274. Reducing Business Friction: Understanding The Benefits With Examples From Amazon & Steve Jobs, with Roger Dooley (Refreshed Episode)

Welcome to episode 274 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy Today's episode is all about friction. Ready? Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello.

Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Today's episode is all about friction, specifically a refresh of the conversation I had with Roger Dooley on his book Friction way back in November 2019. It seems fitting to have Roger's episode be the first interview for a Tuesday refresh, as he was one of the very first interviews I did on the show ever and he was kind enough to be the forwardist for my first book, which your customer wants and can't tell you. Thanks Roger. So why am I refreshing this today? Well, for one, Roger's awesome and the insights are valuable at any time. The other reason is because I was reminded of it when reading Richard Shotton's newest book, the Illusion of Choice, which he's sharing with us in this coming Friday's episode. It came up in my mind because Richard has two chapters early on called Make It Easy and then make it Difficult, which are all about friction or Sludge, which is another great book I have done an episode on, and that one and all the books I've mentioned are linked for you in the show Notes. As you listen today and think about friction, consider your own experiences. Where can they be easier? Where should they be more difficult? I know that seems a bit counterintuitive now, but some thoughtful friction is really valuable in the right places. As an example, if you in my book what yout Employees need and Can't Tell youl, I encourage people to be more thoughtful in the communication they send out to help reduce the backlog of unnecessary emails and back and forth that comes from not being through enough the first time around. So if you introduce some friction to the process where you might be likely to make an error, like sending an email before you've included everything important that you should be talking to this person about or before you made sure the tone was right and make it so you need to wait a minimum of 30 minutes and then reread the email in a cold state when you can be sure to evaluate it with a good perspective, it can create some really valuable friction that helps you to avoid costly mistakes before they happen. It could be that you realize you should have mentioned an important detail or fix a little typo. Or it could be realizing that your email's coming off as totally snarky or rude so you can fix that before it goes out and causes all sorts of problems. So while more often than not, reducing friction is the best place to start, there is way too much friction in our lives and businesses don't forget to look at ways to increase friction or as Richard says, make it difficult, because that can be valuable as well. Before we jump into this episode, I just want to remind you that there are links for those books and related past episodes and other great stuff all waiting for you in the show notes for this episode, which are found within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com274 all right, let's talk about friction. Roger Dooley, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.

Well, thank you, Melina. I'm glad to be here.

So I absolutely adore your new book, Friction, and I. There's absolutely a link for everybody in the show notes for this. One of I think the greatest, just little tiny tidbits that I noticed right off the bat when I got the book in the mail was the texture of the COVID which I'm guessing is intentional, and that power of touch and how it's very coarse, which is different than other books. Am I correct in assuming that that was intentional?

Yes. That was very perceptive of you, Melina. And you are correct. I had to work with McGraw Hill to get that done. I was looking for a slightly gritty coating, and they come in different degrees of grittiness, and we ended somewhere in the middle part of the range. So it has kind of a slightly, slightly rough feel, but it isn't quite as abrasive as sandpaper. So it's. But it was meant to convey a sense of friction.

Awesome. I. I love that. And it was something. We do have an episode on the sense of touch and how that impacts perceived ownership and helping you to understand just the way that senses it sort of ingests everything. And so I love that just that tiny piece shows how much thoughtfulness is in the entire book, so.

Well, thanks. About one in 10 people notices that when they pick it up. Is that intentional? So that's good. I'm glad you noticed, Melina.

Absolutely. At least they consciously notice it.

Right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. The other folks will notice it's a little bit different perhaps, but maybe not make the connection immediately.

Absolutely. So tell the audience a little bit if you can. Just Give some background on yourself and how we got through neuromarketing, brain fluence, friction.

Let us know a little bit about Roger.

Sure, I'll try and keep it brief. So I began life a million years ago as an engineer, and even then though, I was interested in a couple of sort of odd topics. One was psychology, I minored in psychology. And the other was advertising, when I was supposed to be studying organic chemistry in the library. Instead I would be reading Advertising Age. But put those things aside. Started off a pretty normal engineering career, began to progress up through the management ranks through a product management with more marketing emphasis, and finally when I was about 30, I was in charge of strategic planning for a Fortune 1000 company. So I felt pretty good about that and I loved the job and I chose that moment to bail out and become an entrepreneur. In the very early days of home computers I co founded a catalog marketing company and it was kind of an appealing sort of return to advertising because it was the most quantitative type of marketing you could do at the time. We could do things like square inch analysis, we could do rather primitive but effective A B tests, and we actually had a pretty good idea of what was working in our marketing. So that over the years changed into different types of businesses, much more digitally oriented. And about maybe 15 years ago now, time flies and you're having fun. I saw two areas coming together, neuroscience and marketing, and I wasn't the only person to see that there were already some early neuromarketing service providers out there, but I did what any good digital marketer would do and registered a domain and started writing there. It's neurosciencemarketing.com Oddly enough, keyword domains were big back then, but it's still relevant because it conveys the blend of the two top and that morphed into today well over I think 1100 blog posts on the topic. My first book, Brainfluence, came out from Wiley about seven years or so ago now, and the intersection of neuroscience and behavioral science and business has always been fascinating to me and this both the blogging and my own podcast, the brainfluence Podcast and books give me a chance to explore that and try and simplify some of this for people who are in business. There are some super smart academics out there creating great research, but often they can't really translate that into practical business advice, in part because that's kind of not what they do. But also they don't have the decades of hands on business experience of knowing what it is to meet a payroll close a customer and so on. So I try and be the bridge there. And that's what I've tried to do in my new book, which is. Has its roots in behavioral science but is designed to really be an aid to anybody in business.

