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There are a lot of product returns on December 26.

In the past, this was a laborious process. Go to a store and you'd wait in a long line, get grilled by the associate, and then be asked to fill out a stack of paperwork. Try to return something by mail and prepare to spend half a day at the post office.

Fast forward to today and things are much easer.

I recently needed to return a camp chair to REI, one of my favorite retailers. The wait in line was less than a minute, and the only information I needed was my phone number. Two minutes later and my money was refunded. (Which I promptly spent in the store.)

This is an example of how smart retailers are improving the customer experience by removing friction from once-tired processes.

Cutting out friction not only makes customers happier, it cuts costs and often increases revenue. Here's how you can do it, too.

What is customer friction?

Friction is any obstacle that gets in the way of a customer's journey. It can be something that slows them down, aggravates them, or prevents them from accomplishing their goal altogether. This includes out-of-stock products, service interruptions, and rude employees.

My business insurance policy came up for renewal a few years ago. Absolutely nothing had changed in my business's circumstances (line of business, number of employees, address, etc.), yet I was required to fill out a lengthy questionnaire just to process the renewal.

Did I mention the questionnaire wasn't digital?!

I had to dig out one of those writing implements people used to use in the old days before computers and the internet. What were they called again? Oh yeah, a "pen." I needed a pen to renew my insurance policy. To add insult to injury, I had to mail my renewal forms.

This process took me from not thinking about my insurance company to actively disliking my insurance company.

Customer experience expert Shep Hyken, in his book The Convenience Revolution, wrote that "friction is what kills the customer experience."

That's exactly what happened with the insurance company.

Why does friction hurt customer experience?

Friction creates three issues for businesses. It unnecessarily annoys customers, it increases costs, and it reduces revenue over the long run.

Let's look at my insurance policy as an example.

It annoyed me because completing the paperwork was unnecessary, and it took extra time because the forms weren’t digitized.

The insurance company's costs went up because of this process:

The form had to be printed and mailed.
Someone had to take time to listen to my feedback.
An employee had to manually enter what I wrote into the computer system.

The insurance company lost my business as a result. If it was this difficult to renew my policy, I could only imagine the hoops I’d have to jump through if I actually had to file a claim.

I moved my policies to Hiscox after getting a recommendation from a friend.

Wow, what a different experience! Enrollment was easy and the price was much lower, presumably because Hiscox doesn't waste money pushing pointless paperwork.

My Hiscox policy recently came up for renewal. The process? I received an email with my updated documents. No work required on my part.

How can you identify customer friction points?

The best way I know to identify where your customers are experiencing friction is to understand their journey and listen to their feedback along the way.

A university I worked with had a lot of faculty and staff upset about parking. We analyzed the parking department's voice of customer data and found the number one complaint was about annual passes.

At the time, issuing annual parking passes was a manual process. Customers had to visit the campus parking office, where ironically there was no parking. Once there, they had to fill out a lot of paperwork and wait in a long line to get it processed.

We re-imagined the journey from the customer's perspective and quickly saw multiple friction points:

Completing extra paperwork
Traveling to the parking office
Waiting in line

The parking department removed this friction by emailing the necessary paperwork to customers so they could complete it ahead of time. Temporary distribution stations were set up at multiple points on campus during the renewal period, so faculty and staff could hand in their paperwork and quickly get their pass at a place convenient to where they worked.

Customers were suddenly raving about annual pass renewals.

The key is understanding the customer journey, and collecting customer feedback. Here's an interview with customer experience expert, Annette Franz, where she explains how journey mapping is the backbone of customer experience management.

You can get step-by-step guidance for starting your journey mapping from Franz's book, Customer Understanding.

Take action to reduce customer friction

Reducing friction results in happier customers, reduced costs, and increased revenue.

There's another unexpected benefit: your employees will appreciate it. My book, Getting Service Right, devotes an entire chapter to exploring how broken systems frustrate and discourage employees.

You can take a big step forward by starting with your top complaint.

Ask your employees to share the most common customer complaints.
Identify the root cause of each one.
Find solutions that reduce friction.

