Key Takeaways
- Reducing friction at key points in the customer journey improves customer satisfaction and loyalty while driving business outcomes like revenue, engagement, and reduced support costs.
- To find meaningful friction points, map journeys by persona and combine quantitative data with direct customer input.
- Prioritize friction points tied to the highest-priority business goals, then test changes at a small scale first to reduce risk and validate impact.
- Use cross-functional feedback and iterative experiments to validate, refine, and scale what works.
The potential for friction—anything that impedes a customer’s path to their goal—hides in plain sight throughout the customer journey. If unaddressed, it can frustrate your customers, prevent them from completing transactions or using your services, lead to churn and dissatisfaction, and impact your bottom line. For example, a 2025 report evaluating friction in online SaaS sales demonstrates how friction in the checkout step can result in millions of dollars in lost revenue per year.
How you reduce friction can vary widely in scale, from renaming a button to revising the messaging and layout of a landing page to refactoring a workflow or launching a new service. Finding those friction points and deciding the best way to address them requires understanding your customer journeys and prioritizing solutions based on business goals and effort.
To help you get started, we’ve outlined high-level steps you can take to identify and address friction points. While there is more to each step than we’ve captured here, you can use this framework to guide your efforts or vet the work you’re already doing.
Start with a goal in mind
Customer journeys can be long and complex, and friction is everywhere, so how do you decide where to focus your attention? Start by looking at the business goals and metrics you’re responsible for, such as reducing customer support costs, increasing engagement, or reducing churn. Which is the highest priority? Where are you making or not making progress? Pick one goal to focus on. Through the next steps, you’ll refine which specific flows and metrics to target.
Find the friction points
Once you have a target goal, the next step is to identify possible friction points that you can address. This phase requires mapping the overall customer journey, then drilling down into the parts of the journey you own to understand customer behaviors and blockers along the way.
Tips for finding friction points:
- Know your customers
While “customer journey” implies a single customer and a single journey, in fact, you have multiple types of customers, each with unique journeys, external influences, and friction points. Before you go further, identify the specific customer persona you will focus on first. If you don’t have personas or haven’t updated them in a while, this is a good time to create or refresh them. Friction can often be caused by treating all customers the same, rather than addressing their unique needs. - Sketch what you think you know
For your target persona, consider and document what you think their overall journey steps are. You will refine this sketch with additional information over time, but the first step is to get something down in a form you can refer to and share with others. Be sure to capture the overarching journey and additional details of the experiences you’re responsible for. Consider not only the workflow, but inputs, influences, and outputs at each step. - Look at available data
Find and evaluate data for each journey step you own, such as web analytics, CRM and sales data, customer support logs, and past campaign performance. Use insights you gain from these sources to add details to your customer journey maps and highlight potential friction points. This step is incredibly valuable, as you’ll not only learn more about your customers but also discover where you have gaps in your data. - Gather information from actual customers
While it is important to understand the data you already have, relying only on that information without direct customer input can lead to bias, incorrect assumptions, and an incomplete understanding of what is actually happening. There are many qualitative and quantitative techniques, including surveys, interviews, and usability studies, that you can use to gather customer input. Talking with and observing even just a handful of customers can be transformational. - Identify points in the journey that impact your selected goal
As you progress through this discovery process, learn more about your users, and build out your journey maps, you’ll gain a better understanding of areas of friction along the way. This is where your target goal and priorities come back into play. While you can and may eventually address all of the friction points, focus your immediate efforts on the area with the greatest potential impact on your target business goal.
Gather feedback
Building out your understanding of the customer journey is an ongoing effort. We know that making progress and demonstrating results is always a top priority, so work with what you have and add details over time. However, keep in mind that moving too quickly can create gaps and assumptions in your journey maps. Throughout your process, gather feedback not only from your core team but also from other internal teams such as sales, customer support, and operations. If you have a user experience (UX) team, tap into their expertise in customer research and journey mapping. You can also bring in an external specialist, such as a digital agency, to support specific steps or review your findings and provide objective feedback.
Start small, evaluate, iterate, scale
Armed with the information you’ve collected, you’re now ready to explore and test options for reducing friction in your target area. The scale of your effort will vary depending on the identified problem and the approach you choose to address it.
For each potential solution, identify the metric you’re targeting, such as conversion rate or support volume, estimate the projected value of the improvement, and assess the cost and complexity of the change. Use this impact-versus-effort view to prioritize and select the first change to try.
Running a small pilot, A/B testing, and iterative refinements can help you measure the effects of changes on your target metric before rolling them out to your broader customer base. This approach helps to reduce risk and cost while still moving you toward meaningful business results.
Get started
While finding and addressing friction points does require effort, it doesn’t have to be arduous, and you can control how you move through each step.
At CMD, we help clients uncover customer needs and behaviors and use that information to move their business forward.