Absolutely. And I think it is very likely clear to anyone listening as well as, you know, to me as to why we are very kindred spirits. Sort of a similar. While my undergraduate is in marketing and I worked in branding versus the engineering background that, you know, searching for how this psychology intersected and how it all went together and being that conduit between academia and business is, you know, very much similar space. I know we were talking before we jumped on the call about the overlap in audience that we're sure that we have here. So I'm really excited that you agreed to come on the show and talk about. About your book.

Well, I appreciate your having me. And I think, you know, from the standpoint of our audience, it's. I find something really interesting is the increase in business interest in behavioral science. Now we're seeing many large companies that have behavioral science team, maybe they have a chief behavioral officer, something of that nature. And even those people who were interested in consumer neuroscience or neuromarketing, sort of those hard tools to analyze advertising like EEG or biometric measurements and so on, even they are kind of steering toward the behavioral area. Nielsen is the biggest provider by far of consumer neuroscience services around the world. And they have 20 neuroscientists on staff, which is pretty incredible that a market research company would have that many neuroscientists. But they do. And just earlier this year they announced that they were in part repurposing these scientists as behavioral science trainers and consultants. So even they are seeing the value in applying the principles of behavioral science to their marketing and other parts of business.

Absolutely. I know I've had several organizations that have reached out, as I'm sure you've had similar of looking to start a nudge unit or something along those lines of how do we incorporate behavioral science into our entire business, not just marketing and communication, but pricing and products and communication and all of these different areas because it's just so relevant to everything, really.

Sure. Don't forget human resources.

Oh yeah.

How could I?

I'm sorry, all the human resources folks listening, I know you're there. I apologize that I almost forgot about you. Thank you, Roger.

But, but they, those, those humans, I think that right there in the title of that department, whether you like calling it human resources or not, it has the word human in there. And That's a key that, you know, you cannot simply motivate people by somehow saying, oh well, we'll just add an incentive here or there or we will tell people to do this. They are humans. It's not quite that easy to motivate them to do stuff.

Absolutely.

Yes.

I definitely take the approach with my work and consulting and the podcast to be about the we're all people at the core. Even if we're looking at how we would change things within a business, you have to be looking at how humans actually make decisions for everything. And I saw a lot of that in your, your book as well.

Well, we know that change is hard and when humans are involved, at least you know, if you had all robots working for you could send out a, you know, download a new program and everything would be great. But when you've got a company composed of humans, it's a little bit more challenging.

Absolutely. Well, some of the things I loved in your book and I made a bunch of notes as I was reading, as I always do, I think that a couple of the topics. So I really like that you have this, you know, both sides of the scale. So you've got your. The benefits of reducing friction, making things easier for people which including, you know, having less boxes in a form is the top way to get more leads through on your website or whatever it happens to be all the way to. There are times where it's really important to increase friction to help modify behavior and different aspects of that. So I like that you took both sides versus just just one. I would say that reducing friction was the more common place. I really loved the stories from Amazon and some of the tiny changes they've made. Can you expand on some of your favorite stories from the book?

