Want a superpower in your business? Be user friendly.

Watch me open my new iPhone. Left handed. Which I am not. You don’t get more user friendly than that.

User friendly. There’s an attractive phrase. As a profitable entrepreneur, you know one of the main keys for a successful business is to be user friendly. What’s the opposite of user friendly? If you ask Roger Dooley, he will tell you: friction.

If you haven’t heard already, we have a book club here at home base. Every quarter we are assigned a new book to boost our performance and growth. Roger is one of my favorite authors and we have read several of his books. Roger has written Friction, his latest book which we all read, The Persuasion Slide and Brainfluence. Roger came on our podcast to drop some logic bombs about the user experience and how we can eliminate friction. Listen up!

So what is friction in business? Friction is anything that interferes with your client’s ability to utilize your services effectively.

If you read Friction (as you should) you will see all the places you are getting in your own way of profit in your business. Stop for a minute and think about where you yourself have found friction in your own user experience. Now think about yourself as a consumer of your business.

Customer experience should be seamless. Websites that don’t log you out (thanks, Amazon!), cable companies that don’t change plans or service (do you know of one?), car rentals without lines, toy packaging that you don’t need power tools to open and communication when needed. Sounds wonderful, right? The same goes for your business. The last thing you want is friction and frustration in your client’s experience. At least, not if you are looking to keep and increase customers.

Can you identify instances of friction in your own business? How can you eliminate it?

1. What is friction? Friction exists in large and small businesses. How do we identify friction in our business and what are the hidden frictions? Take a look at your current rules and reporting systems. Often times they can become entities are no longer enhancing productivity and customer experience. They create organizational drag – time and money wasted on meetings, reports and protocol that benefits no one. This drag makes it difficult to get anything done because you are so consumed with system imposed time. These things detract from the user experience and we know the opposite should be happening.
2. What is the result of friction in our business?
   Friction impedes the outcome in business. The end. Hopefully not the end of your business.
3. How can you avoid friction in your business? The biggest way to eliminate friction in your business is to spend time researching and identifying what aspects of your business are friction points. Make yourself a differentiator from other companies. What is their feedback? How can you enhance their experience? How can you make their experience frustration free and the most user friendly?

Once you have identified the aspects of friction in your business you can get to work on making those systematic and behavioral changes. Atomic Habits, by James Clear, is another book we read here in the office. Through it we learned that to make real, long lasting behavioral changes, we must adopt new habits. The easier you make it the more likely you will be able to do it. Adopt simple new habits in your business. Revamp or do away with systems that stood in the way of profitability. Match the priorities of the customer so they have a far more user friendly experience.

The friction free company beats the company with high friction processes in place. Every time. Listen to your customers because if you don’t get it right for them they will go somewhere else.

What systems do you have in place that eliminate friction in your business? Keep things and friction free as possible and say hello to a more profitable business.

For more tips like this go to Mikemotorbike.com or Mikemichalowicz.com and click on Get the Tools for tons of tried and true resources for business help and how to run a truly profitable business. Let’s rock entrepreneurship!
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