Roger Dooley Interview - the secret that 88% of your customers will talk about
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I find it mind-boggling that, while we all know the importance of simplifying the buying process, too many in business are actually adding friction by making you change your passwords and fill out contact forms and talk to their chat bots. Well, my guest today has a lot to say about unnecessary and frustrating friction in your business, and why it's costing you money and customers, and even employees. I'm talking to the brilliant Roger Dooley, author of Friction, the Untapped Force. That can be your most powerful advantage.
David Avrin: and welcome to why customers leave the podcast. As we look into this New Year, and I know most of these podcasts are evergreen. You could be listening, or at any time we're watching the video version which is available on my website and also on my Youtube Channel as well. it's I I think there's a great opportunity to clarify what's next. You know I i'm a speaker
David Avrin: as my guest is as well. We'll introduce him here in a second you know, as I've been talking a lot of meeting planners and others saying, what are companies looking for? Is the world is opened up again? Post pandemic? and they said, what they're looking for we're hearing so much is is clarity
David Avrin: and optimism
David Avrin: like clerk. What does this mean? What has changed? What is? What does it mean? What's the implications for ramifications, our business, and of course, optimism. I mean, nobody wants to come out with a gloom and do, and the good news is I'm. I'm super optimistic. I think there's been some phenomenal innovations, some phenomenal trends, and some cautious ones as well. But it's also important that we're really cognizant and conscious
David Avrin: erez agmoni of the things that frustrate our customers. I mean. That, of course, is my my whole mantra of talk about why customers leave, and and becoming ridiculously easy to do business with. Well, there are a few people smarter 2
David Avrin: in this realm than my guest today, Roger Dooley, I I freakin loved his book friction. So. let me. I'll do a quick introduction
David Avrin: for him, and we will, it will say, Hi! And then and then delve into the subject. Roger Dooley is a serial entrepreneur and author, an international keynote speaker, and the founder of duly direct, which is a business consultancy. His books include the the acclaimed and international bestseller brain influence 100 ways to persuade and convince consumers with neural marketing and his book. I would love to talk about today that i'm
David Avrin: holding up for those who are seeing the video version because I love this book. It's called friction the Untapped Force. That can be your most powerful advantage, and it was named one of the best business books of 2,019. He writes a popular blog called Neural Marketing, as well as a column at Forbescom Roger. Thanks for thanks for joining us on the podcast today.
Roger Dooley: Thanks for having me on the show, David and I love the new name of your show. Why, customers leave. I guess the title of my latest book friction would be the answer to that question.
David Avrin: Yeah, it is. I mean it's what was kind of funny was was during Covid. it was less relevant because people leave because they can't leave their house, and they're all massive and everything else. But now that we're back to normal, at least a new normal or a new next, or whatever we call it. I think some of these things that you talk about so clearly, and I want to delve into all that have become that much more important, as we've seen a whole rash of new conveniences and ways to buy it, and disruptions into the traditional process, and in almost every case
David Avrin: mit ctl. And those disruptions are preferable because they're easier or faster or simpler. Talk to us about about the the genesis of the book and your work in helping organizations reduce friction 150.
Roger Dooley: I guess it really stems back to my trying to explain
Roger Dooley: how to convert customers better, or how to change any behavior. I focus a lot on conversion, because that's near a dear to the hearts of many marketers. How do we turn these visitors into buyers? And I was focused on multiple aspects of that motivation that both conscious motivators like discounts and free things, and such
Roger Dooley: and the product characteristics itself, but also non-conscious motivators. That's what I wrote about in brain influence using behavioral science to change behaviors, to make people a little bit more likely to be persuaded, and I I should be
Roger Dooley: cost you one word of caution here. I, when I talk about that, I always want
Roger Dooley: anybody who's listening to use these techniques in an ethical way, because you.
Roger Dooley: if used wrong, they can be manipulative. But sure now we are doing this to help customers get to a better place. But in any event
Roger Dooley: one of the things I created a little framework called the Persuasion Slide, which was all about how to change behavior, and was based loosely on the work of a scientist named Bj. Fog, from Stanford, who created the fog behavior model 150
Roger Dooley: but it's also what means to try and explain to marketers? Well, how do you use those conscious marketing
Roger Dooley: aspects, the what? What's your, what's your product? Do this perform? Well, how does it compare to the competition what's the price and non-conscious motivators things like using a scarcity reciprocity and many of the other sort of lost aversion under cognitive biases. There's so many ways to use non conscious persuasion.