Sure. And yeah, I'd say 95% of the time businesses have too much friction in their processes, not too little, but occasionally it's can help to add a little bit of friction. And before I get to Amazon, I'll throw in one tiny example of that for people who are trying to visualize it. One company found that people were using the retirement plan, their 401 pretty much like an ATM. You know, when they had a fairly short term need come up, they would phone up HR and say hey, I need to take out $500. And what they did was added just a little bit of friction to that process by requiring the employee to fill out a form form to get that withdrawal. What they found was the number of withdrawals went down, which is pretty much the reverse of the Famous nudge to increase participation by opting people into retirement plans automatically rather than forcing them to fill out a form. So there are times when adding friction helps, but in general, it is best to eliminate it. And Amazon is certainly a prime, no pun intended, example of that. You know, start with their one click ordering. They in 1998 patented this process that allowed a customer to click one button and that would immediately send the message to the warehouse to ship the product. That was. It didn't seem like something would even be patentable. You know, it's a Buy now button that has the information stored. But when Barnes and Noble decided to implement their own version, they got in a big legal battle and Amazon spent millions of dollars to defend the patent. And they succeeded. And when you think about it, all they did was the only way they disadvantaged Barnes and Noble and other competitors to come was force them to add one tiny little mouse click to their process. Barnes and Noble added a Confirm Order button. After you click the Buy now button, they had to click Confirm order. So I mean, you think about that in terms of effort, you'd say, well, that's no effort at all. You know, if you talk to people in your IT department about improving one of the processes on your website or your mobile app, they'll say, oh man, that would be expensive. And you know, it's only a few keystrokes. You know, it only take a few seconds to do. But in fact, Jeff Bezos thought that this one tiny little click was such a huge advantage that they defended it to the death. And they won. And then one other really smart person, Steve Jobs, saw it and he was starting his new music store, launching a new music store at the time, he did not screw around. He didn't try and fight it or work around it. He paid Amazon a million bucks so they could use that in what became itunes. And we know how well that worked out. So, you know, when somebody in your company says that's not that much effort, don't worry about it, you know, it won't change outcomes. Just ask them if they are smarter than both Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos because they thought one tiny little click was worth millions of dollars.

Wow. I love that that's even expanding beyond what is in the book. I'm sure there is.

You have mountains and mountains of knowledge for sure.

So thank you for expanding on that. Can you give us, for anyone who hasn't yet seen the book again, there's a link in the show notes. But can you give us your definition of what friction means? What Friction is, yeah, probably the simplest.

Definition, there's a slightly wordier one in the book. But it would be any unnecessary effort to complete a task. So, you know, if in physics, if you have to move something from point A to point B, you'll have to do a certain amount of work. But if you're doing that, say on a surface that is rough, that will take more work, it'll actually burn some energy, which if you have moved quickly on a rough surface, like say you're sliding down a rope, you'll find out that it generates heat that is because of friction and that is wasted energy. But in the book it refers to in a more metaphorical way any kind of wasted effort that isn't absolutely necessary to accomplish the task, but it is for some reason part of the process. So the example of the one click ordering is that takes almost all of the effort out of the process, which, when you compare that to other businesses where you may have multiple steps in checking out, even if you're an existing customer, you may have to log back in. You'll notice that Amazon never logs you out. You're always logged in at Amazon unless you say reformat your hard drive. There's a reason for that. They want to be sure that that one click button is always available for you. And it sounds like maybe their security procedures are lax compared to other businesses that log you out automatically or force you to create complicated passwords, which Amazon does not do. Actually, they have made some business decisions and they are not quite as much as open to fraud as you might think. If you try and engage in some higher potential risk activities, like say I decide to send Amazon gift cards to people, which is basically sending them cash, or if I decide to ship a TV to an address that I never shipped to before, they will re authenticate me because there's just enough there in that transaction they can say, okay, we think you're probably Roger, but we want to be sure that you're Roger. And so they do it then. But 99% of the time or more, you are simply using that one click button to ship a product to your home address or your office address that's stored in the system. And that for them is an extremely low risk transaction. You know, the odds that somebody would have hacked your account and is going to ship stuff to your home address is pretty much slim to none. And so they figured that out. Unfortunately, there are many businesses and I'm a frequent flyer in United Airlines and I'm always on united.com they're a good example of a company that has set the boundaries in a very different way. If I want to do anything at all with my account, I have to go to the website and log in. You are not logged in when you arrive there, even as a regular customer, and with cookies and everything else, after 20 minutes of inactivity, they will log you out so that you know when you're setting up flights. Usually, at least for me, I've got about 10 windows open. I've got hotel sites open and rent a car sites. And the conference that I'm going to be speaking at their website to see exactly what the schedule is, trying to optimize all these things. And I go back to the flights that I had picked out and boom, I find out that I've been logged out and I lost my work and I'm going to have to start searching from scratch. That drives me absolutely bonkers. But this is because they have decided to ensure. Because certain things, there are certain things that you could do that would have potential for fraud. Say if I decided to transfer a couple of hundred thousand miles to another customer of theirs, I mean, that could be legitimate. But that has been a problem in the past where somebody hacked an account and then sent the miles someplace else. So to prevent, against. To prevent that from happening, basically United makes it very difficult even to book routine flights in your own name for destinations that you fly from or to normally.

Right. And that gets. I really enjoyed some of the examples from the book where it's talking about, you see the one time thing, I talked about this in an experience I had at an airport recently where they kind of talked themselves out of a sale. I was trying to buy almonds at the airport, and almonds are expensive in general. And the person said, oh, are you, did you see how much those are? Are you sure you want to buy them? But.

Well, maybe not.

I feel I've been shamed in my almond purchase.

