How to Make Customers Happy #entrepreneur #smallbusiness

10 Apr 2025 · 1 min

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0:53

In this short talk, the speaker references Roger Dooley’s book Friction and explains that customers encounter resistance points—"friction"—throughout their journey, which can cause frustration and abandonment. The key lesson is that businesses should not try to eliminate every friction point at once, as doing so can create adverse side‑effects and be overwhelming. Instead, they should observe where the biggest delays or highest abandonment occur (the "time piles"), fix that primary friction point, and then move sequentially to the next biggest issue. This iterative, prioritized approach helps improve the customer experience without destabilizing other processes.

Chapters

There's a great book by a guy named Roger Dooley. I encourage you check it out. It's called Friction and it's all these resistance points that our clients experience as they navigate the customer journey with us. Perhaps you've experienced this when buying online or something. Or the point of frustration and you abandon. You give up. Well, your clients are doing that with you too. You need to fix the friction points, but don't fix them all. That's the key to this lesson. If you try to fix everything and it's like turning multiple dials at once, one could have an adverse effect on the other. Plus it can be overwhelming. Pick your biggest friction point. Just observe where time piles occur, meaning where do things wait or take the longest or customers report the most frustration. Or you just observe that clients abandon you. Which is the ultimate expression of frustration is at that spot where you likely have the friction point. Just fix that. Once that's resolved, move on to the next and then the next.