Friction is a Tax on Your Growth

Jordan: We hear a lot about AI and complex new marketing strategies, but the data is showing us that customer patience is at an all-time low. Clients and customers expecting things to be really easy, intuitive, really fast as well, and if it’s not, they’re just going to leave without a second thought. And this isn’t just e-commerce as well, it’s applying to every interaction a customer or a client is having with different types of businesses. So today, we’re going to get practical. We’re going to break down why this decreasing tolerance for friction is such a huge deal for businesses across New Zealand and Australia, especially as AI continues to really shape customer expectations.

Jordan: We’ll have a think about some different ideas and frameworks about how to think about and audit the friction in your own customer journeys, and most importantly, what you can actually do about it as well. By the end of this podcast, hopefully you’ll have this really clear idea on how to make your business the easiest and most obvious choice for your customers as well. And a special guest back on the podcast, Aarti. Good to see you back.

Aarti: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Jordan: And it feels as though every time we have a podcast recording for yourself, it always rains outside. It’s always miserable. And the reason I bring this up is, obviously, our office, we work out of a recycled shipping container. So you may be able to hear it in the background, but the rain definitely echoes throughout. So I always think, oh, every time we want to record something in here. Last time it was terrible weather as well, wasn’t it? And then it turns into one of those things of bad lighting, bad sound, bad everything. But hey, we’re going to push through.

Aarti: Onwards and upwards.

Jordan: Thank you so much for joining us. Very interesting topic today that we just wanted to have a bit of a look at. And I guess it’s that thing around friction and the expectations, really, of customers and clients and consumers in today’s age. Because it feels as though it’s always been really important, but it feels as though it’s even getting more and more important as people have kind of adjusted and realised that they can get things really quickly. And how that’s kind of changed the customer journey, you know?

Aarti: Yeah, I think it’s becoming harder and harder for businesses to, one, cut through, but also provide that really seamless experience across all their channels. And customers are just far less forgiving, for sure. And I think that people, I mean, me included, would consider switching brands after just a single bad experience.

Jordan: Yeah, so there was a stat here. Salesforce: 80% of consumers will abandon a brand after three bad experiences, is what they’re saying. I wonder if that’s maybe even quite generous.

Aarti: Yeah, it’s potentially got worse.

Jordan: And I reckon, so there’s a few things to think about. So if we think about 2020, COVID, which seems to be a big digital revolution, I guess, for businesses, and everyone had a different, slight expectation of how to buy online. But with AI, maybe everyone’s starting to get that thought process, that they can get everything at their fingertips, and pretty quickly as well, you know?

Aarti: Yeah, and I also think that it has to be things that are delivered that are relevant. I get so pissed off if I get delivered an ad that isn’t actually relevant to me, or I’ve been talking about a topic, but it’s not actually one that applies to me personally. I immediately, three dots, this ad is irrelevant, get it out of my feed. I hate that. So I think that although businesses need to be smarter, consumers are taking on that power much more, to be like, okay, I don’t want to be delivered that type of ad. And they’re trying to teach the AI algorithm and businesses what is relevant to them and what’s not as well.

Jordan: Interesting. I was going to say, picking up on what you said there around the three dots. So is that something you do quite a bit?

Aarti: I do it on Instagram.

Jordan: Hide ads from your feed quite a bit?

Aarti: I hide ads constantly on Instagram. It’s something that really pisses me off.

Jordan: Really? Really interesting, that point around that: not only that as consumers we’re expecting things to go much faster, but then that personalisation thing. It’s like we expect that companies or these algorithms do actually know us well, because I guess they do as well, don’t they?

Aarti: Well, it’s interesting. How much data are these companies actually collecting, and what avenues are they collecting them from? I would be fascinated to know what data different companies have about me as a profile or a buyer or a consumer of their product. I’d really be interested to know.