That person has a real career in sales, I can tell.

Right, right. So it's such an extravagant purchase of almonds. And so. But potentially they set that up because they had a lot of people wanting to, you know, or maybe a few people that wanted to return bags of almonds because they didn't realize it was, you know, 13 bucks and it's typically 10. And in a regular grocery store to buy this giant bag of almonds that they sell. And so they think, oh, look, sales of almonds have gone down. So clearly we've done something right. But really you've created a new process that deters people from buying almonds. And the example I like in the book is where there's the person where, you know, one person took a tool home once, and so they set up a shed and you had to go and check the tools in and out and go through this whole thing and set up, you know, $50,000 worth of expenses every year. And so much time to solve a problem that maybe would have cost $1,200 a year in lost.

Right? Yeah, exactly. It's, you know, because people are. They don't look at the cost of the processes that they create. They may be trying to do something good for the company. Hey, we don't want people to steal tools. We don't want paperclips to walk away. So instead of having paperclips in a cupboard, we're going to have somebody responsible for keeping track of paperclips. And you'll have to go see that person and fill out a form to get them. But when they look at the total cost and time and effort compared to the amount that you would lose even if somebody did grab an occasional tool or box of paperclips, you know, it wouldn't compare. But unfortunately, people don't see that. Although the objective in this book, Melina, is to sort of open people's eyes, to start seeing that unnecessary friction, to look at those problems, processes that their customers have to go through or that they have to go through in their own business and say, is this absolutely necessary? Could we do this a simpler way? What are the risks? And sometimes, you know, if you have something extremely expensive, maybe you do have a process for getting that checked out. But for all too often, there's a rule that's created that ends up creating a huge burden on people for stuff that's just not that important.

Absolutely. I know you talk about trust and friction, and I don't know if you have the trust friction continuum or something that's already created, but essentially there's a strong correlation between distrust and increased friction. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Well, sure. Trust is sort of the enemy of friction, or vice versa, because where there's high trust, there's low friction. You tell somebody, hey, I'm going to do this. And if they trust you, that's all that needs to happen. You do it. They do whatever they're supposed to do afterwards, and that's it. But if you don't trust each other, you create a contract with lots of terms and lots of checkpoints and procedures and so on. You know, one great Example that I know is not unique to me is expense reporting. And we all, we all have expense reporting, even in small businesses, but particularly in larger businesses are usually established procedures for that. And although I've been an entrepreneur for many, many years, I built a business and sold it to a large company and I joined them as an executive for a period of years afterwards. And their expense reporting process required me to collect every single tiny receipt, even if it was for a $2 coffee at an airport, if I wanted to get reimbursed for that. Now, that goes way beyond the IRS guidelines. The US Tax Authority, they don't require that documentation, but this company did. And as a result, it ended up creating a lot of paperwork because not only did I have to save this stuff and then add it all up, but then somebody else had to check it on the other end to make sure it added up and matched up. And they actually humans did that. One time I lost one of those little $2 receipts. And somebody called me out, they said, hey, this is missing. And you know, I later I talked to the chief financial guy who was also had left the company, this was a few years after. And I asked him, why did you have that crazy process? And he said it was basically management did not trust that people would not abuse the system. And, you know, often too, we create processes that are designed to make things easier, but they don't really work that way. And one thing that they did in this company, and then also I just saw a very recent post from somebody on a frequent flyer website about expense reporting where this person had a process where he had to take a photo or scan each receipt, then attach those photos or scans to an expense report document, submit that, and again, this was for any size expense, even a dollar or two, and then it would be processed through the system. And finally he went to his boss and said, you know, I'm spending an hour a week on this expense reporting process. Isn't there a way of making this quicker? And, and the boss, instead of saying, yeah, I'll talk to accounting, we don't really need to be doing all of this work. It's not necessary. Said, we just need to work faster because it only takes me 30 minutes. And not questioning whether it's worth 30 minutes of the boss's time to be messing around taking pictures of $2 receipts, that was the same process I did. What it ended up doing was it streamlined things for the accounting people because I had to not only take pictures, I had to put account numbers on it and project numbers that were always really confusing. Could never figure out, you know, what. What they're supposed to be charged to, and didn't want to screw up and have my expense report bounce. But it did allow. Allow the accounting people to process it very quickly because basically they shifted all of the work to the employees, which is not really what you want to be doing as anybody in a management situation. And I just saw a great comment. A person who's an educator had picked up the Friction book and was. Acted on its ideas. And in her commentary, she's responsible for mandatory training for employees. Now, everybody hates mandatory training, right, because that's. That's a friction element right there. You know, you're trying to figure out how. How can I get through this as quickly as possible? Can I multitask while that video's playing? Maybe, you know, do my email or something. It's. It's a pretty bad experience. But strangely for a staff person, this person was very understanding of people's time, and she felt that by simply. There was a questionnaire at the end of it, by simplifying that from a whole series of questions down to just one, I think she said that she could save each person 30 seconds of time. Now, again, this is sort of like Jeff Bezos in one click, say 30 seconds of time, who cares? But 10,000 employees in that school district had to do that training. So she calculated that she saved 5,000 minutes of teacher time across the board by that one tiny change. And to me, that's the way we should all be thinking. You know, we can't say, well, that's not that much effort. We have to think how many people are going to be affected by this and how can we make that easier?