Roger Dooley: But one of the elements in the slide and basically visualize the customer at the top of the slide. You're trying to get the customer to the bottom. 100
Roger Dooley: is a friction. If you've ever seen a child get so stuck halfway down the slide. That's because
Roger Dooley: so in any case, that I I started focusing on friction as the
Roger Dooley: maybe the most important element in the slide, because it's the most overlooked
Roger Dooley: mit ctl. And we as business people, we focus on motivation but often neglect the friction aspects when we're trying to get more sales, convert more customers, 250.
David Avrin: Yeah, I I I was gonna say, based on the experience we all had as as children, whether it was the rusty slide or the water Slide, If the Community pool, if it's not well lubricated.
David Avrin: You Scooch, all the way down and and get burned on your legs, or whatever that might be, and I think it's a perfect analogy when you're looking at a world, and we're looking at a world of of pervasive quality.
David Avrin: I mean everybody's good. the differentiator. I think in earlier in my career. You know, with the words that we use to describe what we do, how do we better persuade people and the reality today is, we've come to the recognition that what we say about ourselves is less important, not unimportant, but less important than what other people say about us.
David Avrin: Erez agmoni and friction seems to be one of the primary drivers of those online comments, negative reviews, and other things as well. When when when people are are frustrated, because a process is what they and I love. The way you talked about this in the book is their perception. 150
David Avrin: of that experience their perception of whether or not it was unnecessarily complicated or unnecessarily. Time consuming. It might be fine for their industry. But we're comparing against Amazon or others right to talk about about about that, that friction being that that
David Avrin: that primary driver today of of positive or negative.
Roger Dooley: right? Well, there's some amazing work done by Gartner, who surveyed thousands of customer service interactions where somebody had to call up a company or interact with the company in some way, whether it's a return, a a technical question, some other kind of issue with the product.
Roger Dooley: and what they found was pretty amazing. My topic is loyalty, which is sort of the flip side of why customers leave, and sure what Gardner found was that
Roger Dooley: customers who had felt they had a high effort experience.
Roger Dooley: or about 96% likely to say they would be disloyal to the company. That's 1010 times as high as those who said they had a low effort experience. And that's that's pretty startling. Number the number that was perhaps even more startling was what happened to
Roger Dooley: word of mouth today, David, we know the word of mouth is so critical. People want reviews, they want ratings. They want to know what other people think before they pull the trigger on something.
Roger Dooley: The customers who said they had a high effort interaction. 88% said. They would say bad things about the brand to other people compared to just one of the low effort. Customers, that's 88% versus one. And and your point about
Roger Dooley: the perception of effort is exactly true, because
Roger Dooley: people are today, just comparing you to your competitors, I mean, hey? Like for one cable company against another cable company, and they all suck right.
Roger Dooley: They are comparing your experience to whatever they think is low effort. You You mentioned a couple of brands, Amazon zoom and Uber, and so on. And if you are making them work harder if your processes aren't quite as seamless as theirs. Then you could be high effort, even if you seem like you, you stack up pretty well compared to the competition.
David Avrin: right? Or compared to even what it was 5 years ago. Right? I mean, we can talk about being spoiled. Okay, but but it's our perception of. Was it a waste of our time, and the only thing we don't get more of his time, and occasionally i'll i'll post something online. I'm not a big fan of people ranting against against companies online because oftentimes it's that one single worker, and it's not necessarily fair. It's better to
David Avrin: complain to them. Let them address and see what we can do. But if I post something that was frustrating there, there's the inevitable rash of people around the world to saying, oh, first world problems. Okay, perhaps. But a problem in the mind of your customer is a problem.
David Avrin: and you look at lifetime value. One of the things I I love that you talked about is that the whole idea of that the behavioral economics right? And and i'm going to quote this exactly as it's in the book, and i'm sure it's from somebody else, because you did a great job of of citing a lot of source and a lot of studies. So the level of action is inversely proportionate to the level of friction.
David Avrin: Right? When you make things easier, people do more of it when it's more difficult, people do less of it, and it sounds intuitive.
David Avrin: But what are companies missing?
Roger Dooley: I I think they don't see the friction in their own processes, because first of all, they know how to do.
Roger Dooley: Yeah, Well, exactly, you know, if you ever ask somebody to review their new website where they were involved in the design process. they will point out how easy everything is, but give that to a total stranger who maybe, who isn't even back technically oriented.
Roger Dooley: you know, give it to your mom or your grandfather, or something. and say, okay, try and place an order. Try and get product information, or whatever the purpose of the website is, and you may well find a struggle. Things that seem obvious to you. simply aren't that obvious and
Roger Dooley: so often we just rely on our instinct, instead of testing
Roger Dooley: whether it's a website or mobile app an in-store process or anything else, and
Roger Dooley: you know little bits of effort make a huge difference. I I think that's perhaps the biggest reason things are better.
