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Rhodes is the Marketing Director at WayThru, a fintech platform for debt resolution, and InvestiNet, a full-service collections network.

getty​Businesses love highlight reels.

​The sale. The sign-up. The service activation. The moments customers enter a relationship with an organization. These milestones receive attention because they’re easy to see.

While organizations focus on these highly visible moments, customer complaints increased 16% in the first quarter.

Customers don’t experience organizations through highlight reels. Think about the last time you updated your billing information, enrolled in a payment plan, tried to make a payment from your phone or searched for an answer in a customer portal. Those moments probably didn’t make a company’s quarterly report, yet over time they can create lifetime customers or one-and-done purchasers.

​That’s why some of the most meaningful opportunities for product improvement don’t exist in the highlight reel. They exist in the moments between it.

​I’ve seen this repeatedly while building digital products. Make the everyday interactions easier and something interesting starts to happen: Users trust the product more, they come back more often, and eventually, they trust it to do more.

Customer lifetime value goes up, your acquisition strategy becomes more profitable, and the highlight reel moments become worth celebrating.

Friction works the same way in reverse.​​

Customers Notice Friction​Most organizations are structured around functions—marketing, product and software, for example.

​Customers don’t see any of that. What they see is a single brand or product, and what they experience is friction. The password reset that doesn’t work. The payment process that takes too many steps. The information that’s buried three pages deep. The form that asks for the same information twice. Individually, these moments seem small. Collectively, they shape how customers feel about a brand or product. ​

​Yet, friction is rarely treated as a strategic priority.

Part of the problem is that friction rarely announces itself as a five-alarm fire. It hides in abandoned carts, support tickets, work-arounds and the things users have simply learned to tolerate.​

​Few organizations measure friction, and fewer celebrate its removal. Instead, attention gravitates toward the next launch, the next campaign or the next growth milestone.

​This is where organizations get into trouble. For years, organizations benchmarked themselves against direct competitors. Banks compared themselves to other banks. Utilities compared themselves to other utilities. Healthcare providers to other healthcare providers.​

Customers don’t think that way. ​

​Fair or not, they’re comparing your transaction experience to high watermark experiences such as Amazon’s one-click checkout. When they’re booking a service, they’re wondering why it wasn’t as easy as their last late-night DoorDash order.

​According to Salesforce, 88% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services.​​

Every interaction shapes expectations for the next one. Customers may not expect every organization to offer the same capabilities, but they do notice when something feels unnecessarily difficult. A process that requires multiple phone calls. Information that’s difficult to find. A payment experience that feels outdated. A task that should take seconds but takes minutes.​ ​​

Every seamless interaction raises the bar and every bit of friction falls below it. And as expectations continue to rise, the organizations that stand out will be the ones creating the fewest obstacles.

​The Best Product Improvements Remove Friction​Friction is especially visible in digital servicing because customers arrive with a specific goal. They’re not exploring, they’re using your product to get something done, whether it’s resolving an outstanding balance, making a digital payment, accessing a document or updating account information.​

​Think of a page that takes longer than three seconds to load, information that’s too many clicks away or a task that feels more complicated than it should. As a builder, these moments may seem insignificant when viewed individually. In reality, they’re rarely experienced that way. They accumulate over time, shaping how customers perceive the product and the organization behind it.

One lesson I’ve learned over the years is that small improvements often have outsized impacts.

I’ve seen this firsthand building digital servicing products. When the simple stuff consistently works, users begin trusting the product with more consequential work. That can mean deeper adoption, fewer manual interventions and greater willingness to use additional capabilities or buy more service.

The inverse matters just as much. If I’m constantly fighting your product to accomplish simple tasks, why would I trust it with something more important?

Trust compounds. So does frustration.​​

​Reducing the number of steps required to complete a task, simplifying a payment flow, making account information easier to find, giving customers access to the communication channels they already prefer to use—these changes may never find their way to a highlight reel, but cumulatively, they create great experiences and lifetime customers.

​Most products already solve a problem. That’s why customers use them in the first place. Therefore, the best product improvements are often about removing obstacles that never should have been there in the first place.

​Looking Beyond The Highlight Reel​The experiences that shape customer perception often happen between the highlights, in the routine interactions that rarely appear on a dashboard or earn a mention in a boardroom.

That’s why product leaders should periodically ask a simple question: What frustrations are customers experiencing when nobody is paying attention?

​The answer may reveal opportunities that no acquisition campaign, product launch or growth initiative can solve on its own.

As a product leader, periodically get out of your own environment and use the product like an actual customer.

Pull out your phone instead of the 27-inch monitor where your strategy sessions happen. Use mediocre Wi-Fi. Request a refund. Cancel a payment. Submit a support ticket anonymously. Try the processes customers encounter when everything doesn’t go perfectly.

Then hand the product to someone outside your world.

Product teams accumulate a burden of context over time. We know where things are, why decisions were made and how workflows are supposed to function. That knowledge can actually make us worse at spotting what’s obvious to someone encountering the product for the first time.

Sometimes the best person to find friction is someone who has no idea what they’re supposed to do.​

​Because while transactions may begin the relationship, it’s the countless interactions that follow that determine how it’s remembered.​

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