Today, getting from the airport to your hotel is usually the easiest part of a trip, but that wasn’t always the case.

Imagine you’ve just landed after a long flight and need to get to your hotel before a conference starts. You’re tired, hungry, and short on time. At baggage claim, you’re already thinking about the next hurdle: finding a taxi. You head outside, join the line, and hope to get a cab quickly. Once you’re on your way, the uncertainty continues. You’re in an unfamiliar city, don’t know the fastest route, and only have a rough idea of what the ride will cost. As traffic slows, you watch the meter climb and wonder how much more you’ll pay before reaching your destination.

What should be a simple trip becomes a series of small frustrations.

Fortunately, that’s not the experience most of us have today. Rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft make the process more transparent and predictable. You know when your ride will arrive, where it’s going, and what it will cost before you ever get in the car. The destination didn’t change, but the friction associated with the trip did.

The same kind of friction exists in advisory practices. Friction is anything that creates unnecessary effort, confusion, delays, or frustration for clients. A confusing form, repeated requests for information, or an unclear next step may seem minor, but they can quietly erode the client experience.

Where Friction Shows Up

Friction often hides in routine interactions that everyone has come to accept as normal. It can show up anywhere clients need to take action, provide information, complete paperwork, navigate technology, or understand what comes next.

Consider registering for an online portal. To your team, it’s a two-minute setup. To the client, it’s another username, another password, an identity verification step, and then the challenge of figuring out what to do once they’re logged in.

Or think about paperwork that comes back incomplete because a signature was missing or a field was left blank. The client thought they were finished. Instead, they’re reopening forms and hunting for the problem. Each extra step can make working with your practice feel more complicated than it needs to be.

These aren’t isolated examples. Similar friction can surface during onboarding, account transfers, beneficiary updates, document requests, meeting preparation, and countless other interactions throughout the client relationship.

The issue isn’t always client follow-through. Sometimes the process itself creates more complexity than it needs to.

What feels routine internally can create unnecessary effort for clients. The problem is that when those moments add up, they can start to shape how clients experience and perceive your practice.

The Cost of Friction

Clients may not remember every recommendation you make, but they’ll remember how easy it was to work with you. When small frustrations pile up, the costs can be significant:

• Clients May Start to Question the Relationship
  Repeated requests for documents, forms that need to be resubmitted, and processes that feel unnecessarily complicated can gradually chip away at confidence and trust.

• Your Practice May Begin to Feel Outdated
  If working with you feels like flagging down a taxi in a rideshare world, clients will notice. They increasingly expect experiences that are simple, convenient, and easy to navigate. When processes feel unnecessarily cumbersome, the practice may begin to feel outdated, even when the advice itself is exceptional.

• Referrals May Become Less Likely
  This is the big one. People are more likely to refer experiences that feel easy, seamless, and enjoyable. When clients frequently encounter obstacles, delays, or unnecessary effort, they may be less inclined to recommend the practice to friends and family.

  And it doesn’t stop with your clients. Friction affects your team as well. Time spent tracking down paperwork, correcting errors, and managing preventable delays can create frustration and pull people away from work that adds greater value. Over time, those inefficiencies can make the practice feel more difficult to run than it should be.

How to Resolve Friction

Fortunately, friction usually leaves clues. Once you know where to look, many of the biggest friction points become surprisingly easy to identify. In my practice, we started paying close attention to what we called “oopsies,” those moments when clients got stuck, needed extra help, asked clarifying questions, or when a team member had to spend time resolving a preventable issue.

Financial professionals aren’t always the ones experiencing these moments firsthand. More often, they show up in conversations between clients and the administrative team. That’s why some of the best insights come from the people handling client requests, paperwork, follow-up calls, and day-to-day problem-solving.

Rather than treating these moments as routine, we started viewing them as opportunities to reduce friction. Every oopsie was a clue that something in the client experience could be made easier.

When we noticed oopsies, we asked:

• What could confuse the client?

• What could slow this down?

• Where do mistakes typically happen?

• What requires unnecessary effort from the client or the team?

The answers to these questions often reveal the biggest friction points in a practice. Here are two examples I frequently see:

401(k) Rollovers

• The Request: You ask a client to roll over an old 401(k).

• The Oopsie: The client calls the practice because they’re confused about how to start the process or what steps to take next.

• The Friction Point: It sounds straightforward, but for the client it can feel like a maze. They may not understand the terminology or know which questions to ask. Once they contact the provider, they’re often met with additional paperwork, unexpected requirements, or efforts to keep the assets in place. What seemed like a simple task suddenly becomes frustrating and time-consuming.

• The Fix: Don’t send them through the process alone. Join the call when appropriate, provide guidance beforehand, or equip a team member to help. The more support clients receive upfront, the less likely they are to become confused, discouraged, or delayed.

Transferring From Another Financial Professional

• The Request: You ask a client to transfer assets from a previous financial professional.

• The Oopsie: The client seems hesitant or anxious about contacting their current financial professional and delays taking action.

• The Friction Point: From the client’s perspective, this is often more emotional than administrative. Many clients are uncomfortable initiating the conversation and aren’t prepared for objections, retention efforts, or questions they didn’t expect. What seems like a simple transfer can quickly become stressful.

• The Fix: Prepare clients before the conversation happens. Provide sample language, explain what they can expect, and discuss how they might respond to common questions. Helping clients feel confident and prepared can significantly reduce anxiety and keep the process moving forward.

These are just two examples. Oopsies can show up anywhere clients interact with your practice. A delayed account transfer, a confusing form, a client who needs help navigating a process, or a team member making the same follow-up call for the third time may all point to opportunities to reduce friction.

The key is to start looking for them. Every question, delay, misunderstanding, or request for help is a clue that the experience could be made easier.

To Summarize

First, friction often hides in routine interactions that everyone has come to accept as normal. Second, when those moments add up, they can affect both the client experience and how clients perceive the practice. Third, by paying attention to “oopsies,” the moments when clients get stuck, ask for help, or experience delays, financial professionals can uncover opportunities to make doing business with them easier.

The Bottom Line: Make Working with You Feel Effortless

Uber didn’t fundamentally change what a ride was. It simply removed much of the uncertainty, hassle, and frustration surrounding the experience. The same opportunity may exist within your practice. Every time you make a process a little clearer, a little simpler, or a little easier for clients to navigate, you’re reducing friction and strengthening the overall experience. Over time, those small improvements can help build a practice that feels more efficient, more trusted, and more valuable to the people you serve.

Next Step

The next time an “oopsie” happens, a client gets confused, needs extra help, misses a step, or a team member has to resolve a preventable issue, don’t treat it as business as usual. Ask one simple question:

How could we make this easier next time?