Author: Simon Attard
Most businesses obsess over the moment a customer says yes. The signature, the sale, the booking. It is understandable. That moment feels like the whole game. But in more than two decades of watching how people actually buy, I have come to believe the more important moments are the ones nobody notices. The small ones. The quiet exits.
A customer rarely leaves with a complaint. They do not write to tell you they gave up on your checkout, or that your reply came a day too late, or that your website made them feel slightly stupid. They just go. And because they go silently, the loss never shows up on a dashboard as a loss. It shows up as a number that was never quite as high as it should have been.
The Loss Happens in the Gaps, Not the Grand Moments
We tend to picture the customer journey as a clean line. Awareness, consideration, decision. Tidy stages, one flowing into the next. Harvard Business School frames it in roughly those terms, and it is a useful way to think. But real journeys are messier than any diagram, and people fall out of them in the spaces between the stages, not inside the stages themselves.
A recent piece in CMSWire made this point sharply. Businesses assume that offering many channels means offering one experience. It does not. The customer starts a conversation with a chatbot, gets handed to a human, and has to explain everything again. They fill in a form, then get asked for information they already gave. As the CX consultant Christina Garnett puts it in that article, visibility and communication are everything.
The failure is almost never in any single channel. It is in the handoff between them, the seam where one part of your business forgets what the other part already knew.
That is where people quietly leak away. Not because your product is weak, but because the journey asked them to carry the effort you should have carried for them.
Friction Is Rarely About Effort. It Is About Feeling
Here is the part most businesses get wrong. They treat friction as a mechanical problem, a matter of clicks and steps. Reduce the steps, remove the friction. True, but incomplete.
The behavioural design firm SUE describes friction as the invisible resistance a customer feels before taking the next step, and they break it into more than the practical kind. There is cognitive friction, when a choice demands too much mental effort. There is emotional friction, the flicker of anxiety before a commitment, stronger before an annual contract than before typing an email address. There is social friction, the quiet embarrassment that shows up in areas tied to identity, like health or money.
I find this deeply true to how people behave. A customer hesitating on your booking page is not always confused about the process. Sometimes they are simply afraid of making the wrong decision, and no amount of layout tidying will settle a fear you have not acknowledged. Friction is often a feeling wearing the costume of a technical problem.
The Instinct to Add More Is Usually the Wrong One
When conversion is soft, the reflex is to add. More features, more reassurance, more copy, another badge, another popup. It feels like progress. It is usually noise.
SUE make a point that runs against that instinct: removing barriers changes behaviour more powerfully than adding motivation. That is worth sitting with, because it inverts how most marketing is done. You do not persuade a hesitant person by shouting louder. You persuade them by quietly clearing the thing in their way, often something you cannot see from inside your own business.
Which is the real trap. Srikant Datar of Harvard makes the case that journey maps built on assumptions are far weaker than maps built on research. Most businesses map their journey the way they wish it worked, not the way a stranger experiences it at eleven at night on a phone with a weak signal. The gap between those two versions is exactly where customers disappear.
You Cannot Fix What You Have Never Actually Walked
None of this gets solved in a meeting. It gets solved by walking the journey as an outsider would, honestly, and being willing to feel the friction yourself.
When we redesigned the digital presence for GROHE with Alfred Hili and
Co , the work was not simply about a better looking website. It was about how a person moves through a premium product range and reaches the point of confidence and enquiry without stalling. Product led experience, clear paths, content that answers the real question the customer is holding rather than the one the brand wishes they were asking. A premium brand loses trust quickly when the experience feels clumsier than the product it is selling. The job was to make the journey feel as considered as the brand itself.
That is the discipline. Not decorating the journey, but removing the quiet reasons a good customer talks themselves out of you.
There is a balance to hold here, and I want to be fair to the other side. You can over engineer this. You can map and audit and optimise until you have polished away every edge and, with it, every bit of human character that made people choose you in the first place.
Friction is not always the enemy. A little effort can signal quality, seriousness, exclusivity. The skill is knowing which friction earns trust and which friction quietly kills it. That judgement is the whole craft.
How MYC Delivers This
At MYC we treat the customer journey as something to be walked, not just drawn. We look for the seams where people slip away, the handoffs, the hesitations, the moments a website or a message asks for more effort or more nerve than it should. Then we design those moments out, carefully, so the journey feels human rather than engineered. You can see how this thinking shaped real work for brands like GROHE and others across our portfolio (https://wearemyc.com/portfolio/). If you sense you are losing good customers without quite knowing where, that is usually the most valuable place to start looking.