3 Elements Of Friction To Remove From Your Customer Experience

When setting up a business, you could do much worse than understanding how you prefer to be treated as a customer and using those impressions to build out your process. Thinking of all the times you’ve felt frustrated and annoyed by a poor customer experience is a good place to start. Maybe a company forced you to wait an hour on the phone before attending to your claim, or hidden charges meant that adding products to your basket suddenly came with many additional fees.

Unfortunately, if there’s an issue or a way to fleece some more money from customers, at least one business has experienced or tried that on before. For this reason, it’s good to try to remove all inconveniences and annoyances from your brand for the best results.

But how might you go about such an effort? In this post, we’ll discuss some examples and how to prevent friction from occurring in that way.

Payment Issues & Incompatible Websites

The frustration of reaching a checkout only to find that a preferred payment method isn’t accepted is perhaps one of the most annoying aspects of online shopping. It’s similar to reaching the front of a long queue, and then being told the purchase can’t be completed due to payment limitations or that the checkout clerk has finished their shift. That’s why it’s good to integrate with as many as you reasonably can. A credit card processing company can help, as can integration with popular platforms like PayPal.

Depending on your business type, you may also wish to implement Apple or Google Pay, Klarna, and other credit or pay later options, and even cryptocurrency for certain audiences can be considered. The simple goal here is to simplify the payment process as much as possible. A customer unable to pay is a customer unable to make a purchase, regardless of their desire for the product, and odds are they won’t wait around but find someone happy to take their money.

Of course, this also means running a secure website compatible with most modern browsers and with up-to-date security certificates. If a website gives a warning on a browser, few will trust you with their payment info.

Poor Navigation & Loading

Browsing a website and becoming lost in a maze of poorly organized pages is a nightmare, and you may wonder why it’s 2024 and you’re having this experience. Good website navigation should function like a helpful guide and a simple place to return, directing customers to their desired destination efficiently and without confusion or constant loading.

If you spend time sorting products or services into logical categories, that can serve as a good starting point. Clear, descriptive labels for menu items can also help. Of course, they’ll thank you for a search function as well just in case.

Loading times are another essential element which is why keeping your website simple and without too many scripts can be important. Waiting more than a few seconds for a page to load can feel frustrating in 2024 and may drive customers to someone else. Conducting website audits to make sure loadability is a priority can be a good use of your time.

A Lack Of Saved Preferences

If you like ordering the same thing from a cafe, it’s nice to walk in and have an employee ask you “The usual?” That can go for online shopping too. The experience of having to explain a usual order in painstaking detail every time you fill in your card info can be frustrating, so allow customers the means to save their preferences, perhaps with an account portal.

You can also expand functions here, as features like saved addresses, preferred payment methods, and order history can massively enhance convenience on the side of the customer. It shows respect for their time and also reduces the duration they need to spend with you before converting a lead into a sale.

Now, depending on the kind of clientele you serve, how you serve preferences and remember them can differ. It’s not uncommon for companies serving elite clients to set one representative to remain with them throughout their entire stay so that a uniform level of experience remains. But perhaps you just sell goods that can be ordered again and again, like groceries. A basket feature that allows them to rebuy all the goods they purchased last time could be ideal and save them a great deal of worry going forward.

With this advice, we hope you can more easily remove friction from your customer experience, and have a better time shopping in general.