What Is Frictionless CX?

In a nutshell, frictionless CX or customer experience is any experience where there are no:

• Pain points
• Stumbling
• Areas of disinterest or dissatisfaction

In other words, it’s a perfect CX experience from start to finish. Making this and achieving it for each client is easier said than done. Still, it’s a meaningful goal for your brand, especially when you consider long-term profitability and target audience loyalty.

Example of Frictionless CX

A frictionless CX is smooth and streamlined from beginning to end. Here’s an example of what a frictionless CX might look like for a business:

• A shopper becomes aware of a new brand selling a product they would love.
• That person clicks on an online advertisement and is immediately brought to a stellar landing page with phenomenal information and an easy-to-navigate interface.
• The customer navigates to the product they want to purchase.
• When the individual puts the product in their shopping cart, they are able to easily check out in a matter of seconds without unnecessary input fields.
• The user finishes the transaction and answers a brief, two-question survey at the end of the experience.
• The client is so satisfied with this frictionless CX that they opt to sign up for the brand's loyalty program.

Example of Sub-Standard Customer Experience 

Now let’s take a look at an example of a bad customer experience with a lot of friction:

• A person clicks on an advertisement for the same brand.
• However, the landing page is poorly designed and challenging to navigate through. The customer doesn’t know where to start looking for their product.
• When the person puts the product in their shopping cart, they are inundated with pop-up ads for discounts or side-selling
• The client has to put in a lot of unnecessary information in the checkout process, slowing them down.
• Right before clicking on “buy,” the individual decides they are too annoyed and clicks away from the website.

As you can see from these examples, frictionless CX can net you loyal consumers and many more sales. A poorly designed customer experience with tons of friction points will drive people away from your brand en masse.

Friction Points for Customers Within the CX

Depending on your brand, industry, and how your store is set up, consumers might interact with many different potential friction points. For instance:

• Clients are on hold for too long when asking a question to your support department.
• Clients are to give inconsistent information in advertisements, on product pages, and elsewhere so they feel confused and misled.
• Shoppers have to repeat the same information over and over to check out or put something in a digital shopping cart.
• Your brand provides sub-standard self-service options, so users have to interact with multiple customer experience agents to complete a task.
• People can’t navigate through your website.
• Your website loads slowly or poorly.

These are just a few examples of how your clients can experience friction in the middle of their journeys.

If it helps, think of frictionless CX as a metaphorical ski slope: If your customer experience is truly frictionless, your clients will slide down the CX mountain straight to the goalposts. If there are tons of friction points and obstacles, consumers may not reach the goalposts and may abandon the ski slope entirely.

Why Is Frictionless CX Important for Your Customers and Brand?

Ensuring every person has a frictionless CX is vital for customers and your brand overall.

For starters, customer experience affects practically every revenue-related customer touch point, including customer lifetime value, reputation, revenue, client churn, etc. In the long run, a frictionless CX is more likely to generate loyal shoppers, while a CX with lots of problems is more likely to create disloyal consumers.

Satisfied customers who experience frictionless CX journeys are more likely to pay for premium services and to spend more money at your business. Since it costs more money to acquire a new customer than it does to keep a current one, this is vital for your bottom line. If you can get the same people purchasing more and more things from your brand, your profits are more likely to skyrocket, and your customers will pay more for better products and services.

Bottom line: a frictionless CX is crucial for the long-term health of your brand and the success of your enterprise.

How To Implement Frictionless CX

There are many ways to implement frictionless CX into your brand. Here’s a breakdown to integrate frictionless customer experiences for every single one of your target audience members.

Identify Key Customer Touch Points

First, identify all the key touch points clients will encounter in their journey with your brand.

A touch point is any point at which a customer or prospect interacts with your brand. For example, when they first view an advertisement, that’s a touch point. Similarly, when an individual clicks on your website and views your landing page, that's a touch point, too.

When you identify the key customer touch points your target audience members will encounter, you can map out all the potential areas where they might encounter trouble, including friction.

