Friction Mapping Moves to CRM to Spot Customer Pain Points
Friction mapping first appeared years ago in behavioral psychology and cognitive science, leveraging our natural tendency toward the path of least resistance. It diagrams the mental barriers, cognitive load, and emotional friction that stall human action. By understanding these mental hurdles, practitioners have been able to redesign patients’ environments to encourage better decision making, reduce stress, and make desired habits easier and undesired behaviors harder.
Businesses only recently began adopting friction mapping to identify and eliminate the roadblocks, delays, and points of frustration that stall customer interactions. They used to rely on customer surveys to glean that kind of information, but low response rates due to survey fatigue have made that much more difficult.
So organizations today have been increasingly turning to artificial intelligence-powered, real-time, unstructured data and predictive analysis to visualize exactly where and when customers abandon tasks. Friction mapping takes basic customer journey mapping to a whole new level, and a well-done friction map can tell where the friction points are, their magnitude, their frequency, and who is impacted by them.
In their zeal, though, many companies have been looking at the wrong things. Many organizations assume the biggest customer frustrations are obvious. They often focus on staffing levels, response times, or system functionality, even though friction frequently develops in less visible places where departments, systems, and customer expectations fail to connect smoothly in real-world interactions, experts contend.
Friction might be widespread, or it might be isolated to a single element, like a website or mobile app. Friction mapping will look at how many times somebody tries to click on something and cannot move forward, or something like cart abandonment, pointing out where and when customers abandon it and how far they were into the shopping experience before abandonment, says Elaine Buxton, president and CEO of Confero, a CX research and mystery shopping firm. “The technology is really helpful to figure out where things are breaking down, particularly if the whole customer experience is all digital, like online sales or something like that.”
Digital sellers often don’t have personal interactions with customers, so using friction mapping technology is critical to find online points of failure, Buxton adds.
Good friction mapping will often uncover unexpected points of friction, according to Dan Herbatschek, founder and CEO of Ramsey Theory Group, a software development firm that provides artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and digital marketing services. “Organizations initially look for the answer to their customer service breakdowns by analyzing angry phone calls, terrible survey scores, or abandoned transactions.”
Typically, service breakdowns occur earlier in the interaction, and this creates a negative chain reaction. Friction mapping can pinpoint the exact breakdown point, and that makes it extremely powerful, because it shows the true failure origin point, Herbatschek adds.
“The best friction mapping products have the ability to combine sentiment analysis, refund delays, escalation patterns, resolution times, clickstream behavior, support tickets, chat logs, call transcription, CRM data, and more,” Herbatschek says. “Friction mapping links everything together so visibility across your entire organization’s ecosystem and the failure point can be easily and very quickly identified. Friction mapping is a huge problem for brands, and not enough enterprises know how to execute it properly. It really is key to customer retention and increasing revenue.”
Until they create a visual representation of their current processes, most companies trying to unearth issues don’t understand how many hours they can waste trying to find each friction point, says Lucy Blackley, founder and chief product officer of Bombix, which provides unified product experience management solutions for consumer goods industries.
Friction mapping, she adds, helps to identify the same issues being experienced by customers as well as internal team members.
How It Works
There are many ways of finding points of failure throughout the customer journey.
TTEC Digital, for example, uses a mystery shopper technique in which one of its employees calls in or emails clients to order their products or services. They will look at how easy it is to find the item or service, ask questions, and place the order. Once the product is shipped, the mystery shopper will find out how to return it.
The company also uses a combination of Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, Qualtrics XM, and Genesys Speech and Text Analytics to help assess issues like how easy the website was to navigate, how quickly the mystery shopper could find the item or service, whether simple queries required special logins or account registrations, whether the correct item shipped and how it arrived, how easy it was to return, and more. After completion, the mystery shopper provides a full report of all interactions.
The number of vendors offering friction mapping software is large and growing. Some software is stand-alone, while other solutions are part of larger suites that often include technologies for journey mapping, journey orchestration, performance analytics, quality assurance, feedback management, and more.
Latane Conant, chief marketing officer of Parloa, a provider of AI agent and customer experience automation solutions, adds that AI today can simulate much of what a human mystery shopper does to enable companies to produce friction maps much more quickly than they did in the past.
“You can test for different customer types, like a happy customer in Mexico and an angry customer in Romania, then see exactly how the design of your customer service stacks up. AI has changed the immediacy of friction mapping,” she explains.
AI is also helping companies solve friction issues more quickly, according to Conant. “The ability to remove friction has never been greater than it is now, which I think is a real exciting place to be.”
But even then, “while many organizations focus heavily on CRM platforms, AI tools, dashboards, and customer analytics software, technology alone is rarely the root solution,” says David Carneal, founder of Digital Efficiency Consulting Group. Software might help expose where friction exists, but it does not automatically resolve the operational logic creating the problem in the first place, he explains.
Buxton agrees, pointing out that while the technology might be good at mapping the friction points, and AI can help interpret the map, consultants are still needed to help determine the emotions behind the friction points. This could include the degree to which customers are inconvenienced by different friction points.
More detailed analysis can also uncover whether one or a combination of friction points are resulting in lost revenue and profits, Buxton adds.