Roger Dooley: Companies just assume Well, that's normal. It's a little bit of effort. Is okay. And what I would contrast that with David is Amazon and one click ordering back in 1,999 they got a patent for one click ordering which might, you could see a product and click that by with one click button. And
Roger Dooley: you know, 2 days or less later, beyond your doorstep.
Roger Dooley: I I have to admit I have clicked that button far too many times in my life that that truck is always showing up in front of my house. But oh!
Roger Dooley: They were
Roger Dooley: challenged almost immediately by folks, said, Well, you can't patent something that obvious. Their biggest competitor at the time when they were primarily a bookseller, was Barnes and Noble, the big bookstore chain.
Roger Dooley: They put a similar feature on their website, and pretty soon they were locked in a big legal fight with Amazon.
Roger Dooley: and
Roger Dooley: after using cord millions of dollars in legal fees, Amazon one, their pat, was declared valid. And they, what do they get for all those, all that money, all that management, time and effort.
Roger Dooley: all the effort they imposed on their competition was one tiny little click.
Roger Dooley: Barnes and Noble had to add one more click. They added to confirm order, click after their by now. Click! That's all you know that doesn't seem like it'd be worth millions of dollars, but it was worth it to Amazon. They said, You know this one tiny little bit of effort
Roger Dooley: differential between us in the competition
Roger Dooley: is going to be a game changer, and there's one other person at the time who is pretty smart, who saw that same opportunity. That was Steve Jobs at apple apple paid Amazon 1 million dollars, so they, too, could have that one. A tiny little click advantage over their competition.
Roger Dooley: You know what's crazy, is it's been, how many companies, I would say. Well, we can't fix it again, and we realize that's a little bit clunky on our website or the mobile app. But, boy, that would cost thousands of dollars to fix, so we we'll leave it till next next Fiscal.
David Avrin: Right. But and and now where are we? We're 14 years later.
David Avrin: and how many companies are overly complex. I love and you detail this very well in the book. No, there's no shortage of people to talk about Amazon, but you
David Avrin: you couched it in terms of the simplicity of the process, and I think you could probably connect something like Uber as well as a great disruption. You could just get out of the out of the car. You don't have to fumble for your your credit card. You don't have to sit in traffic double parked in New York City in a cab. there's a better way of doing it, of course, that the cabs resisted for too long.
David Avrin: but it's astonishing to me how many others don't every time i'm if i'm at the gym or i'm in the car, and I need to pull out my credit card and type it in again.
David Avrin: Or, of course, if you type in your one something wrong, you have to go back and do your username again once again. First world problems. But there's so many phenomenal examples of companies that that actually do it. Well, there, there, there's crazy unnecessary
David Avrin: complication.
David Avrin: and you see it. You see it in the behavior. You see it in in the in the abandoned shopping cards. I think you have a great statistic. I think it's a few years old is probably over 4 or 5 trillion by now. The number of abandoned shopping carts, virtual shopping carts on sites because they got frustrated in the middle of the process. Talk about that.
Roger Dooley: Yeah. And actually the latest data. I just checked that to couple of days ago. The latest data shows that almost as many shopping carts are banned today as a percentage of total versus When I wrote the book it's about, I think, 67 68% on average now, and it, of course it varies by company by industry Some are much better
Roger Dooley: and of course Amazon eliminated that problem with one click. Because there is no shopping cart. You order to go straight to the warehouse. There's no chance for somebody to change their mind. But, but for most companies they still use shopping cards, and you can still use a shopping card. Amazon, of course.
Roger Dooley: Sure. And what the data shows is that there are a variety of reasons why people abandon their shopping cart. Sometimes they put something in there just to check the price or to check shipping because it wasn't clear. But, the majority of reasons for shopping card abandonment when they've done surveys of customers who actually did leave their shopping carts abandoned
Roger Dooley: we're frictional in nature. Oh, the checkout process was kind of complicated, or I couldn't check out as a guest. I had to set up an account with the company. And
Roger Dooley: gee! You know I didn't have my you know. Credit card information handy, and it wouldn't let me auto. Fill my credit card from my browser, which you know that that's such a common error, David. Even today, you know auto fill will fill in all day down a form for you. I know the big coast if the site is coded correctly.
Roger Dooley: but so often I would guess half the time when I go to fill in a form, whether it's something related to e-commerce like a checkout form or some other information request form. It has not been coded correctly to auto-fill for me. So I end up having to type everything in.
Roger Dooley: and you know, in some cases that effort is going to be just too much, especially if I don't have that information there with me. You know I don't have my credit card handy well I can't do it because it's it won't auto-fill for me.