Dig Into Details To Find Friction Points

Next, take a hard look at your analytic data and metrics and dig into the details to find any possible friction points that might occur. You can normally find these friction points in spots where your customer or prospect count sharply drops off.

Say that you have an initial batch of prospects from a marketing campaign totaling 1,000 people. However, you lose 200 people on your landing page, then another 400 on various product pages. You lose another 200 people at checkout.

Armed with this information, you can come to certain key conclusions:

• Your landing page needs to be revamped since it's likely that people view your landing page, decide that it isn't good enough, and click away to another website.
• Your product pages may need to be redressed or improved, such as by giving your products better photos to keep people interested for longer.
• Your checkout page needs to be streamlined for a frictionless CX, as it's clear that many people abandon checkout for some reason.

One way to check where online users abandon your site is with Google Analytics. You should also rely on details sourced from clients directly. While receiving complaints is never super fun, this information is invaluable. A dedicated call center and support staff of highly-trained individuals (like those provided by AwesomeOS) will provide critical, actionable feedback that can boost the bottom line.

Put Yourself in the Shoes of Your Customers

If you can’t nail down the precise details of why customers stop their journeys, put yourself in their shoes and imagine going to the customer experience as one of them. Click on your checkout page, for example, and ask yourself: Is this a fun and breezy experience?

Is it easy for you to check out with a new product? Check out your site on a browser, tablet, and mobile device — you may find that your site isn’t optimized for mobile users. In this day and age, that’s a huge issue.

As you answer these questions, you’ll be better equipped to remove any friction points.

Devise a Plan To Improve the Friction Points

Once you've identified the friction points in your customers' journeys, you can then take steps to improve those friction points. For example, if your landing page shows a major drop off in site visitor count, you might need to:

• Remove unnecessary media from the landing page so that it loads more quickly.
• Redo the landing page’s layout so that it’s easier to navigate through.
• Include significant information on the landing page to funnel customers to the most important or profitable products.

Outline Specific Team/Worker Goals and Responsibilities

As you devise your plan, highlight specific team or worker goals and responsibilities so that there isn’t any overlap. Everyone must know what they need to do to get the job done. The more specific you can make these job responsibilities, the better, especially if you are leading a large team across several departments.

Execute Your Plan

It’s time to execute your plan to integrate and implement a frictionless CX into your business.

Whatever that means, get it done quickly. The faster you integrate a frictionless CX, the faster you can accumulate data and see how well your ideas measure up against customer expectations.

If you’ve made some particularly drastic or distinct changes, don’t be afraid to highlight them! For example, if you have read on your corporate website, consider announcing that on the landing page with something like, “Check out our newly redesigned store and user interface!” This tells shoppers they can expect great things from you and may help to restore some lost confidence.

Review and Iterate

Your work still isn’t done at this point. After implementing a frictionless CX, it’s time to gather data on that customer experience to see whether it’s really working.

As you accumulate data from your clients, review and continually iterate on the CX across the board. There are almost always improvements or additions you can make in one area or another.

For example, if you find that one of your product pages is performing better than a competitor, look closely at their distinct differences. Consider revamping the poorly performing page so that it looks closer to the page ranking higher with customers.

Need Something Awesome?

Frictionless CX is key in the modern, competitive market. That’s why organizations like AwesomeOS are the perfect support partners for your brand, and in more ways than one.

For example, we offer back-office support for your technical personnel, helping you to achieve a streamlined and smooth CX from the ground up. We also offer ancillary web and software development services, support staff assistance, and call center analytics. There’s no limit to how we can help your brand, so send us a message today!

Sources:

What is CX (Customer Experience)? | McKinsey

What is customer touch point? | Definition from TechTarget

Customer Retention Versus Customer Acquisition | Forbes

Understanding the Buyer’s Journey | Fairleigh Dickinson University Online

Address These 10 Common Causes of Customer Friction to Maximize Success | Entrepreneur