Not All Bad
Experts caution, though, that both in the physical and digital environment, there are times when companies might want some friction—or more correctly, what customers would consider friction—in their operations. Making a customer talk to a customer service representative before canceling a subscription likely adds frustration for the customer, but for the company, it creates an opportunity to save the account or maybe even upsell it.
Some customer friction will be intentional. Called positive friction, it is often used to assist users in crucial interactions, such as confirming a specific action or consequence. It could involve a confirmation pop-up that appears before a customer deletes a file, closes a program without saving, unsubscribes from an email newsletter, or opts out of a marketing campaign. Other positive friction might be used for security purposes, such as passwords or security codes for online payments. And some points of friction, like delivering long disclosures, might be necessary in highly regulated industries.
The Worst Offenders
The objective of friction mapping, though, should be to eliminate the negative points of difficulty, and those can be found in many stages during the customer journey.
“There are many potential points of excessive friction: the chatbot, call center agent, CRM workflow, email, or something else. The bottom line is that customers’ disappointment is ultimately with one thing—your brand,” Herbatschek says.
Other key points of friction include slow websites, nonresponsive designs, long waiting times, a lack of information or inaccurate information, system bugs, and improperly configured handoffs,
A major point of friction at an increasing number of companies today is the difficulty connecting with a live agent, adds Robert Wakefield-Carl, senior director of innovation architects at TTEC Digital. “Companies want bots to handle everything, so they front-end IVRs with bots. They even front-end their emails with bots, and there’s a lot of friction to get past them.”
Parloa, in researching its “State of Agentic CX in 2026 Report,” found that some industries, like healthcare and utilities, were worse than others, but all industries had serious friction issues, according to Conant. “All of them were bad, worse than we had expected going into the study. Part of what’s happened is that brands have fooled themselves into thinking that self-service means that customers don’t want to talk to you.”
TTEC Digital has worked with many major companies to help identify and solve points of friction. Companies selling low-price goods and services tend to have more points of friction, with customers more willing to accept the roadblocks, while companies with high-price goods and services tend to have fewer points of friction, are more likely to want them eased, and have customers less willing to accept too many hurdles, according to Wakefield-Carl.
The restaurant industry is also riddled with friction points, largely because of the many different systems in use. The industry has different technologies developed by individual teams within different departments, all with their unique needs, Buxton says.
While sellers of such technology usually promise integration across systems so that everything flows smoothly between systems, the reality often is that there are unexpected points of friction or complete bottlenecks, she says.
“Sometimes you can have a situation where one screen says start your order, another says place an order now, and another says buy now. One says product, one says menu,” Buxton says. “The terminology is not even the same throughout each of the components, and everything is supposedly integrated.”
Across industries, it’s also important to note that friction often occurs early in the customer interaction and can alter what happens throughout the rest of the process, experts agree.
In its research, Parloa found that the greatest point of friction occurs before the customer interaction even begins. “Before a chatbot or interactive voice response system can even fail, customers can’t find support at all,” says Malte Kosub, Parloa cofounder and CEO.
According to Parloa’s research, 43.3 percent of the world’s largest companies display no visible phone number or chat option. Of those that do, 56 percent require scrolling to find it, and nearly 95 percent of chat widgets appear only on the homepage rather than the support page where consumers with active problems land.
When customers do find a chatbot, it almost certainly won’t solve their problem, Kosub adds. In nearly 4,000 tested interactions, the bots failed the basics at astonishing rates: 90 percent couldn’t remember information that the customer submitted two minutes earlier, 98 percent couldn’t follow instructions, and only 8.9 percent of chatbot conversations actually achieved the customer’s stated goal.
When these friction points escalate, the designed failsafe—transferring to a human—becomes a roadblock in itself, Kosub adds, noting the report’s findings that 89.9 percent of attempted transfers to a human agent fail.
Drew Madore, founder and CEO of Synergist Digital Media, a digital marketing agency in Philadelphia, recommended in a recent blog post that companies pay particular attention to the following in their friction maps:
Drop-off points above 25 percent, meaning that something’s broken or confusing.
Support ticket clusters: When you get the same question 50 times, that’s not 50 customer problems. That’s one design problem with 50 victims, he explained.
Time-on-page outlier: If a form that should take 90 seconds to complete averages four minutes, people are likely getting confused somewhere along the way.
Looking Ahead
Companies that redesign their customer experience platforms around points like these to support autonomous resolution, reliable escalation, persistent context, and efficient machine-to-machine interaction are likely to differentiate themselves on both cost and quality, experts agree.
And as more companies come to that realization, friction mapping will become more ubiquitous in the next couple of years, Buxton predicts. “I can remember when journey mapping was considered a new thing. People didn’t really understand what it was. A lot of companies thought let’s just make a pretty diagram of the customer’s journey and experience through our organization.”
That evolved into a map designed to track CX and sales, both online and offline, which became useful for companies in determining how to improve the customer journey to boost sales and revenue, she continues.
Buxton expects friction mapping to follow a similar path of increased adoption among companies. “It’s a higher and better use of journey mapping.”
Phillip Britt is a freelance writer based in the Chicago area. He can be reached at spenterprises1@comcast.net.