Right. I know that comes back to that, you know, less boxes and more leads in that. The. When you were talking about the accounting team setting up the process so that it's easiest for you, I've seen a lot of businesses that kind of say, well, we're. We have this form now, and it's maybe the only time we can get those form or this ad in front of people. So let's put everything we could possibly ever want in the introductory form, and then we'll have it all, and we won't have to ask again. But how that just. That's making it really useful for you. But that shift in brain thinking, you know, flipping the frame is sort of something I talk about a lot, looking at what is best for the other person, and I think that comes to trust as well. But making the process Easy on someone else and just asking what you need instead of every possible thing can have such a profound impact.

Oh yeah, I mean, I've seen these forms for their lead gen forms and they've got 10 or 12 spaces on them. You know, you don't need your, the potential customer's fax number anymore. Okay, you can scratch that one off. You probably don't need their mailing address unless they're specifically requesting information that you are going to physically mail to them. You know, you may want to make that form as simple as possible and short as possible so that you get more potential leads. Now, there is a way that sometimes adding friction could help. Imagine that your objective was to get leads that would be followed up on by human salespeople. In those cases, it might be good to have a slightly more difficult form just to act as a screen for people who weren't very interested. Because otherwise you would end up expending a whole lot of your sales resource time, maybe for not much end. But that would be something you'd want to test. You'd want to see if the leads you got From a say 8 space form versus just name and email address converted that much better if you wasted a lot less time on those, or if you're actually better off getting the larger number of leads and letting the salespeople sort through them quickly and eliminate the ones through whatever mechanism they have. So there's not a single answer. But in general, if you are trying to say maximize leads or maximize sales, making the process as simple as possible is the way to go.

Absolutely. And I was reminded of an example that I'm pretty sure was in friction that was talking about the wanting to transfer people to phone leads instead of the form online. And they thought, okay, we'll just get rid of the online form. But can you tell us what happened?

Sure, sure. You know, I work with a variety of conversion experts around here in Austin. We are a center for conversion companies and experts. One of these people is Brian Massey, who has a company called Conversion Science. And he related a story about a customer who had a website with both a toll free phone number and a web form on it where people could request information about the company's products and services. What the company found was that the phone leads converted much, much better than the web leads. They said, okay, so what we'd like to do is get more phone leads. So the simple answer that they tried at first was say, well, okay, let's get rid of the web form. And that way those people who are quite Interested will call in and you will get more phone leads. What happened was not only did the number of phone leads not go up, it actually went down, which seems a little bit inexplicable, but the speculation was that people felt they were being forced to call and they were afraid that they might get high pressure sales or something. So regardless, the leads went down. So, so instead they relieved that pressure with what Brian calls the big ugly form. And what they did was they created this really lengthy web form to fill out and they, with, you know, lots of fields, they probably did ask for the fax number and the street address and a few other irrelevant pieces of information. But before that they said, we can handle your inquiry most efficiently and quickly if you call us, but if you would prefer, feel free to use this form and we will get back to you as soon as we're able to. And that then increased the number of phone leads. Nobody filled out the big form, but they did get an increased number of phone leads. And that translates into a strategy or sort of little psychological quirk that perhaps you've shared with your listeners in the past. And that is the BYAF but you are free technique. And in essence, studies around the planet have shown that it's counterintuitive. But if you want somebody to do something, you can ask them to do it. But if you then say but you are free not to, or you are free to do X instead of Y, that you actually get higher compliance with your request. Now it seems counterintuitive because instead of simply asking people to do something and showing them how it's important to them or to you or whatever, you're giving them an out. But apparently by giving them that out, you sort of relieve the pressure and they're actually more comfortable complying with the request. So my take on this particular experiment is that that big ugly form was a by a F approach, but you were free to fill out this form and it was an unattractive alternative. So people instead called, oh yeah.

And I, it's definitely, I'm a person that would almost always rather fill out a form than call. And I can appreciate, I think I probably would have been one of those people that would have said, you know, forget this, I'm leaving. And I think if I remember correctly, it was really a significant, it was like 56% decrease in the number of calls that they got or something Huge.

Yeah, it was significant and surprising too, because you would think that anybody who's willing to call, I mean, on average it's not the same People, but assuming a similar mix of people. But you would get at least as many when you eliminated the form. Because all the people who originally called would still call and you'd have a few that didn't, you know, no longer had the form option who would say, okay, well I'll call, but it's not what happened. Right.

