Eliminate Friction: Smooth Out Your Customer Experience (Fans First Principle #1)

How to Smooth Out Every Bump in the Road for Your Customers

Every time a customer sighs or grumbles doing business with you, you’ve got friction – and friction is the enemy of fandom. Eliminating friction is Principle #1 of Jesse Cole’s Fans First playbook for a reason: it’s the foundation for everything else. Think about it – can you imagine enjoying a baseball game where you wait 30 minutes for a $12 soda and the will-call line stretches a mile? Nope, that experience has more friction than sandpaper. Jesse understood that, so he set out to remove all the pain points that make fans hate going to games. The Bananas eliminated boring downtime by inventing a faster-paced game. They killed hidden fees by making tickets one flat price (which even includes food!). They looked at every touchpoint – from buying a ticket to leaving the parking lot – and asked, “How can we make this easier, faster, better?”

Now, let’s bring this idea to your transportation business. Whether you’re a freight broker, a trucking company, or a logistics software provider, your customers have their own version of long concession lines and boring innings. It might be clunky paperwork, slow quotes, hard-to-reach reps, confusing pricing, or lack of updates. It’s time to grab a notepad and do a Mirror Moment (as Jesse would say): put yourself in your customer’s shoes and walk through your entire process. Where are they waiting? Where are they annoyed or confused? List every friction point you can find – big or small. This is your hit list for change.

Here are some action steps to eliminate friction and make your customer experience smooth as butter:

• Map the Journey & Identify Pain Points: Literally draw out the steps a customer takes from first contact to final delivery. Highlight where things slow down or cause frustration. Is it the long hold times on the phone? The cumbersome onboarding form? A lack of status updates during shipping? Pinpoint the trouble spots.

• Fix or Remove One Friction at a Time: Tackle the biggest pain point first. For example, if customers hate waiting 48 hours for a rate quote, find ways to speed that up (maybe automate the easy parts or set up a quick-response team). If your invoices confuse people, redesign them in plain language. Quick win: Jesse suggests even little things like your hold music or voicemail can add joy instead of irritation – could you, say, replace the bland hold music with a fun message or helpful info?

• Empower “Friction Fighters” on Your Team: Make it everyone’s job to spot and kill friction. Train your customer-facing employees to be on the lookout – if they hear the same complaint twice, that’s friction to eliminate. Encourage them to bring up issues and ideas to fix them. For instance, if your dispatcher notices drivers always ask the same questions about load info, maybe it’s time to proactively send that info every time.

• Be Transparent & Proactive: A lot of friction comes from uncertainty. Take a page from Bananas’ all-inclusive tickets – no surprises. In trucking, that could mean transparent pricing with fuel, tolls, etc. included, or at least no hidden surcharges. Proactively communicate delays or issues before customers ask. Removing the need for a customer to chase you for info = friction gone.

• Regularly Audit and Update: Friction has a sneaky way of creeping back in as your business changes. So schedule a regular “friction audit” (maybe every quarter). Gather feedback: ask customers “What’s one thing that annoyed you or could’ve been easier?” – and then fix it before it annoys someone else.

Eliminating friction is an ongoing effort, but every little improvement sends a big message to your clients: We care about your experience. As Jesse Cole puts it, this is “the starting point for all innovation.” Once you’ve smoothed out the ride, people will be far more receptive to all the fun, engaging stuff you build on top of it. In a world where so many companies stick to “that’s just how it’s done,” you’ll earn mad respect (and loyalty) by saying “how should it be done?” and making it happen. Remove the barriers, and you’ll find your customers sticking with you for the long haul – not because they have to, but because it’s a joy to do so.

Real-World Example: One freight brokerage noticed that many first-time shippers were confused by industry jargon and pricing formats (fuel surcharges, accessorial fees – ugh 🙄). It was a major friction point causing distrust. Taking a Fans First approach, they redesigned their quotes to a simple all-in rate – no add-ons – and wrote an FAQ in plain English explaining common terms. They even added a friendly video of a rep walking through the first shipment process. The result? New customers felt at ease, trust went up, and so did repeat business. By eliminating confusion and anxiety, they turned a potentially one-off customer into a fan who came back with more loads.

Remember: whenever you make a customer think “Wow, that was easy!”, you’ve done your job in the Eliminate Friction department.