IS FRICTION HURTING YOUR ORGANIZATION AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH THE CUSTOMER?
What is Organizational Friction? Organizational friction disrupts interaction with operations, customers, and vendors. Friction negatively impacts revenue, expenses, compliance, service, and most importantly “the customer’s experience”.
What are the signs of friction? Lost sales, complaints on social media, wasted customer time, lack of coordination between departments, lower profitability, and regulatory/legal penalties are a few examples. Friction causes problems that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
Examples of Organizational Friction include complex on-line order web pages, transferring a customer by phone to numerous areas, lack of after-sale customer service, chargebacks, refunds, rework, frustration between and within departments, and seeing the customer as a problem. Root causes and fixes of friction are found in an organization’s beliefs, processes, automation, and measurement.
What is an eight-step approach to reduce friction?
- Find where friction exists, beginning with an inventory of processes and current automation,
- Rank friction in terms of how it impacts customer orders, loyalty, service, feedback; and internal quality and efficiency,
- Identify frictionless goals, timelines, and roadmap,
- Change the way people work within your organization by identifying procedural changes to reduce friction,
- Technology identification and vendor assessment, including required changes to currently owned systems, to reduce friction,
- Implementation oversight to help ensure procedural and technology changes will meet frictionless goals, and timelines,
- Ongoing review of measurements, and
- Needed follow-up, as requested.
To learn more about how to reduce friction and how we at CRE8 Independent Consultants can help. Read More.
About the Author. George Dunn, the president of CRE8 Independent Consultants, is a worldwide recognized consultant, speaker, instructor, and author on business process innovation, advanced technologies, and computer system replacement. George can be reached as follows.