And this would be. So the concept here is relativity. We have an episode of the podcast, it's number 12, I believe it'll be linked for you in the show notes for anybody who hasn't listened to that yet. And I really want to just take one quick moment to talk about. Framing is so important and a foundation that I talk about in everything. One of the best examples of framing and I think you, you know, friction is framing sort of in its own right. But that dealing with people, how that all comes together. But you have this example about not using the word actually and how that had created. If you say, well actually if you do this versus yeah, this is how you do this. I think that had to do with Buffer. Using Buffer.

Yeah. And Buffer is a great example. When they arrived on the scene. They are a social sharing tool, so. Or a content scheduling tool. You know, if you say, like to read articles first thing in the morning and then share with your audience on Twitter or Facebook or wherever you share your stuff, what would normally happen is you would send out a bunch of content at 7:15am in the morning and people who were not around at 7:15 might never see it. So scheduling tools evolved. The first one was hootsuite, which is sort of a Swiss army knife for social media management. And you know, if you talk to any social media manager, chances are they are a hootsuite user. But for the casual user it's kind of intimidating because there's a lot of functionality and just setting up how to schedule stuff is not totally easy. Where Buffer took basically all of the friction out of that, they made it dead simple to get started. Just connect with your Twitter account. Say they had yes, you can set up your own time slots, but they pre programmed in time slots that you could start with so you didn't have to choose times. You know the default in most systems the default is no times are set up. You need to figure out when you're going to do this and then you sit there, well, I want to be a good time. They said, hey, we did this for you, but feel free to change it. In their early days they even had content you could share. So something else that holds people back say, well I want to share some stuff and I sit there and now what do I share? I don't have anything good. I didn't find anything good when I was reading this morning. They had quality curated content that you could see which might fit your audience and share it. Now they drop that as they become more popular. Getting lots of people sharing the same stuff would have gotten rather spammy, so they had to cut that out. But in their early days, it was a real asset and people did share stuff that they. They curated for them and on specific topics. So they made it very, very simple to get started. And in a very short space of time, they had more than a million users. And a lot of it was that sort of making it easy. They also adopted a very friendly approach. They created a friendly Persona for the company. When you delete a tweet, say, that you had scheduled, instead of just saying tweet deleted, delete confirmed, there'd be some kind of funny little message like that one will never see the light of day or just some crazy little thing that makes you smile. And the actually thing is from their support lead, who I noticed that a few times when I communicated with their support, they were always just super over the top friendly. I was always like, wow, Roger, thanks for bringing this to our attention. So sorry you had a problem with that. We're in. You know, they'd say what I should do or what they were going to do about it and so on, and, you know, end up just being effusive in their thanks and friendliness. And so I asked him about that and the actually thing came out from, came about from that person where one of their rules was never say actually when you are answering the support question, because what you were doing then is usually saying, yeah, actually you could do this had you read the instructions properly. But no, we can point that out for you here. Can I do this? Actually, yes, you can. You just need to click this button and select that option. But rather than seeming to correct the person and imply that maybe they didn't work at it hard enough, they just avoid the word and they explain how to do it and they do it in a very friendly way. And, you know, to me, you know, each one of these things is kind of a small factor overall, but when the entire company has this friendly Persona, both in their human communications and even their automated communications, it makes a big difference.

Absolutely. And I know for me it's such an unintentionally condescending term, right, to use that word, actually, that you don't Realize that it comes across that way. I know something that I always find.

To be very bristling.

And a term that so many people use and that I found a lot of people don't like is the does that make sense? Do you understand what I'm saying? Sort of a space instead of saying, did I say that correctly? Did that? But saying did, does that make sense?

Are you smart enough to be understanding me or not?

And oh man, I can't. I can't stand that. So, but that's just a simple reframe and where you could be derailing every single thing from this one, one phrase or word. And it's just, I love finding little tricks like that. So thank you for including that problem.

And yeah, it's like when that phrase of yours is like, well, okay, let me dumb it down for you, then that's really what you're doing. So it's important because I never thought about the word actually. I mean, I never thought about it either on the receiving end or using it. It just wasn't in my consciousness. But now it is, right?

And it makes complete sense. Absolutely. So I think I'm looking through all of my notes. I know I could talk to you for four days where people say, you know, all day. I feel like I could talk to you forever about all the different research and things. Are there any stories or tips or real benefits that people have gotten from the book? Something else that you think is just that great nugget for the listeners to learn more and why it's important?

