The Observation
I was thinking this morning about friction in technology, and how a good customer will leave without a word. A little is useful. Too much, and they just give up.
The local coffee shop is a franchise I go to all the time. A few months ago they released a new mobile app to replace the old one. The new one has latency problems. Flaky at best, worse around 8 in the morning, less bad mid-morning. A colleague and I were talking about it in the office. We wondered if the app is silently failing and they don’t even realize they’re hitting a bandwidth wall at the rush.
I’ve spent a few thousand dollars there. I like ordering from the house so the coffee is ready when I pull up. I tell them I’m here, they hand it through the window, they say thanks for the business, have a great day John. They know me by name. I know them by name. The transaction is almost secondary.
And I told him: if another shop in town offered that same convenience, I would likely shift my business over and never say a word. Because of the app.
He pushed back. You’re a really good customer of theirs. Wouldn’t you mention something?
No. I would silently fail. Switch coffee shops. Not a conversation. I’m that guy.
That’s what got me thinking about our customers.
The Implication
The coffee shop thinks they still have me because they know my name at the window. That’s the shock absorber. When the app dies at 8am, ordering from the house already failed. The greeting at the window can’t fix a morning I spent fighting a spinner.
Are we balancing friction in the auction process, or are we over-frictioning people away? The hard part is you don’t get a report. The people you’d be driving off are the ones who fail silently. No ticket. No review. No “hey, your registration is a pain.” They just don’t come back.
Some friction is the useful kind. Contract, photos, catalog, a real campaign. Identity, payment, terms. The question is whether we’ve crossed from that into spinner-at-8am.
You’re only hearing from the people who write in. A customer wrote in about registration friction. I answered it. That feels like being close to the customer. It’s close to the people who complain. Not to the Johns. I never send the email. I just find another coffee shop. The Shock Absorber Trap already named the trap of throwing a human at the failure. This is the other half. The human never even sees the failure, because the person who would have produced it already left.
Terms clear is not experience clear called it silent churn. Invoice can be right and the day still loses the person. Same shape, different door. Here the door is the app, or the registration form, or whatever we made slightly too hard at the exact moment someone was trying to give us money.
The only proxy I can think of is how many people start the registration process and never finish. Even that misses the people who bounced before they started.
Open Questions
- What’s our registration start-to-complete rate, and does it move by time of day the way the coffee app does?
- What other silent-fail surfaces do we have besides registration? Search, bidding, invoice, pickup scheduling.
- If a buyer who’d spent a few thousand with us left this year, would anyone notice besides a missing row in a report?
- Where is the useful friction (identity, terms, payment) and where have we added the other kind without meaning to?
Related: The Shock Absorber Trap, Terms clear is not experience clear, Users Do the Scaling, The Mom Test