Roger Dooley: and you know it's just little things like that. That. Companies don't see make such a huge difference right? And and for those who are watching it, listening to this once again talking to Roger Dooley, author of friction, 100 and 50
David Avrin: Lest you think this is petty, it's not so hard. The reality is, we're looking at this from the business perspective. Right? A lost customer. It's a lifetime value of a customer, and for those, because something is unnecessarily complicated. Or once again, if it works well for you, there are points of friction. I'm going to tell you, Roger, i'm the guy, and and i'm not
David Avrin: proud of this, but I i'm a guy who actually abandoned a real shopping cart at the grocery store at Walmart.
David Avrin: I was halfway through. I had a massive cart full, and by the ninth thing that it didn't unexpected item in the bagging thing. I couldn't get somebody to come over. I've got one of the the guns pricing guns, and I just start shooting everybody with the pricing gun and the people, and they're kind of looking at me. I'm like
David Avrin: this this, this doesn't work look on my face, and halfway through I I just. I went home. I was so frustrated. My wife is an angel. She's really good stuff. I hate it. Just at least give us a choice, and I get home, and she says so. Do you need help? Bring in the groceries, and I said, I don't have them. She was. I thought you went shopping. I said I did, and she said, Well, where I said I. I left him in the cart
David Avrin: at Walmart at the Self Check out. She says it was just so frustrating
David Avrin: like what's going to take me
David Avrin: an hour somebody else could do in 10 min. Now, i'm not naive. I understand the the financial pressures, but I think we can both agree. My God, just give people options like real options.
Roger Dooley: right, you know, and I think there's there's a couple of points that I can make about that. You You are a a relatively rare example of a physical shopping card banner. But it does happen, and you know, in self-check out I think is used incorrectly by many companies. I think self check out can be a great option. Okay, if I've got
Roger Dooley: you know, just the 2 items, and it's clearly Bar Coded. I will always go for the self check out where I can just zip through. Don't have to do anything. It's so simple. But if I've got a cart load of stuff, some of which maybe is produce. It needs to be wait, or have codes entered, or something like that. I am going to be very inefficient at that. So
Roger Dooley: if a company is forcing me into self-check out, if if they have inadequate cash years where they've got one cashier and there's like 10 people in line. then I to the ban in my cart. I mean, that's not the way to do it. You want to give the customer their preferred option, and if my preferred option is a cashier I would like to expect.
Roger Dooley: I like to see a cashier available without a link to wait. And you know Amazon is working on this problem in 2 ways. I I keep coming back to Amazon, but their focus is on the standard. Jeff Bezos himself said.
Roger Dooley: When you reduce friction, make something easy, people do more of it, and that has been their guiding principle for the last couple of decades. But in their in retail they They've got a couple of innovations, and I just wrote about one of the Forbes literally 2 days ago.
Roger Dooley: but one innovation has been out there for a while, and that is the
Roger Dooley: got. It.
Roger Dooley: Just Just walk out shopping where right your products are scanned as you put them in your cart, and then you can basically just to leave you won't have a checkout process at all. So I mean that that's even better than the cashier. Check out right
Roger Dooley: the other one that I wrote about is a little bit simpler of an innovation. I and it is Amazon one, and what it is is a little pound scanner at the checkout. I'm lucky in Austin, where the
Roger Dooley: headquarters for whole foods, which is now part of Amazon, and we're one of the test sites for Amazon, One as you check out the cashiers, ring up your stuff. You pass your phone
Roger Dooley: over a little palm scanner, and it
Roger Dooley: immediately applies your prime discounts, which often there are some. If you're shopping at whole foods and your prime member, you'll get significant discounts on sale items so it gets your loyalty information automatically, and it
Roger Dooley: gets your payment information you previously stored. So what that means? Somebody said, Well, what's the big deal? I mean, it's not that difficult to pull out a mobile app or something?
Roger Dooley: This doesn't require you to have anything you don't need your phone. You don't need your wall with your credit card in it. you know
Roger Dooley: I I really have. Occasionally I've gotten to the store. I got almost of the checkout realized. Oh, darn, you know, I left my credit card at home or in the car or something. And suddenly I've got this dilemma of okay, how am I going to check out here? You know. There, there's none of that. And what am I posted about this on Facebook, and one of my friends said, Well, what's the big deal?
Roger Dooley: And I point out that, okay, without that little innovation of a single slip of your palm
Roger Dooley: the process would be for me to. First of all, i'll pull out my phone
Roger Dooley: from my pocket. Open up the whole food, Zack!
Roger Dooley: Find the QR. Code, scan it. So okay, I've got my loyal to information entered. Now I have to put my phone away, get my wallet out, get my credit card out, and then insert that and go through that process, and then finally return it to my wallet and put that back in my pocket. Now, as you mentioned it. This is kind of a first world problem. It's not that difficult to process.