The prank was pure genius.

Two boys, each about 12 years old, stood on opposite sides of the road. As a car approached, the boys would pantomime picking up a rope and pulling it taught across the road.

This caused speeding cars to slow down as the drivers perceived they were about to run into whatever the boys had stretched across the road. They couldn't see anything in front of them, but the boys' actions told the drivers' subconscious brains that some danger lurked ahead.

Of course, there was no rope. The drivers were reacting to their perception, not reality.

Customer service is often the same way. The experience is almost always amplified for good or bad by invisible ropes—things that alter your customer's perception of reality.

This post will help you identify invisible ropes that might annoy your customers and ruin their experience.

Sign asking customer to wait to be called.

Wait Time

Customer service often involves waiting. Waiting in line for help. Waiting in line to make a purchase. Waiting on hold for a customer service representative to answer the phone.

Long waits tend to make customers very unhappy, but there's an invisible rope here.

A 1996 study by researchers Ziv Carmon and Daniel Kahneman revealed that people overestimate wait times by as much as 36 percent. They discovered several factors in particular that increase our perception of how long we've been waiting:

Expectations: The wait time is longer than we expected it to be.
Fairness: People are cutting in line.
Competition: Another line appears to be moving faster.
Movement: The queue is moving slowly.
Line Length: We can see a long line.
Boredom: Our wait time perception increases when we are bored.
Unpredictability: There is no information telling us how much longer it will be.

The easiest fix is to shorten the actual wait., but that's sometimes not possible. So some companies have found a set of techniques to make the wait time feel shorter.

Contact Friction

Customers must often deal with an unnecessary amount of friction to contact a company, even for the most basic of transactions.

A 2015 study from Mattersight found that 66 percent of customers who called a contact center were frustrated before they even started talking to a live person. The amount of phone menu hoops we have to jump through is ridiculous.

I recently tried to sign up for a webinar that looked mildly interesting. The registration field for this free event contained 20 required fields. Suddenly, I was no longer interested.

A certain florist has been sending me several spam emails per day, ever since I made the mistake of ordering flowers through its website. I never signed up (hence, spam), and I've clicked "unsubscribe" on multiple emails. All to no avail.

Perhaps I can send a simple direct message on Twitter? Nope! The "primary" Twitter handle directs customers to the customer service Twitter account. That account still uses outdated techniques, such as requiring customers to email, or follow the account so the customer can san a direct message.

I won’t be ordering from that company anytime soon. (Side note, if your company uses Twitter, make sure your account is set up to allow customers to send you a direct message without following you, like mine.)

In reality, this extra effort might add an additional minute or two to the interaction. That's really not too much, but it's the perceived waste that really annoys us.

The solution here is simple. Make it as easy as possible for customers to contact your company. If you’re having difficulty getting support to make necessary changes, ask your executives contact your company through the same channels your customers use. That should get their attention.

Friendliness

So many customer service situations can be solved or ruined based on the perceived friendliness of the employee.

A restaurant meal can become "an amazing experience" or the "worst meal ever," depending on the rapport the server can develop with their guests.

A retail shopper can become "a customer for life" or vow to "never go back," based on the retail associate's ability to listen carefully to the customers' needs.

A cable company can ensure a problem is "quickly solved" or deliver "nightmare customer service" based on the technician's ability to solve a problem and make customers feel okay in the process.

Yet getting employees to be friendly isn't as simple as demanding or expecting it from the people who report to us. They need a work environment where they can actually be happy. They want to feel respected, and support products and services that make them proud.

And when they don't feel great, acting friendly can be incredibly difficult.

Conclusion

You can see an example of the invisible rope prank in this short video. It's a great example of how perception can alter the way we see reality.

Look for invisible ropes in your own organization. A sure sign is when customers complain about something unreasonable or their complaint seems untrue. That's often an indicator that an invisible rope tripped them up somewhere along their customer journey.

Another solution is improving your ability to set clear expectations. You can identify some situations with this short video:

Find places where you can manage expectations from Customer Service: Managing Customer Expectations by Jeff Toister