Editorial
The Gist
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Friction signals misalignment. Customer effort often reveals deeper organizational issues, not just frontline failures.
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CX needs alignment. Fixing CX requires aligning goals, systems and incentives across the company.
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Redesign around resistance. Instead of removing every obstacle, use friction to guide smarter CX design.
One summer morning in Colorado, I stood ankle-deep in the Big Thompson River while my three boys leapt from boulder to boulder, chasing each other in the chaotic freedom only kids can create. It was one of those fully present moments, until one of them froze, stared at the winding river, and asked, “Dad, why doesn’t the river just go straight?”
Before I could make up an answer, his older brother delivered the obvious. “It’s the rocks, dummy!”
It was a funny, forgettable exchange, until it wasn’t. That moment struck a chord deep in me. In that question and that blunt response was the perfect metaphor for every challenge we face in business, and especially in customer experience. The river doesn’t go straight because of the rocks. The flow is shaped by resistance.
Yet in CX, we’ve been taught to view friction as failure. We launch initiatives to remove it. We obsess over reducing effort. We design sleek journeys and dashboards that aim to flatten every bump. But what if those bumps, the rocks, aren’t our problem? What if they’re our map?
Table of Contents
- What Resistance Reveals About CX
- Why CX Isn’t a Touchpoint Problem
- CX Failures Represent Functional Clues
- Turning Friction Into Better Flow
- Core Questions About Turning Friction Into Better CX
What Resistance Reveals About CX
Customer journeys bend and twist for a reason. The resistance of a slow service interaction, a confusing policy or an untrained frontline team offers a kind of organizational MRI. It reveals where our values, systems and incentives are misaligned.
We often mistake these signs for noise. But in truth, resistance is feedback in its purest form.
In fact, my company’s research shows that effort is one of the strongest predictors of customer loyalty. In 2024, customers who have a low-effort experience are 12 times more likely to be a loyal customer. Meanwhile, high-effort experiences make a customer 13 times more likely to be disloyal. Effortless isn’t just nice; it’s profitable. Metrics like the customer effort score help organizations quantify and act on this insight.
Still, what most CX leaders miss is that this friction usually isn’t rooted in frontline failure. It starts upstream. That means factors like misaligned goals between departments, legacy systems no one wants to own and metrics that reward speed over empathy. We spend millions optimizing the river but ignore the terrain shaping it.
Related Article: Reducing Customer Effort Is the Key to Loyalty
Why CX Isn’t a Touchpoint Problem
Too many customer experience initiatives operate in silos. We tweak call scripts, invest in UX improvements and run NPS surveys without addressing the cultural and structural dynamics that created the issues in the first place. It’s like polishing a canoe while paddling against a broken dam.
The most common friction I see is misalignment, not just in strategy but in mindset. Leaders want transformation but reward output. Teams want collaboration but are judged on individual performance. Customers want clarity, but we give them complexity masked as personalization.
What looks like a customer problem is often an alignment problem. Until we confront that truth, no amount of automation, design thinking or AI will fix the journey.
This isn’t just theory. A recent McKinsey study found that companies who reimagine customer journeys end-to-end see significant improvements in customer satisfaction and revenue, but only when internal alignment supports the transformation.
Related Article: The Ultimate Blueprint for High-Performing Customer Experience Teams
CX Failures Represent Functional Clues
What can CX leaders do differently? They can start by rethinking resistance. Stop trying to bulldoze every barrier. Instead, ask what that friction is trying to show you. What system, assumption or misalignment created it?
Obstacles are not failures, but functional clues. Some are sedimentary built up over time through old habits and org charts. Others are volcanic like sudden events like layoffs or leadership changes. Some fall from the sky like unexpected market shifts or economic crises. But all of them shape how customers and employees experience your brand.
Leadership, then, doesn’t revolve around removing every rock. What’s important is navigating with intention, naming the resistance, learning from it and designing flow around it.
Turning Friction Into Better Flow
The next time your metrics drop or your customer feedback turns sour, don’t just ask, “What went wrong?” Ask, “Where are we misaligned?”
True CX transformation doesn’t begin with better scripts or smoother apps. It begins with understanding how resistance shapes the experience and how alignment restores the flow. Because the rocks don’t block the river. They define it.
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Core Questions About Turning Friction Into Better CX
Editor's note: Key questions about how customer effort reveals deeper organizational misalignments — and how CX leaders can use resistance as a design signal.
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