7 Easy Ways to Reduce Friction in Your Customer Experience

cx | 4 minute read

Both Amazon and Apple have nurtured their business growth by investing heavily in reducing friction in their customer experience. The rest of the marketplace has followed suit; the average budget allocated to customer service and support has grown substantially in the last few years.
Your success over the next ten years will hinge on the ease of your customer experience and the accessibility of your customer support. Removing friction from your customer journey will pay off very quickly. #custserv #cx #cctr Click To Tweet
Your success over the next ten years will hinge on the ease of your customer experience and the accessibility of your customer support. To keep you ahead of the game, here are some critical points in your customer’s journey to focus your efforts.

Speed up your website and app

Loading speed is a major peeve for most people and an even bigger turn-off for the younger generations. More than a third of Gen-Z says they’ll leave a brand if their website loads too slowly.

Run tests and invest in better infrastructure so that you can serve your content to users quickly and reliably.

Invest in a good UX designer

Many companies often forget the importance of optimizing their user experience. This is particularly important when producing a smartphone app or a web-based product.

Invest in a skilled UX team and run user tests to ensure that your processes are simple, quick, and don’t cause the user any obstacles.

Install Web Call-Backs

Stop making customers call you! It’s unnecessary, expensive, and creates friction for both the customer and the business (especially you, contact center managers!).

Web Call-Backs (formerly Visual IVR) offering will help you better manage call volume and reduce one area of friction that’s particularly prevalent in the youngest generation, Gen-Z.

Get a copywriter

A professional wordsmith can make all the difference. Have them review your self-service pages and any others in your journey — such as landing pages and shopping pages.

One of the most significant sources of customer frustration is unclear information. Explaining things can be difficult in person. Trying to explain things in writing is even more challenging. Get a professional to ensure your words make sense and carry your intended message.

Perform customer perception research

Do you know what your customers think about you? You should!

Customer perception research can offer you valuable insights into areas of friction as well as areas of opportunity. Send out surveys to customers and get their feedback on your sales process. You’ll quickly touchpoints where there’s an opportunity to reduce friction for customers.

Offer to call them back

Nobody likes waiting on the phone. You may be able to get away with making customers wait for a minute or five. You can walk the Erlang tightrope and hope that your contact center doesn’t get swamped unexpectedly when a couple of employees fall ill.
Why would anyone go through the stress and uncertainty of walking the Erlang tightrope when call volumes are so easy to manage - even during a global crisis. You just need the right tools #callbacks #cctr Click To Tweet
But why would you? Why would you go through the stress and uncertainty when hold times and call volume are so easy to manage?

Using Voice Call-Backs alongside Web Call-Backs, you can significantly reduce friction at several points in your customer journey. You can also cut your abandonment rate by more than half and even make a healthy ROI. Find out more about the ROI of call-backs here.

Empower your agents

If there’s one thing customers can’t stand, it’s dealing with an employee who cannot help them solve their problem.

If you give your agents and staff the permission and incentive to help your customers, you might be surprised at how well they do it; FCR, AHT, CSaT will all see a boost.

It’s best to implement these new standards gradually. Find out which topics and inquiries get escalated most frequently and look at how you can prevent that escalation. The solution will likely involve empowering the customer to find their answer through a self-service portal or giving the agent permission to address it through theirs.

Don’t Drag Your Feet

Reducing customer friction has been a focus for growth-orientated companies and will continue to be for a long time to come. But you shouldn’t wait to start optimizing it.

The younger, ‘digital-native’ Generation-Z have far higher expectations of companies than previous generations. They dislike customer-friction almost as much as they dislike overdraft fees and socially irresponsible corporations.
The younger, 'digital-native' Generation-Z have far higher expectations of companies than previous generations. Invest in improving your customer experience now or you'll find a lot of resistance to growth. #custserv #cx #cctr Click To Tweet
It’s also a mammoth task and one which you should have no illusions about completing quickly. Get started now, or you’ll find that there’s too much resistance later.

 

Fonolo Resource cover image

Discover the Contact Center Trends That Matter in 2024

Dig into industry trends and discover the changes that matter to your business in the year ahead.

Read it Now

Discover the Contact Center Trends That Matter in 2024

Contact Center Trends 2024
Read it Now
Fonolo Resource cover image

Discover the Contact Center Trends That Matter in 2024

Read it Now

See Fonolo in Action

Select the type of demo you'd like.

By continuing to browse our website, you agree to the use of cookies for providing our services, marketing purposes, and analytics. To understand more about how we use cookies and ensure the safety of your data, please refer to our Privacy Policy.

Accept and Close