What is frictionless customer experience and why does it matter for your business

The Age of the Digital Customer is here, and with so many options and technology at our fingertips, customer expectations are only going to rise. A company's future growth is determined by the end-to-end customer experience. 

Alternatively put, the frictionless customer experience is essential in the age of the digital customer.

But how can you reduce customer churn? And more importantly, what is a frictionless customer experience?

Well, there is no rocket science in this. It's all about delivering a frictionless experience and getting rid of anything that can get in the way of your prospective and current customers having a seamless customer journey.

When you read all the way to the conclusion, you will learn how to offer a frictionless customer experience and why businesses should constantly delight their clients.

What Does Frictionless Customer Experience mean?

What matters most is customer experience (CX). The journey of a brand is in the customer's hands. Customers no longer prefer receiving dated, monotonous care. They expect more of you than you might be able to provide them in terms of services. A seamless, frictionless customer experience is exemplified by how larger businesses treat their clients.

What does frictionless mean in business?

Understanding customer friction is a prerequisite for grasping frictionless customer experience meaning.

Any obstacle that prevents the customer from completing the customer journey is referred to as customer friction. They could be minor challenges like extended wait times, shipping expenses, or increased service requests. It extends beyond customer service.

The frictionless customer experience is responsible for doing that. To get rid of every barrier your customers encounter during the customer experience. 

The goal is to locate the obstacles, get rid of them, and make the customer's journey as easy as possible.

In comparison to just a year ago, 54% of all consumers believe they have higher expectations for customer service.

According to this Microsoft survey, For businesses to walk hand in hand with their customers, they must constantly upgrade and become smarter.

Why is frictionless customer experience important for your business?

The secret sauce to success is customer experience. Indeed, customers’ demands are higher than ever. The frictionless customer experience gives a competitive edge and hence business processes need to be changed and improvised. Here’s how it helps:

• If the customers are satisfied, they keep coming back for repurchase.

• Customers tend to pay more if they are satisfied with your hospitality

• It increases overall purchases and profits

• Leads to more impulsive buys

• 67% of customer churn can be prevented

What Causes Friction Within the Customer Experience?

Imagine, you have an online store, and your customers require a couple of extra clicks before making the purchase. Will it be a pleasant experience? Well, this is friction! You might lose customers due to hassles on your website. Prioritizing speed and a hassle-free checkout process will bring your website to the next level.

Let’s have a look at the causes that can bring friction:

• Unorganized teams and inefficient customer support team

• Longer time periods to resolve customer tickets

• Not recording prior interactions leads to a poor experience of repeating the issue again and again

• Taking long to hear the customer queries

One of the best ways to improve customer experience and reduce friction in customer service is to use chatbots. Find the best chatbots that you can use to improve customer service. 

7 Steps to create Frictionless Customer Experience for your customers

1.Understand touch points or pain points of your customers 

Touchpoints are the points at which you interact with your customers, whether it is during the signup process, customer onboarding, or purchasing process. A live chat, a consumer testimonial, a survey result, or even your contact page are other possible ways to obtain them. Putting yourself in your customers' shoes is one of the simplest ways to identify customer touchpoints in your company. This will portray a complete picture of what they anticipate from you. Make the most of it because this is the first step in giving your consumers a frictionless customer experience.

For instance, if we look at airline brand AirAsia, we will get to know they have created a name for themselves in a historical notorious industry. With fast customer response, they have been able to cater to all the touchpoints of their clients giving a competive edge to all the players in airline industry.

2.Rate effectiveness and assign priority

Give each touchpoint a weighted score based on its importance and a score out of 10 for its effectiveness. Touchpoints around your website, for instance, will be crucial to your business if you provide the majority of your services online or through an app. If you decide to develop an app, you need to consider how much it costs to build an app.

3.Analyze the details

After determining your customer touchpoints, the next step is to begin examining each touchpoint's specifics and to see where the issue lies. You must consider factors like- the number of steps in the purchasing process, the customer wait time for an answer (in the case of chatbots, live chat, and customer service agents), and how straightforward is it to reach you. 

For instance, is your website's Contact Us page clearly displayed so that it is simple to find? Do clients who land on the website have access to all the details they require there, or do they need to navigate a number of links to find certain contact information?

For instance, if one look at brands like Nordstrom, you will realise that they are absolute role models for frictionless customer experience. They have seamless return policies, they analyze each detail and painpoint of their customer. The agents are really knowledgable, well trained and ensure help at every stage.

4.Plan

It's time to consider how to improve them and come up with a plan after you've discovered the touchpoints and delved into the details. Reducing repetition or friction in the steps is the objective here.

For instance- More communication channels are a smart method to improve customer service and lessen conflict and annoyance. For many who prefer phone conversations or have trouble using technology, having only live chat may not be ideal. Customers who prefer not to converse on the phone would likely get even more upset if only call channels are offered. If you don't offer your clients efficient avenues for communication, you run the risk of infuriating them even more before they interact with your representatives. To meet all client communication preferences, you should make an effort to provide as many communication channels as you can.

If one closely looks at the success story of Amazon, it can be seen that they’ve planned their customer service meticulously. They give tireless focus to customer experience, making it seem like an art.

5.Assign roles and responsibilities through your team

Determine who is in charge of each customer touchpoint after you have planned the customer touchpoint analysis. There shouldn't be any inconsistencies between assigning a certain team member the necessary task and making sure they do it justice.

6.Execute the ideas 

Finally, it’s time to execute what you have planned! Another crucial component you must concentrate on is implementing the tasks that must be completed first while carrying out your plan. Additionally, you can spend money on new technologies that can assist you in lowering friction at all client contact points. Mosaic provides its members with frictionless access to healthcare, anywhere in the world. Forget all the friction and pain in reimbursement with traditional health insurance, simply tap and go with your Mosaic Mastercard anywhere in the world.

7.Continuously review

As technology evolves and other businesses establish new standards, customer expectations change. Customers tended to be happy with only a few points of contact and were aware that there might be several phases in the checkout process ten or fifteen years ago. These assumptions, however, have been smashed by businesses like Amazon. Amazon's website and app are built to be as frictionless as possible. Customers simply need to enter their card information once to purchase an item with one swipe and have it delivered the following day (when they sign up). They can even scan their card using their phone's camera instead of manually entering their card information, and presto! The specifics are provided.

The best example here can be Apple. The company has reinvented the word renovation. As per Steve Jobs, Jobs “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back towards the technology.” The company continuously reviews their technology and processes to ensure they have utmost satisfactory services.

Start reducing friction now

There is no set period of time when you should begin lowering consumer friction. In fact, the time is now. It is imperative that you plan and carry out your ideas properly because most cutting-edge businesses are currently focusing heavily on the consumer experience. At the end of the day, all that really matters is having the customer's love and support!

Related: Chatbot for website- Benefits and Usecases