Personally I love frictionless CX and I was glad that I could make a business out of my passion when I launched Conversion Rate Optimization as one of the services of my company’s Digital Marketing+ offering.
All along I’ve been debating with myself and my customers whether there’s an optimum level of being frictionless or the aphorism “more the merrier” applied to frictionless.
I recently went through a couple of experiences that have helped me settle this debate.
The first one was in the B2C space with the housing portal Housing.com and the second one, with the B2B SaaS product SalesLoft.
Housing
Founded by a group of fellow alumni from IIT Bombay, Housing.com provides a very frictionless experience for buying, selling and renting property. Let alone short forms or prefilled forms, Housing didn’t ask me to fill any form at all when I listed my property on it.
This contrasts sharply with every other housing portal I’ve used in the past that have made me complete long forms.
To execute its missionary zeal to ensure high quality and freshness of data, Housing sends out its own Data Collectors to the propery to click photographs and enter its particulars directly into a mobile app while they’re onsite. This delivered a very frictionless CX.
But when the leads started coming in, all hell broke loose.
One potential tenant told me that he wished to start an office in the apartment. Another guy wanted a pad for himself and a couple of his coworkers. The third person intended to convert the apartment into a corporate guest house.
I told them that none of these was permitted according to the bylaws of the housing complex. All three of them pushed back saying why did Housing.com display my property when they did a search with their specific needs as filter criteria.
I had no answer to their genuine question but I suspected what must have happened behind the scene: When he created the listing on my behalf, Housing’s data collector must have checked too many boxes on his app – e.g “Bachelors allowed” – without seeking my confirmation!
SalesLoft
As soon as I read about SalesLoft’s “Sales Development Prospecting & Automation” software, I visited the SaaS provider’s website and signed up for its free trial by filling a short form. The software installed itself as a Chrome Extension on my browser and showed me a tantalizing button labeled “Generate Leads”.
Like any other marketer, I found this to be a powerful CTA and hit the button immediately.
Lo and behold, my screen filled up with a long list of contacts from various companies. Since I hadn’t specified any selection criteria, I had no clue what was the basis on which SalesLoft had compiled this list.
I abandoned the trial. It was only during a subsequent conference call that the company’s SDR explained the rationale behind the list.
If Housing had asked me to fill a form, I’d have ensured that my property was not suitable for bachelors, commercial zoning or any of the other exclusions stipulated by the society. If SalesLoft had asked me to fill a form asking me for what kind of leads I wanted, I’d have been in a better position to understand what leads it served up.
On the face of it, this might imply that it’s bad for something to be too frictionless.
However, that would be the wrong conclusion.
As is the myopic belief that more the effort taken by a customer to contact a vendor, greater is the customer’s propensity to buy from that vendor.
Friction shouldn’t be used as a tool to qualify leads (or to accomplish outcomes for which there are better ways.)
That said, it’s important to ensure that lack of friction at earlier stages of the purchase journey don’t result in chaos – and the risk of abandonment or churn – at later stages. I can think of the following way in which the companies in my two examples could have done that:
- Housing. The portal can email me the draft listing with all the options highlighted and give me the opportunity to correct the errors before it went live. (The portal didn’t even ask me to register or create a password, so I didn’t even have a way to access my listing online and edit it).
- SalesLoft. The website can display the filters used to compile the search list à la LinkedIn at the top of the page or JigSaw-Data.com at the left of the page. Had it done that, I’d have concluded immediately that it works as advertised.
To answer the question in the title of this post:
No. Less friction is always better than more friction.
But, as we saw above, it takes efforts to ensure that a frictionless experience at earlier stages of the purchase journey does not create unintended friction in the later stages.