Jordan: So the other thing with AI is, obviously, we talk a lot about AI on the podcast. How do you think the rise of AI is influencing what customers are going to expect from a good experience with a company? So we go past the ad side, and they’re now going to experience, I don’t know, they’re looking at your website, or they’re actually starting to work with you and things like that. Is it making it less tolerant, or clunky, difficult process, or? What are your thoughts on that?

Aarti: The consumer’s kind of expecting you to know what they want. And I think that kind of comes back to things like maybe Netflix and their product suggestions, so that you’re getting delivered, like, what you see on the website and what you’re looking at is then going to be what they actually want to purchase.

Jordan: That Netflix one’s an interesting one. I saw that some of the ways that’s even moving with AI is even around AI product placement on Netflix shows. So what you’re watching, and the product that’s sitting on the table, could be completely different to what I get, type thing.

Aarti: Yeah, that’s amazing.

Jordan: Which is pretty crazy, but I guess it comes down to that. Again, it comes back to this seamless experience of what consumers are actually expecting, and how fast they’re actually expecting, A, that targeting, but also what they’re expecting from the actual delivery out of the product as well.

Aarti: Yeah, I think things like speed, and the whole UX of a site, or being able to function the digital experience and the checkout experience or something, those are very specific things that can feel like you need them to be on point. You’ve got an expectation of how that transaction or delivery is meant to go. And for me personally, that’s often where the friction starts to rise.

Jordan: So that speed thing’s interesting. So just to chat, so without your marketing hat on, as a consumer, is speed really important to you? And would it be important for every type of purchase, or just some things you actually want that process to take and have a bit of time and thought behind it? I’m just trying to think…

Aarti: I’m thinking speed in a few different elements. I don’t just mean the actual… I’m thinking speed in the sense of, for example, checkout friction. When things have already, I can pay with Apple Pay or Google Pay, for example, that immediately is less friction to me. I don’t have to go get my credit card, and I don’t need to go put in my details, for example. But I have to say, if that was for a really large purchase, I would do that on probably my laptop, and make sure that I was getting all the numbers right and was checking that I really wanted that purchase. But for something like, I don’t know, a Warehouse purchase to buy a few bits for my kids, I really want that really seamless experience. I want to double click. I want it to be paid. I want it to be delivered. And I don’t want to think about it again.

Jordan: Okay, so the consumer thing, and I guess this whole speed of being able to buy something really quickly for a consumer, is obviously changing rapidly. And I get that. Then if we think about B2B, are people expecting the same type of level of speed and service from a B2B transaction, even if it is a larger transaction?

Aarti: The expectation is there. I think that they want to maybe have a bit more… I think you need to give them the option. I think that people are actually making larger, bigger, those types of transactions in more of an e-commerce way than they traditionally used to. So I think that regardless of B2B and B2C, I think that speed, or frictionless type purchase, or engagement, it’s still expected, even if you don’t necessarily do it in that speedy manner.

Jordan: Yeah, but this is where it gets interesting for me, because I agree, and that’s a massive challenge for a lot of service-based or B2B type businesses, who necessarily might not have been ready to go with a response, set up, ready to go, being able to offer a response straight away, a well-thought-out response or anything like that.

Jordan: So I guess the B2B side, and how frictionless it is, and how easy we can get things at our fingertips these days. Even if we go back to the Netflix example, if we want to watch a movie, it’s not like back in the old days, where we’d have to go to the video store and go rent it out for an overnight or something like that. You can literally sit on the couch and just pay for it and just get it right there. And it’s kind of like, do we have that same expectation if we are in that B2B sense, or that we’re looking for someone to help us with a particular service?

Jordan: Or let’s say we’re dealing with a lawyer, for example. Are you expecting a real quick response with that first piece of that transaction? Not necessarily saying they’re going to deliver the service straight away, but is our expectations just moving so much faster these days? And is it so much more fast-paced, as opposed to, oh yeah, we’ll get back in touch in a couple of days, once we’ve had the chance to really review something, you know?