Sure. And I guess I'll look at customer experience for that nugget. And people ask what drives loyalty? And we all know that loyal customers are better and more valuable than new customers. If you have to go out and acquire new customers all the time, that's pretty expensive to do. And you've got to onboard them and then they go away and you've got to find more customers and onboard those customers. Loyalty is so desirable. But a lot of people don't really know what drives loyalty. And oddly, it is not exceeding customer expectations. According to research, what drives loyalty are low effort experiences with a business. Gartner, the market research firm, did some pretty phenomenal research on customer service interactions. This is where a customer had to interact with customer service at a company to solve a problem. Maybe there was a product that wasn't working or they had a question or something. And what they found was pretty phenomenal, that 96% of customers who had high effort experiences were likely to be disloyal. That is purchase from somebody else the next time. Compared to only 9% of customers who had low effort experiences, 94% of low effort customers repurchased. Just 4% of high effort customers did. And you know, we all know how important word of mouth is these days, particularly with social media, because word of mouth is amplified way more than it used to be. 88% of high effort customers were likely to say bad things about a business compared to just 1% of low effort customers. So, I mean, that is such a huge difference. And now the scary thing is, what defines high effort versus low effort? You think that, well, my processes are pretty good, actually. I've looked at my competition and we're quite a bit better than they are. You know, we answer problems more quickly. We have fewer times where somebody, the first person who answers the call has to transfer to some other person. But what people are comparing is not you against your competition. They are comparing you against their best, lowest effort customer experiences to Amazon, to Uber. And if you cannot provide that seamless of an experience, then you could be delivering high effort experiences when you don't even realize it. You ask like, what things are part of a high effort experience. It could be having to switch media. For instance, maybe you ask a question on Twitter and you then have to call the 800 number or you call in and the first person who you talk to can't help you and they have to switch you to somebody else. And it's compounded if then you have to say re authenticate with that second person, which happens to me quite frequently. I have to answer the same challenge questions for the second person that did for the first person or I have to re explain my problem to them because that information was not transferred to the second person automatically. All these things and also the inability to solve the problem on the first contact, if it takes a second contact or a third contact, all of these things create a high effort experience and they will absolutely kill your loyalty. And a lot of people just think it's sort of par for the course. You know, they think, well, yeah, that's, you know, we answer a pretty good number of our questions the first time around and, you know, we're doing pretty well. But you are endangering the loyalty of all those customers that you cannot handle in that really instantaneous and efficient manner.

Absolutely. And I think that ties so well into, I have my note here of this that, you know, the, sometimes it's about making things faster and sometimes it's about making them easier. But getting back to that, the Expense report example, or there are several in the book that we'll, we'll leave it as a little nugget for people to go check it out. But that there's this. Sometimes the best thing to do, it's not to look at how do we improve this process?

It's just can we get rid of this?

How can we eliminate this completely? And how does that make the system and everything that much easier for people and reduce friction?

Yeah, absolutely. Whether it's an internal process that employees have to go through, whether it's something we're making our customers do, often we find that we're doing things. And I'll give you an example from the cruise industry. For years, when you showed up to board a cruise ship, you had to go through a check in process much. It's kind of like a hotel check in, but they're checking your passports and other stuff to be sure that you've got whatever you need to visit the places you're going to be visiting and that they've got your credit card info and all that. And there was a little form to fill out that said that you had not experienced certain kinds of illness symptoms in the last 24 hours or 48 hours or something. And it's just like two questions and then you had to sign it and date it and they would collect that piece of paper. Now this people presumed was a legal requirement because if somebody boards the ship with an illness, then potentially hundreds of passengers could have their cruise ruined and create people who want say, partial refunds and so on. So this was the cruise line's way of protecting themselves. They thought this was just a mandatory thing. When the folks at Carnival looked at this, Carnival Cruise Lines is implementing something called the Medallion, which is a sort of massive friction reducer on ships that are equipped with it. It's a small number of ships right now in the fleet, just a few Princess ships, but it's rolling out over time to the entire fleet. They looked at every aspect of it, every aspect of the cruise process. They even mocked up in a warehouse like building each element of a cruise and including that sort of onshore check in process as well as they mocked up staterooms that you would have to enter with a key. They had a bar, quote unquote environment, a restaurant where they could simulate all the, all the things you might experience on a ship. But this form, when they checked it turned out there was not a legal requirement for it. It was just something that everybody did. Instead of having thousands of people standing in line filling out pieces of paper with their name and answering these questions because nobody is going to say, yes, I had these symptoms because they're not going to be able to board the ship if they say that. I mean, it was a perfectly useless process that just created a lot of hassle at the check in. They eliminated it, gone simple and saved passengers and their workers many thousands of hours of grief.

Oh yeah, absolutely. Oh, I love that example. And another really great one that isn't. You know, this is one of an example of a fantastic example that didn't make it into this book. It's jam packed with great lessons for everybody listening. There will of course be links to the book Friction in the show notes and Roger, what is the best way if people want to interact with you and to find you where, where should they go to find you?

