What is Organizational Friction?

What is Organizational Friction?

Organizational friction disrupts interactions with customers, operations, and vendors; which can negatively impact revenue, expenses, goodwill, compliance, and risk.

Signs of friction include lost sales, complaints on social media, wasted customer and organization time, lack of coordination between departments, problems created that shouldn’t have happened in the first place, lower profitability, and regulatory/legal penalties.

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, and refunds, rework, frustration between and within departments, and seeing the customer as a problem.

Root causes and fixes of friction can be found in an organization’s beliefs, processes, automation, and measurement.

How 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,

Reward customers and employees for letting you know where they experience frustration with your organization.

Identify frictionless goals, timelines, and roadmap; change the way people work within your organization by identifying procedural changes to reduce friction, required changes to currently owned computer systems, and use of new advanced technologies.

Provide implementation oversight to ensure procedural and technology changes meet frictionless goals, and timelines, Conduct on-going review of measurements and improvement.

Since 1995, we at CRE8 Independent Consultants have assisted hundreds of organizations and trained thousands of individuals in process improvement methods and strategies. To learn more how we can help your organization, contact us.

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