1.”
When has the last time you went through your processes and figured out how to make them a little more frictionless?
Mickey Mellen also wrote a good article on friction recently as well.