Roger Dooley: But but when you have choice a little palm scan eliminates, you know, probably 6 or 7 discrete little steps of effort. and yeah, it's like one click. Isn't a big deal right? Well, it made a big difference for Amazon for itunes, and so I can easily see
Roger Dooley: mit ctl, and how people will view this as just a nice little convenience that they prefer. In fact. Now, if i'm checking out a whole food, so they have a couple of registers in different parts of the stores that Don't have, that it installed yet 150.
David Avrin: I I will go through a line that has it, because I know it's going to be much easier. Right, you know. I think what we're seeing a lot, and you talk about this a little bit in the in the book. Friction is companies that make things a little unnecessarily complicated, because they're so eager to capture your information.
David Avrin: And so it's when you can do a free trial. But you can't do a free trial unless you put in your credit card information first, right? or you want to. You want to be able to buy something, but you need to create an account to make all of that happen. I I the same thing. I was going through a Wendy's, and I saw they had some special for some some breakfast thing as well. And of course that's the nature of just getting lots of text messages over and over again, because i'm on a family text. If I can figure out how to let's turn that off, there we go even better.
David Avrin: And i'm going through when I go there. And they said, yeah, you've got. They've got the special deal, but you got to do it through the app. And I said, Well.
David Avrin: i'm at the drive through. When they said, No, you need to download the app to make it happen. This was almost comical, and you know, for those of us always say for speakers, you don't have bad things happen. We just get new stories to tell, so I said, All right, let's see what this is going to take, and fortunately I had a little bit of time, so I had to pull out of the the drive through line. I had to download the app.
David Avrin: Then I had to pull out my wallet, enter the credit card information all of that, just to be able to get my dollar off, which I wouldn't have done. Have I not been looking for good content, but they were so intent on making sure that I had their app. They had my information, my credit card, my content that i'd never had to get out of myself. I'm already in the line.
David Avrin: and they said.
David Avrin: we can't. We don't have a process for that.
David Avrin: So we're seeing a lot of this very complicated. What what would be your advice
David Avrin: ere
David Avrin: with what we prefer as customers or clients, or prospects or patients?
David Avrin: How how do you? How do you balance that
Roger Dooley: right? Well, first of all, do not push to an international keynote speaker through that kind of process. Because, if you think word of mouth is bad, I try word of mouth when that story is amplified by you know. In fact, it it to do a little side anecdote
Roger Dooley: long before the Internet was a thing, and social media was the thing. I recall hearing a presentation from the speaker and told a story about how he
Roger Dooley: made a special trip. He was having a cook out for family and friends. They did not have Pickles made a special trip to the stores of pickles. Got a jar pickles. I got home, open it up, and one of them appeared to have a bite out of it like somebody had opened the jar and taken a bite.
Roger Dooley: So we ran back to the store and immediately had this incredibly difficult experience where basically the implication was that they were that he was lying about. It was trying to get a free jar of pickles or something, and
Roger Dooley: he ended up getting it. But it was an awful experience where they finally just slung the new jar pickles across the check out at him, and I
Roger Dooley: he pointed out to the point he was making was not so much about pickles or the supermarket, but that he told that story to millions of people. But he he actually did account, and it it gone to more than a 1 million people that one bad customer experience. So you know I, These things can amplify far beyond what you might expect.
Roger Dooley: But you know, I think, that
Roger Dooley: you know there's a desire to get people's information because you can market to them. But you know Trump maybe provide a backup system, you know, if if somebody's in check out line and they need it, and they don't have the app.
Roger Dooley: there should be something that that that the customer person service person could do the the check out person say, okay, hey? I'll take care of this time. But will you please download the app and install it? It's empowering people. Yeah, you know. I mean, yeah, just just like the people on on the spot to deal with it.
Roger Dooley: We've got a great supermarket here in Texas, and they're only in Texas, and that is heb people from everybody in Texas knows Hb. A people outside of Texas only here, but occasionally but they do that with their people. If you've got a problem
Roger Dooley: I I've seen so problems one. In one case I got to. Oh, I fail to get a 2 for one deal that I saw in an AD later, you know, instead of going through some complicated accounting process the customer service process.
Roger Dooley: okay, yeah, You know, that was actually for this other kind of store in the store that you bought this and didn't have that deal available. But just go ahead and get one you know. Just go pick one out and say, Well, do I need to receive or anything? No, no, just just go get one of the same kind you got before.
Roger Dooley: So good, hey? They trust me, they don't think i'm trying to somehow cheat them out of a flower pot. You know it's and you know to me that and many other experiences like that. That's how you build brand loyalty when I go to their competitor. I I had an opposite experience of their competitor. Where
Roger Dooley: remind me of the pickle story. I got some olives that were moldy.