Aarti: Well, I was thinking about this in relation to us at Done By Nine, at a meeting last week.

Jordan: This could be confronting.

Aarti: Yeah, maybe. No, I think in a good way. But we were talking about onboarding new clients, and how you had created an experience with AI, so that AI was then prompting and being able to give things like logins to their paid social accounts and things like that. So that for me is a really great example of this, because it’s helping the buyer, a client, move through that process much faster. That was a pain point of ours and of our clients, where you’re going back and forward with, oh, can I have a login to this? Can I need access to this? Can you give me… those types of things, right? So this process that we’ve implemented is actually making it less friction.

Jordan: Yeah, so I guess using that example, we used to have an onboarding, just a doc, and it was kind of like, if we need access to this or this, here’s the way to do it. And essentially thinking that there are really cool AI tools, because most of the time people would still come back saying, oh, you always had trouble with…

Aarti: Couldn’t do it.

Jordan: We had trouble with Business Manager and assigning you to the ad account. I got you into Business Manager, but I couldn’t assign you the account, and things like that. So this AI tool, we’re using a tool called Formless, and it’s built through Typeform. And as you’ve explained there, essentially not only does it give instructions about how to do it, but if they get stuck, it essentially helps guide them through it, which I can kind of see as a bit of a win-win.

Jordan: So for us, it’s a massive time suck for you or I to sit down and try and help someone navigate their own Facebook. Click here, can you go to here, can you go to here? And then we turn into tech support, which is not our job, and it’s not what we’re good at. We can do it, but it’s not worth our time. And it’s so much a better experience for them to be able to do that, and then come to us, if there were a couple of sticky points at the end. That’s fine. We can help with those final few pieces, but it gets them all set up. And so we have been trialling that, and that seems to be working really well with some of the clients that we’ve onboarded recently as well. It just removes a little bit of that friction and hopefully gives them a slightly decent experience.

Aarti: I agree.

Jordan: But there’s things like that. So then there’s another one here as well, is even things like chatbots and things like that. Live chats on your actual website. We’re starting to see a lot of clients come to us with that type of need. And there are some pretty cool tools out there as well that can provide some really good value to your website. But I still think there’s a caveat, that it does need to be fully reined in.

Jordan: So I was talking to a client last week who’s added one to his website, and it essentially helps with the conversion flow and understanding a bit more of the product. But he essentially didn’t ring-fence it at all, which essentially meant that then the AI was going off into massive tangents. If you wanted to, you could ask it any question, and it would go off into massive tangents and try to answer it. So I think being really careful about ring-fencing those AI chatbots to just talk about your website, or just talk about your product and service, and actually really train it to be really specific, and be really conscious that if they do ask a question that’s outside of those realms, it’s kind of like, well, that’s not my wheelhouse here.

Aarti: Yeah, that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a risk there with AI. It’s all well and good using it and implementing it, but you need to have boundaries and have rules that you’re putting in place for your business that keep things in a box, so that you have control over it, I guess, isn’t it?

Jordan: Definitely. So I guess when we talk about friction, some of the things is obviously the website, the technical side. So you’ve talked about slow website speed, I think is also really important. So another example last week of that with a client: we ran that site speed test, which is a very basic test that Google can do for you, just Google “site speed test”. And it was really slow. It’s a really painful experience. Some of the images were loading really slow. And I think that is really important, especially thinking about that mobile usage, when people are at that research phase of trying to understand what you and your business does. Obviously, that’s really important, to have that loading quick here.

Aarti: I think that research piece, if your website or your platform or whatever you’re doing isn’t built for mobile first, I think right now you’re in trouble. Do you know what I mean? I think it needs to be readable on mobile. All of my research, doesn’t matter what it is, done on my phone first. And if I want to do a deep dive, or want to be able to look at products better, or if I’m making a bigger purchase and I’m collaborating with my partner over what this purchase is, then it might be on a laptop. But honestly, everything is done on my phone now.