Okay, the best jumping off point is rogerdooley.com where I've got links to my neuromarketing blog there, my Forbes blog, my books and my podcast. So that's probably the easiest way to go. If on social media I'm easy to find on LinkedIn and on Twitter I am RogerDooley.

Awesome. And we will have those linked in the show notes as well. And thank you again, Roger Dooley, for joining us today on the Brainy Business podcast to talk about friction and neuromarketing and brain fluence and all sorts of wonderful things. It was such a joy to have you.

You. Well, thank you Melanie. It's been a lot of fun.

Such a great conversation about an incredibly impactful book. I highly recommend you pick up your own copy of Friction. There are of course again links to the book and everything else Roger and I discussed in the notes. As you think about reducing friction in.

Your life and business, as Roger said, about 95% or more of the time.

The focus should be on reducing friction, though there are times it makes sense to increase it. But as you look to decrease friction, you'll start to notice it all around you. Open your eyes and engage all the senses for the things that seem to take more effort than they're worth. Do you ever have customers complain about how long something takes or where? Have you complained as a customer? If you change your filter to instead look at how things can be easier. Constantly looking for a way to make things things better. What will you start to see? Take a step back and reflect on your business, the experience others have with you. And the holidays tend to be a time where there's a ton of family friction. How can you reduce that before it even comes about. In the coming weeks there will be.

Episodes on the Brainy Business on filtering.

For gratitude, the importance of nostalgia and stories, as well as as celebrating wins. Hopefully this can aid you in looking for a life of easier experiences and seeing the opportunities for growth that are all around you. As always, if you're looking for an expert to help you with that process, I would love to work with you. The Brainy Mindset course is a great option with details@the brainybusiness.com courses. Or use a contact form on the website to send me an email so we can we can chat more. And of course check out Friction, which Richard Thaler. You've heard me talk about him, the Nobel Prize winner and co author of Nudge. His review of the book reads what do Amazon, Apple, Google and Netflix have in common? They made life easier for their consumers by removing what Dooley calls friction. Reading this book will arm any manager with a mental can of WD40. Hopefully we opened your eyes to friction.

A bit in this episode, and thank.

You to Roger Dooley for being my guest. Check out the book, I know you'll love it. So what got your brain buzzing as you learned about Friction today?

For me, I thought it was so fun to listen back to one of.

My very first interviews on the show and revisit that conversation with Roger about friction. One of the things I always associate with Roger is his thoughtfulness. So you know I think very highly of him and something as simple as the texture on the COVID of his book, that rough exterior is something that stands out and sets the stage for the book topic of Friction. This can relate to so many other areas of business and knowing that the metaphors you use and the experience you want to create can be carried out in so many ways that others miss. Whether it's texture like on a business card or book cover, or in your imagery, or in a signature scent, or the language you choose. You know I'm loving cognitive semiotics, the study of how the mind makes meaning, and so this piece is really important to me. I also like the idea of making it easy for people and trusting them more. I'm linking to Stephen Mr. Covey's episode on the Speed of Trust Trust, which wasn't out yet when I recorded this interview with Roger, but he talks about a similar concept and the importance that trust brings for a business. When people know that you trust them, they are able to focus more on their work and get more done, like the garden shed tools or the receipts for tiny dollar amounts. Sometimes the friction is causing a lot more problems in those policies and making it easier can have a huge upside that far outweighs the small losses that could happen from a more relaxed experience. Just think of ordering something from Amazon and knowing that you can easily return it if it's wrong. Or Zappos and their policy of returning shoes, which helps you feel comfortable ordering online. I'm also linking to a book by John Sills whose episode is coming out in just a couple of weeks. That book is called the Human Experience as it's really, really related to these ideas as well. So be on the lookout for that. If you aren't already subscribed to the Brainy business, now is a great time to do that to make sure that you don't miss any of these great upcoming episodes. So also remember you're a human doing business with humans inside your company and with your customers. Trust and humanness and a reduction in friction can go a long way in building an amazing business. And we're going to talk more about that, of course, when John is on the show talking about the Human Experience as well as when Richard Shotton is here next week. So what about you? What frictions have you seen that were outrageous? Or where was there a frictionless experience that you can't help but share about? Come tell Roger and I about it. He is at Roger Dooley on Twitter and you can find me there and on all the socials as the Brainy Biz as well as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. We can't wait to hear from you. There are links in the show notes to make it easy along with the books, related past episode articles and more that were shared on the episode today, as well as many others that hadn't come out yet when I was talking with Roger and that I didn't have time to reference as I was talking about this all today. So there's lots of great stuff there waiting for you in the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com274 and just like that, episode 274 on friction with Roger Dooley is done. Join me Friday for a brand new episode with Richard Shotten to talk about the illusion of choice. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it.

Until then.

Thanks again for listening and learning with me. And remember, remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.