Roger Dooley: and I got into a big argument with the produce manager that a they were supposed to look like that because they were Buchi's olives. And no, they're not supposed to have fuzz growing off of them. But i'll. Finally he said, Look these refrigerator. They're not moldy and really mad. He's going to show me how refrigerated they are. He opens up the thing, says, oh, hey! It looks like the refrigeration units down.
Roger Dooley: and it was. It was kind of embarrassing for him. But I mean to put a customer through that process, arguing about whether olives have right by them, whether they clearly do it. It's it's our our colleague our terrific colleague ship Hiken, has a whole philosopher. I can't remember what the product is, but it is the the philosophies around. Basically, don't smell the jar
David Avrin: like when someone says this doesn't smell right. You don't smell it. Just see if they're like it's it's nothing, I mean, even with Amazon Nowadays, If there's something a fairly low price item, it comes back wrong. They'll send you new one, they say don't even send it back right? What is because it just doesn't make sense to to pay for that as well. When we talk about
David Avrin: about sort of frustration and friction, and you can interchange the words and complication of the process.
David Avrin: What I really liked about the book was that you talked about how that translates into different aspects in our life, what taxes do in terms of our motivation, even internationally, what company, what countries are difficult to do business with. But I love what you talked about internally within an organization, and that friction within an organization.
David Avrin: It's anonymous with red tape.
David Avrin: Talk about that
Roger Dooley: exactly. And you know we could. We could vote an entire podcast to employee experience and employee engagement. But, in this country we have a problem. Only one out of 3 employees, according to Gallup, is actively engaged with their work or their workplace.
Roger Dooley: 2 out of 3, or
Roger Dooley: which you know. Imagine, if you're trying to deliver fantastic customer experience. If 2 out of 3, your people aren't really engaged with the company, they're just by the time they're you know we're picking up their paycheck. they are not going to deliver that fantastic customer experience. and it's even worse globally globally. It's a averages one in 5, and
Roger Dooley: I just did a keynote in one Italy, and i'm, sad to say, in Italy.
Roger Dooley: the number, according to gallup is only one out of 25 that's down from one out of 20 a few before the pandemic. imagine that if only 25 of your people i'm! Hoping there's some companies that do much better than that. I'm sure there are. But it's only one of 25 year. People are engaged. You know how
Roger Dooley: productive is your company going to be? How
Roger Dooley: What kind of customer service, customer experience are they going to deliver, and so on? What do you attribute that to? Is it leadership.
Roger Dooley: or is it unnecessary process that's frustrating. Well, it's there are a lot of things so it's it's just bad management is one people there's you know where there's not communication. you know there's no recognition of work that people are doing. There are a lot of reasons, but the one that I focus on on our unnecessary processes.
Roger Dooley: things like all
Roger Dooley: forms that people have to fill out to do something, for example, in the company that where they don't really need, that checks and balances layers of approval complicated expense reporting processes, you know.
Roger Dooley: I've been a an entrepreneur for decades. but I had a corporate stip for a few years after I sold a business, and I joined the company as a vp of digital marketing as part of the contractual sale. And
Roger Dooley: I had to fill out an expense report like everybody else, and what I found was I
Roger Dooley: even an item as small as a $2 cup of coffee, if you can still find one of those had to be documented with a piece of paper. Right now you know this.
Roger Dooley: It was an incredible waste of time. I was submitting expense reports that you have always a little piece of paper. I would lose them, of course, occasionally, or forget to get one, and I wouldn't get reimbursed with that. And it was an insane process 250,
Roger Dooley: which is not required by law. The Irs has much more liberal guidelines in the Us as far as documenting expenses. But Later on, after I left the company, and I spoke to the Controller, who at that point had also left the company and said, Why did you do that?
Roger Dooley: you know it's just so much work because they actually check those things. Not only did I have to go through the effort, somebody, and they did. One time they caught me on one. I They had a $2 expense, but I lost the receipt, and they they actually caught me on it. But I asked me, said, Well, we didn't trust that. People wouldn't somehow abuse the system.
Roger Dooley: and trust is so important, you know, when you show people you trust them, they are more likely to trust. You. Trust is reciprocated, and trust is a huge indicator of company performance. Yeah, Paul Zack, the oxytocin researcher who discovered the oxytocin, is the hormone of human trust.
Roger Dooley: He found. He and his team went into
Roger Dooley: Mit Ctl. And high-performing and low-performing companies did thousands of surveys asking people about different things in the company, including trust levels. Or do you trust the company to trust your boss? They trust you, and so on, 150?
Roger Dooley: And also they did something kind of strange. They took thousands of blood samples when they got back to their lab and analyzed all the data. What they found was pretty amazing. The high performing companies were high trust companies. Not only is indicated by the surveys.