Jordan: And then that information communication piece as well. So the FAQ sections, that type of thing. I guess that all contributes to this frictionless experience.

Aarti: Definitely. I think, I mean, I for one always would go, delivery times, all of those types of stuff. You want to be able to have all that information readily available. You don’t want it to be buried into your site and then not be able to find it. Things like that causes friction.

Jordan: Yeah, I was going to go on a little tangent there, and just think as well that with that information piece, and making sure that you’ve got the right info on your website. I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently, especially with some of those big purchases. The more that we get AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude that have these research functions embedded, especially if it is a B2B type service type business, you can actually use those tools, and consumers are using those tools, to then actually delve deeper into that presentation or that communication that you’ve actually got on your website.

Aarti: Oh, absolutely. They’re drawing from that to deliver better information on ChatGPT. So what you’ve got on there makes a difference.

Jordan: Yeah. So that’s the whole customer journey, it’s kind of really changing, I guess. So I guess if we’re thinking about, if we’re a business owner, we’re sitting here right now, we’re thinking, I’ve got these issues. Some of the things that we’re talking about here kind of relate. What do we do? How do we, I don’t know, audit our business on some of the friction that we have?

Aarti: I think walking the path yourself. So going through each step, yourself or your team, and external people being able to go through that and being able to really objectively say: where do I hesitate? Where do I get annoyed? Or could this be better? Just constantly questioning each stage of that and thinking, can I improve it? Can it be tweaked? Or is that a good experience? I think that’s a massive part. I think then also another key part is things like NPS surveys, and asking the frontline, asking your customers, getting actual feedback from customers about if there’s anything unclear or broken, or that creates friction in that process.

Aarti: And then the other part is, which seems obvious, but actually checking your data. So checking your website bounce rates, your exit rates, cart abandonment. All of that type of stuff, and being able to pinpoint maybe there’s a certain area of the site or a certain part that is actually broken, but you’re not regularly looking at the data to see that’s actually happening.

Jordan: And then the other one, I guess, going back to what we were saying before, that I try and think about, is even if there’s some issues that we on the team have. And I guess we go back to that issue about our onboarding with clients and things like that: I never really got specific feedback from someone saying, oh, that onboarding process was really shit. But for me, I would be sitting there going, well, this is really shit, because I’m sitting here trying to school this person on how to set me up into Business Manager and things like that. And that just turned into a process that I was like, there’s got to be a better way for us to do that, and to deliver that information over, instead of us having to spend that time. So I guess also trying to re-evaluate some internal processes about how we can smooth things out a little bit.

Jordan: And then, because if we can get all of that going, then I guess it goes right back to what we were saying at the start, around all those small wins and those little 1% wins you can make there, that then do add up to actually providing someone an experience that does actually hit the expectations. We can move at a bit faster speed, or you can deliver something a bit more personal. And even if we think about that onboarding experience, we can keep that real personal, and we can tailor it to the actual business that you’re working with, and let the AI run all those conversations themselves, which, well, I hope it gives a really cool, different experience, you know?

Aarti: Yeah, I absolutely agree.

Jordan: So let’s just have a think about why is re-evaluating and optimising the process so critical for marketing in 2025 and beyond? How do you see friction going from next year onwards, even, and the way that AI is moving? Are there any big holes that you can see that we need to be plugging in terms of this topic?

Aarti: I think that a customer experience piece is always going to be so important, because in marketing, it’s not going to really matter if your customer experience sucks. So I think it’s always going to be a massive piece that people are going to have to keep focusing on. I think in terms of where it’s going, God, I don’t know. Things are changing, I feel, every week, every month. I don’t have any massive insights there, but I think that constantly looking at things like your data, that’s always going to… Obviously, with AI, the better data you have, the better AI you’re going to have.

