The real cost of customer friction

When buying is hard, the buyer walks

Last week, I signed up for a trial with a well-known cloud communications provider. I won’t name them as the story matters more than the target.

I had a working VoIP setup already, but they offered something I’d been curious about — call transcription and AI-generated meeting notes. The proposition was clear, and the price looked fair. I signed up for their trial.

Three things happened over the next few days.

The first was identity verification. I uploaded the documents they asked for on day one. On day two, they came back asking for additional items that hadn’t been listed in the original request. I sent those over. On day three, more requests — again, items they could easily have asked for at the start. They had clearly seen what I’d already sent; they simply drip-fed the demands over three days, taking five in total to resolve. Each message came from the service provider rather than an individual — no continuity of name, no obvious owner of the case.

The second was the phone itself. I had already bought a desk handset they supported. Their provisioning system pushed the configuration to it correctly, yet the handset registered to their network. Inbound calls worked from the moment the line came up. Outbound calls did not. They couldn’t tell me why. Probably the same verification process that was demanding photo IDs, which they hadn’t yet completed at their end.

The third was the bill. The trial was advertised as free. They charged me anyway. When I queried with customer services, I was greeted with silence. Three working days later, no reversal had happened. I queried again, again to complete silence. The dispute is now with American Express.

I’d signed up to one trial and unwittingly bought three problems.

What’s interesting about this isn’t the company. It’s the pattern. Every onboarding step that went wrong was a small, recoverable thing on its own. Aggregated, they painted a clear picture of how the business actually runs — not as it presents itself in the sales material, but how it treats customers in the moment treating them well matters most.

This is the thing founders consistently undervalue when prospects choose vendors.

When a company is trying to win you, they need to show you the best version of themselves. The slickest demo, the most attentive salesperson, the cleanest pricing page. Their entire commercial model should be configured to make this moment go well. If this is the version that arrives broken — verification dragged out over five days, billing that doesn’t honour what the website said, support that takes days to acknowledge a problem — what you’re looking at isn’t a bad day. You’re getting annoyed. And you haven’t even been able to start the trial. They were supposed to be the ones trying hardest. Instead, you are.

Rory Sutherland writes that friction has a moral dimension. Where a vendor places it tells you what they actually believe about their customers. A company that imposes friction at the point of entry is sending a signal: we are willing to extract effort from you before we have earned it. The customers who push through are filtered for desperation or for not knowing they had alternatives. Either is a useful kind of customer for the vendor. Neither is a customer well-treated.

The implication for founders making any vendor decision is straightforward.

Treat the onboarding experience as a diagnostic test, not an inconvenience. If verification asks for items they didn’t initially list, the data systems behind that process aren’t joined up — and you’ll feel that every time you try to do anything administrative for the next three years. If a free trial arrives as a charge on your card, the billing system has primitives that don’t match the marketing — and you’ll feel that every time you try to scale your account or cancel a feature. If support takes days to respond when you’re the prospect they should be courting, you have your answer about response times once you’re a paying customer.

None of this is detectable by reading the website. All of it is visible in the first few days of trying to become a customer.

The cleanest version of the principle: the vendor at their best is the version you see before you pay them. What you experience in those first days is the best preview you’ll get of what being a customer will actually feel like.

I cancelled. The desk phone is now configured to a different provider — one I’d been with previously, and rejoined as part of this same comparative trial. Joining took less than an hour and worked first time. I don’t think about them often. Which, when I reflect on it, is the best thing I can say about any vendor I rely on.

Friction is the enemy of your sales funnel.