David Avrin: but is indicated by the levels of oxytocin in people's bloodstream. I think you're saying they were taking blood to to identify people who were stealing from the company.
Roger Dooley: Well, you there you go. Well, it's sometimes My, try that DNA sample. We we have some paper clips missing from the supply cabinet.
Roger Dooley: you know. No, it's, and it's so important when you and often the reason for these processes like complicated expense reporting, or gee, you you need a your state for a broken need, a new stapler. It got a fellow to form. Yeah, right, you know companies have this because they
Roger Dooley: don't trust their people not to seal stuff. They really need to ask themselves, you know. Are people really going to steal stuff. If you do occasionally lose something. How is that going to compare in the dollar value and monetary value to 250?
Roger Dooley: The lack of productivity, the lack of trust that you're creating, and everything else, you know. One Netflix has gone to a
Roger Dooley: very different approach. The No
Roger Dooley: right. They threw out their employee handbook. They had all these guidelines for travel and everything else.
Roger Dooley: If you gotta travel they don't dictate exactly how you have to make the reservation, or how you, you know, have to do things they say do it in the make sure it's in the best interest of the company, you know, and same thing for you. If you're going to entertain a client, it's not like, Well, there's a women on how much you can spend, or anything else but
Roger Dooley: to it, and make sure it's in the best interest of the company. And if they have a problem they may tell somebody. Okay, hey? You know you're kind of over doing it here, and if it's not corrected, they might even then clamp down on that particular situation.
Roger Dooley: But basically, they trust everybody until they Somehow somebody shows that they don't deserve that trust. And to me that's a a strategy that we all could use.
David Avrin: Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of the the study show that the vast majority of theft is internal, anyway. But in we still walk out of Costco and have to show our receipt. I think a big takeaway for businesses. We got a couple of minutes here left. Is that
David Avrin: revisit your process a lot of people are following process. They don't even know how that it came about, or who designed it, or maybe it you know their predecessors had put something in place as a reaction to some event. Right? We all take off our shoes at the airport because that one guy, you know, had a a bombing issue. And so I I think we're seeing smart
David Avrin: company leaders coming in slashing process, simplifying, expediting. But I think anybody can do that within their company is, walk their customers journey, walk their employees journey, and incentivize the identification of of obsolete and onerous processes. Do you agree
Roger Dooley: absolutely? And you know your people actually have many of the answers, David, you know when you, if you simply ask all your frontline people what to customers, complain about, or ask anybody in your company.
Roger Dooley: What would make your job easier? How are we wasting? They? They will identify those things. They know whether time is being wasted. I know my time was being wasted. I was fooling around with $2 receipts. Nobody ever asked me if I told them they didn't want to hear about it. You don't say that's that's how we do it here.
Roger Dooley: And you know, if you ask people, they'll tell you, and often to people I've read quite a bit of literature on process simplification. And
Roger Dooley: one of the things is that's pretty common, is you ask people about what rules would you eliminate? Okay, if you if we can eliminate some stupid rules that are wasting your time.
Roger Dooley: they often identify some stupid rules that are wasting their time, but half the time the rule they identify Isn't even a rule at all. It was a practice that's been headed from person to person, and nobody ever thought to question it.
David Avrin: Love it just taking notes here myself talking to Roger dooling the author as I show it on screen here of friction. The on tap force that can be your most powerful advantage. And of course, brain influence as well. We like to end the show with a quick speed round, okay. Simple answers very quick! Whatever comes to your mind, You ready?
David Avrin: I'm ready. I'm not prepared for this, so we'll see how speed well you're not supposed to. That's the whole idea of a speed run. Just okay, PC. Or Mac
Roger Dooley: both.
David Avrin: Okay. Good Answer. Because all right. Well, i'll leave it at that.
David Avrin: or plant based
David Avrin: meet. Hey? I'm from Texas. Gotta get back. There you go, I say, you you you you! You'd be asked to leave the State shopping mall or online shopping
Roger Dooley: totally online. I almost never go into a Mall anymore.
David Avrin: Food Court. It's probably the the best part of it Instagram or Tik Tok
David Avrin: Instagram, not to, not in particular. There's only so many platforms that I can handle, and I haven't gotten into tik tok sadly. I'm Instagram for business tik tok just to veg at the end of the night. in recent years. What do you think is the worst
David Avrin: business, innovation or business trend
Roger Dooley: the worst business trend. Wow! I don't know two-factor authentication, maybe, where it's not needed. You know it's I understand why it's necessary in some cases, but when it's not needed. I just even Zoom, who I use in my speeches as an example of a frictionless in their motto includes the word frictionless.