Aarti: So I think that’s probably maybe where businesses… Having your back end nice and clean, and organising your data in a really nice way, is possibly one of the best things that your business can do to then help you move forward with AI. Because AI is all built on data. If your data is nice and clean, AI then has a good place to start. If your data is just really messy, or in a really bad shape, it’s not going to help you. AI is not going to work for your business.

Jordan: And I guess it’s just going back to some of those basics, eh? The basics of just knowing who our customer actually is.

Aarti: Exactly.

Jordan: As well, like, we think about, how do they like to communicate? It’s hard because, again, if we go back to that B2B or that service space, which is similar to what we do here, what are the expectations? Are they expecting that they enquire and send us an email, and that we’re going to get back to them in 30 seconds flat with their marketing strategy, as you would if you were buying something off Amazon or something like that? Or are they expecting that you get a fast response to start building up that relationship, and then start to build on the value afterwards? So it’s kind of building and tweaking your customer journey based on who that person is.

Aarti: Who they are, your personas. You might have three types of personas. One might be a boomer who needs a lot more hand-holding. The other might be a Gen A who’s like, I don’t want anything to do with you. So I think also you’ve got to tailor those experiences based on the persona as well. Some businesses have a really wide set of personas, who need to be on the mark for all of them.

Jordan: I’m thinking, obviously, as you said, we’ve done a little bit of work trying to think about that onboarding experience. And I think from a Done By Nine perspective, we should probably be also having a look at how it then relates back to even that website content, how people get in touch with us, and even that process. Potentially there’s some room in there for us to make that a little bit more seamless. But I guess it, again, comes back to those type of people that we’re trying to reach.

Aarti: Yeah, that’s true.

Jordan: Very interesting. But I think it’s pretty clear, and the data seems pretty clear, that customers are becoming less and less patient across the board. And as humans, we’ve got everything at our fingertips. It’s only getting worse and worse and worse, thanks to AI, because we can literally get any type of information, or any type of research, or any type of starting point really quickly, with a pretty decent prompt and an AI tool. So they’re expecting, as consumers, smooth, easy experiences. And if we don’t provide it, I guess there are going to be other businesses that are either building it now or are going to provide it in the future as well. As we’re just saying, we can’t all predict the future, but the future is more around just always trying to understand who your customer is, providing the best experience for them, and just trying to remove some of that friction and give them that really good journey.

Jordan: And I guess it makes me think of going back to that messy middle concept that we talk about a lot, which is that people are going between that exploration and that research phase fluidly. Once they get to that conversion stage, where they actually want to deal with you as a business, then it doesn’t stop there. It’s then around how do we use that person to learn from, and build out that overall strategy, and get more business coming through based on that persona and based on that journey that they’ve been through as well.

Jordan: So I guess the next step is pretty simple. I think pretending that we’re a brand new customer, going through that process, or sitting in the seat that you’re currently sitting in and thinking about some of the friction that you deal with customers right now. And either going to your website as a brand new customer, trying to buy your own product or book your own service, or sit in your seat now and try to onboard a new customer, or provide a certain part of your service. And write down every single thing, I guess, that feels clunky or slow or confusing, and use that as your starting list, yeah?

Aarti: Yeah, I think that’s a great place to start.

Jordan: If you and your team want any help with trying to work through some of these friction points, or work through your strategy, obviously that’s what Aarti and I and the rest of the team here at Done By Nine, that’s what we do day to day with a lot of our clients, working through the marketing strategy, and some of those things like the paid media and things like that as well. So you’re more than welcome to get in touch with us at our website, donebynine.com.

Jordan: If you found this valuable, please share it with someone who potentially is going to get some value out of it as well. You can get all our other articles on our website, donebynine.com. Just click on the podcast link at the top, and you can see all the other pieces of information that we share. But, Aarti, thank you again so much for joining us on another episode. And true to form, the rain’s actually started to slow off, which is good too. So hopefully there wasn’t too much background noise in there, but not a nice day for lunch anyway, for hanging out for the rest of the day.