Author: Simon Attard
The customers who leave without ever telling you
Most businesses can describe how they win a customer in some detail, right down to the ad that worked, the referral that came in, or the enquiry that turned into a sale, and yet ask the same business how it loses customers and the answers turn vague. That gap matters, because losing people is rarely dramatic. Nobody storms off or sends an angry email; they simply reach a moment that feels slightly harder than it should, pause, and quietly go elsewhere, and because you never hear about it, the sale just fails to appear and you put it down to a slow market.
I find this genuinely fascinating, partly because it runs against the way we like to think about our own businesses. We remember the wins and forget the silent exits, largely because the silent exits never argue back, and yet they are where a great deal of growth quietly leaks away.
Friction is quiet, and quiet is expensive
The clearest evidence for this comes from online buying, where every step can be measured. Research compiled by the Baymard Institute across dozens of studies puts the average checkout abandonment rate at around seventy percent, meaning that people who wanted a product enough to add it to a basket still walked away before paying. When you look at why, the reasons are almost boringly practical: unexpected extra costs appearing at the end, being forced to create an account, a checkout with one step too many, or a page that felt slow and threw an error.
None of those are grand strategic failures; they are small moments of friction, each one quietly persuading someone that this is more effort than it is worth. And the lesson travels well beyond ecommerce, because every business has its own version of the abandoned basket, whether that is a booking form with one field too many, a phone number nobody answers, a quote that takes four days to arrive, or a reception that makes a first time guest feel like an inconvenience. Most businesses simply cannot see these moments, for the same reason the abandoned basket is invisible: the person who gives up leaves no trace behind.
The map you drew is not the road they walk
Here is where it becomes more complicated, and where a lot of tidy customer journey diagrams quietly fall apart. We like to picture the journey as a neat funnel, with awareness at the top, consideration in the middle, purchase at the bottom and loyalty at the end, and it is a comforting picture precisely because it is linear and fits on a slide.
Real behaviour, though, refuses to respect that shape. McKinsey’s well known work on the consumer decision journey, summarised clearly by Smart Insights, argued years ago that the funnel is misleading, because people loop rather than march in a straight line. They add and drop options, disappear to research, ask a friend, compare you against three
competitors in an open browser tab, vanish for a fortnight and then decide, which means there is no single clean line for you to guard.
There are instead dozens of small moments, spread across channels and time, and any one of them can be the point where you lose them. That is the uncomfortable part: if the journey were linear you could stand at the exit and protect it, but because it is a loop the leaks are everywhere, and you are forced to think in moments rather than stages.
Why people leave is rarely where you think
When sales dip, the instinct is to look at the obvious suspects, the price, the ad, the product, and sometimes that instinct is right. Just as often, though, the real loss is happening somewhere quieter and far more human than any of those.
People do not decide on logic alone; they decide on how a moment feels. A customer who hits a patch of confusion feels a small flash of doubt, and doubt is more than enough to make someone defer a decision they were otherwise ready to make, while a guest who walks in unacknowledged reads that, fairly or not, as a sign of how the whole evening will treat them. We are pattern reading creatures, forever taking a tiny signal and quietly extrapolating it into a story about whether you can be trusted. This is exactly why the exits are so easy to miss, because they are not big rational objections you can answer point by point; they are feelings triggered by friction, and feelings never fill in a feedback form. It is also why asking the customers who left is only half useful, since many of them cannot fully explain why they went. They just felt the pull weaken.
Fix the moments, not the funnel
The businesses that get this right tend to do something fairly unglamorous: they walk their own journey honestly, as an outsider would. They try to buy from themselves, fill in their own form on a phone late at night in a hurry, the way a real customer actually would, and read their own confirmation email while asking whether it reassures or unsettles, until they notice the precise moment at which they themselves would hesitate.
Then, crucially, they fix moments rather than the whole machine.
Reducing friction, as practitioners like InMoment keep pointing out, is usually a series of small removals rather than one grand redesign: one fewer field, one clearer price, one faster page, one warmer greeting. Individually each looks minor, yet together they decide whether a ready buyer becomes a customer or a quiet exit.
I would add one balancing thought here, because not all friction is bad; a premium brand sometimes benefits from a deliberate pause, a sense that this is considered rather than instant. The real skill lies in telling the difference between friction that protects the experience and friction that quietly repels people, and in my experience most of what businesses carry is the second kind, hiding in plain sight.
How MYC Delivers This
When we redesigned the digital presence for GROHE with Alfred Hili and
Co, the work was never really about a prettier website; it was about the journey, building a product led experience that guides a serious buyer toward the right choice without losing them in the noise, supported by video, digital and social that meet people wherever the loop happens to take them. That is how we think about customer journey at MYC, not as a
diagram to admire but as a series of real human moments where you either earn the next step or quietly lose it. If you suspect people are slipping away somewhere you cannot quite see, that is exactly the kind of problem we like to solve, so have a look at our work and let us go and find your quiet
exits together.