Roger Dooley: I had had terrible two-factor authentication process where I had to enter a code. I just set up a new computer prior to this interview and I enter a oh, 6 6 digit code but I only had 10 min to do it, and the email wasn't coming. I missed like 2 opportunities to do it before I finally got one within the 10 min window.
David Avrin: Your best
David Avrin: business innovation
David Avrin: or best business trend. What's what's new that you're really excited about?
Roger Dooley: I think the overall emphasis on making things easier. You know, we we talk a lot about the companies that don't get making things easy right.
Roger Dooley: But in fact, many companies are really striving for that. And to me we're seeing that more shopping so much easier. Now, the pandemic, let us place online orders that somebody will put right in your trunk for you and things like that. Those things are going away. They're They're here to stay because they're easy.
David Avrin: Yeah, delivery. The best of the best tougher question. What do you think is the best thing to come out of Covid?
Roger Dooley: Hmm. I think.
Roger Dooley: Well, i'll. I'll give you 2 answers to that. You know, I think, that the use of virtual as a means of working, communicating, even giving speeches. I I think that even though we all wanted to get back in person, and I've had some great in person experiences since then. I've seen People are practically breaking down in tears when they saw people they hadn't seen in 3 years. So so I mean, that's been great. But I think that recognition that that's a a valuable channel, and it can be very powerful to. I think that's that's one. And then the other is just the
Roger Dooley: development of new methods of convenient convenience for shopping and a lot of other things. We found better ways to do things, but now are going away like delivery, like curbside, and pick up, and so on.
David Avrin: Good, perfect. What's the best part of getting back to traveling again?
Roger Dooley: Hmm.
Roger Dooley: I don't know. I've
Roger Dooley: never been. You know one of those people says, wow, I really enjoy travel, because when once you, when you do enough of it, you know it, it can get to be a grind. But I I think just the excitement of being in a
Roger Dooley: different environment totally. You know. I did a a couple of speeches in Berlin did the one in the line all in the last. I don't know 6, 8 weeks, or something, and being in a different place, I was really.
Roger Dooley: I think, a lot of a lot of fun, and it gets your mind into a different space, too. You know, when you're sitting in your office, connecting remotely everywhere, your your mind gets kind of in a rot. And so I think that travel opens you up to new things. Yeah, the destination that's the best part of it. What's your favorite city that you've spoken in.
Roger Dooley: Hmm.
Roger Dooley: I think i'll go with my most recent one, Milan, you know. I think, that there's the food is so great. The architecture is so fascinating. The fashion is, the people are so warm. Yeah, Absolutely. Last question. 250.
David Avrin: What's your proudest dad? Moment?
David Avrin: I know you got 2 kids. You have, son and a daughter, both of them in in
David Avrin: digital marketing as well
David Avrin: as s toy.
Roger Dooley: Yeah, i'll see, you, you know. Promise Dad moment would be a difficult, because I might have might mean the singing out to one child over the I think right right. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no! No
Roger Dooley: promise Moment is just seeing both of them end up as being, you know, smart, successful individuals, in very different ways, but they both are following their own path. I mean, I think that
Roger Dooley: when you look back it's not a moment, perhaps. But when you can look back and say, okay, somehow, you manage not to screw this up to that. That's that's really what I drive the most. I love the line. This is as as parents were not raising children. We're raising adults
David Avrin: right preparing them for the world. So it's. It's a good time. listen! I appreciate the time we once again talking to Roger Dooley, who is the author of friction, the ontap Force. That can be your most powerful advantage. If people want to get in touch with you, learn more about your work and about your speaking. How do they get in touch with you?
Roger Dooley: The best place to start would be Roger dooley.com there you can find links to on my socials, my Youtube Channel, my Forbes column, and so on and on social media. I'm easy to find on Linkedin and Twitter. That's where I spend probably most of my social media time.
David Avrin: and we'll put your contact information in this as well, and the last name is D. O. L, e, Y. So you can get in touch with him. I really appreciate your time. Hang on because you and I will connect real quickly on the other side of this.
David Avrin: remind everybody You can pick up a copy of my new book, which is the morning huddle, powerful customer experience conversations to wake you up and shake you up, and when more business matter of fact, all of my books that are strategically located next to my head on the visual version are available on on Amazon, and most of them on audible as well. Be sure to click to like this podcast
David Avrin: subscribe. Leave your comments. Comments are really important. So please do that as well. You can click on the little bell to receive notifications of new episodes, and you can learn more about my keynote speaking by consulting at David Avenuecom.
David Avrin: Thanks for turning into the why customers leave the podcast. Be sure to leave a comment big thanks to Roger Dooley for being my guest. I'm, David Avrin, be good.