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The 21-day Friction Audit

One business unit. One number your finance team will recognize. For the five organizations in the Founding Cohort, there is no fee.

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At a glance

The Friction Audit

Length: 21 days
Scope: One business unit
Your team's time: About six hours
System access: None needed
Fee: None for the Founding Cohort
Applications close: 31 December 2026
Fee: Agreed in advance

What you get

A finance-ready statement of what one business unit's broken customer journeys cost in a year, built from your own data: the avoidable cost, how much of it is recoverable, in what order, and the expected return of recovering it.

A written report you keep.
A one-page summary for your board.
A 45-minute presentation to your leadership team.

How it is counted

Five costs your organization already records somewhere, joined for the first time for one journey. Every line is a volume multiplied by a rate, with the parts of the rate shown, so your finance team can take the number apart and rebuild it.

Repeat contacts

The customer came back because the first contact did not resolve the issue.

Manual rework

A person had to correct or re-process something the journey should have completed.

Escalations

The issue moved to a more expensive team.

Goodwill and credits

Money given to the customer to close the matter.

Attributable churn

Customers who left because of this journey's failures, measured against a comparison group and labeled as an estimate where it must be.

The 21 days

About six hours of your team's time across three weeks. No access to your systems is needed.

Scoping days 1 to 3
We agree the business unit and the journey, the data fields, and who signs the confidentiality terms.
Data days 4 to 10
Your team extracts one to three months of contact, case, credit and churn records in whatever format exists. We clean and join them.
Analysis days 11 to 17
The five costs are computed, the recoverable share is estimated, and the findings are checked with your operations lead before anything is written.
Report days 18 to 21
The written report, the one-page board summary and the 45-minute presentation.

What we need from you

One sponsor, and one operations contact who knows where the data sits.
Data extracts, anonymized at source if you prefer: contact records, the case or rework queue, credit and waiver codes, and customer status at period end. Customer identifiers can be replaced with codes before they reach us.
A signed two-page confidentiality agreement. We send it, and your legal team can amend it.

What we ask in return

Permission to use the anonymized data in the Institute's research on friction and churn. Your organization may be named as a contributing site; no figure is attributed to you.
One anonymized case study, approved by you before publication, describing your organization by sector and size unless you choose to be named.
A short reference conversation with one future client, if you are satisfied with the work.

What this is not

It is not a sales engagement. Nothing is sold during the 21 days.
It is not an accreditation, a certification or a validation of your operation, and it is not a statutory audit or an assurance engagement.
It does not claim that every contact is avoidable or that the cheapest journey is the best one. Contacts that create value are protected, not deflected.

The method is published in full as the IACS-7 Standard, and the research it feeds is in preparation, one paper with a university co-author. After the Founding Cohort, audits are offered at a fee agreed in advance.

Apply for a place

The next step is a 30-minute call to choose the business unit and the journey.

Applications are read by Ahmad Samir, Founder and Chairman. Places are offered in the order that scoping is agreed.