For over a decade, customer experience (CX) professionals have followed a mantra: "Friction is the enemy." In this line of thinking, the best experiences eliminate every possible step, delay, and moment of doubt. However, stripping away all friction can harm both customers and brands.

"We need to rebalance our view of friction. It's good in some cases and bad in others," says Sam Stern, Senior Manager of Service Design and Customer Experience at LinkedIn.

Part of the problem is how CX practitioners originally learned this lesson.

Early customer experience work was mainly in contact centers, where reducing customer effort was undoubtedly good, notes Menon Billingsley, Director of Solutions Strategy for Technology, Media, and Telecom at Qualtrics. The field then applied the "friction is bad" idea to all scenarios.

"That phrase just took off," says Billingsley. The industry even created the Customer Effort Score to measure and manage friction.

But experts point out that deliberately introduced friction can deepen trust and loyalty, while removing friction can quietly erode customer relationships. Customer experience leaders need to understand what makes friction good or bad "and be able to tell the difference," says Stern.

The Cost of Frictionlessness

When you remove all friction, you often get the opposite of what most brands want: an experience customers forget.

"Customers have nothing to really remember," says Stern.

This is a problem because customers often decide whether to repurchase based on memories and feelings.

"Emotion is truly one of the strongest drivers of loyalty, and it really builds more loyalty than just achieving a goal or reducing effort," says Billingsley.

Good friction often works by slowing customers down—adding a bit of effort to prompt people to pause and think. A slower, more deliberate process can also signal quality—a hallmark of luxury brands like Ferrari and Rolex.

The most typical case is protecting customers from their own mistakes. For example, Amazon reminds shoppers that they are about to buy a book they already own.

"Maybe I'm buying it as a gift, or I lost my copy, but it could also be a mistake," says Stern. "This is good friction because it helps avoid feelings of regret."

But how much friction an experience should include depends on the level of risk: high-stakes scenarios need more friction than low-risk ones. Stern mentions GitHub—a cloud-based website for software developers to store, share, and collaborate on code—which forces users through a four-step process before they can delete a project.

"Deleting a project is a big deal. So they put more friction in front of you to make sure only the projects you really want to delete are deleted," says Stern.

Friction can also bring fine print to the surface. For example, travel booking sites and apps often require customers to add or decline travel insurance before booking a non-refundable fare.

"They're reminding you that you're getting a great price, but buyer beware," says Christine Dworkin, Vice President of Customer Experience at Ipsos North America.

Done well, this pause turns a passive transaction into an active choice.

"Convenience sometimes makes things the default, and then customers don't realize what they've chosen because you offered it too easily," says Dworkin.

Distinguishing Good Friction from Bad Friction

The difference between good and bad friction often comes down to one question: Is the friction serving the customer or the company?

For example, subscription services often make it easy to sign up but hard to cancel. In the short term, this benefits the brand, not the customer.

"Think in the most honest way: who benefits from this obstacle?" says Billingsley.

Making the cancellation process simpler and more transparent is usually good for business in the long run, even if it occasionally loses a sale.

"You let customers know that your brand will tell them what to expect and give them options they can tailor," says Dworkin. "Transparency is very important for building trust. It lays the foundation for loyalty."

Experts say the payoff of higher-friction experiences can be substantial. Trader Joe's—the supermarket that forgoes self-checkout, curbside pickup, and delivery in favor of high-touch human checkout—is rated as thebest grocery store in Americafor customer experience and leads the category in sales per square foot.

This is not despite the high-friction experience, but because of it.

"The cashiers wear Hawaiian shirts and are very friendly. Every time I check out, they say something nice about what I'm buying or thank me for helping bag. It creates a nice moment at the end of the experience," says Stern.

While most brands wouldn't deliberately add that much friction to the customer experience, Trader Joe's offers an important reminder: "You don't have to polish away every bit of friction in an experience to have a good one," says Stern.