Customers Are Lazy: We Need To Make Things Easier

updated March 2026

Not only are customers lazy, but they’re getting lazier. How come? Because buying process expectations and the competition are making things easier for them.

Let’s take the example of the humble website content form. Many businesses see a contact form as being the primary channel of initial communication from a potential buyer, so it’s super-important, right? But let’s take a step back and consider what the contact form is actually communicating. I don’t just mean the actual words in it, I mean the form itself. The design, the number of required fields, or even the fact that it exists in the first place acting, as it does, as an obstacle between a buyer and a human being from your business. We’re looking at a contact form as merely as a sales lead qualification submission. but to the person filling it in at 4pm on a Tuesday, having already done the same thing on three other vendor sites, it may be seen as a business prevention mechanism that’s at least 30 years out of date and has little reason to exist in today’s commercial landscape.

I’m not singling-out contact forms specifically. There are many buying situations where the initial connection with a supplier or provider mandates the use of a form – it’s what buyers know, are familiar with, and thus expect. What I’m saying is the above scenario is a version of a “buying friction” problem that many businesses haven’t given much thought to, since “it’s how it’s always been/how everyone else does it“. As an aside, did you know that the way buyers perceive a task varies depending on when in the day it occurs? We’re more likely to put up with a sub-optimal experience in the not-too-early morning, compared to just before lunch or when we’re about to leave for the day.

Danziger, Levav, and Avnaim-Pesso published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that analyzed over 1,100 parole decisions made by eight experienced Israeli judges across a ten-month period. The looked at the percentage of convicts that were granted parole, based upon the time of the day they had their hearing.

They found that parole approval rates ran at about 65% first thing in the morning, but progressively dropped to almost zero by the time a break was needed. The seriousness of the crimes, level of prisoner contrition, or competence of the defense lawyers were the same as the cases heard earlier in the day. The only difference was the judges had been making decisions all morning, and by the time they could see that lunch wasn’t far away, the only decision that required no further cognitive output was denial. “Parole denied. So, what’s today’s Special?”

Brain scientists and behavioral psychologists call thisDecision Fatigue, the depletion of the prefrontal cortex’s ability to evaluate, weigh, and commit.

Applying this to a typical B2B sales situation, think of a buyer who has already wrestled with navigating three other vendor websites, or has filled out two contact forms that demand they complete 17 fields, all of them ‘required‘, or waited on hold for 17 mins while listening to Michael Bolton on repeat. It’s no surprise that people are unlikely to be in a state of balanced and rational consideration by the time they land on our site.

When placed under such mental fatigue, any option that buyers see as needing the least amount of additional cognitive work invariably wins. In many cases that means that they choose to buy from the incumbent vendor, since they know what they’re getting and it’s the least effort. Another option would be to buy from the market leader, since it’s a brand they’ve probably heard of.

Option three, which is where we have our greatest opportunity, is for the buyer to choose the first potential supplier that made the path to a decision not feel like trying to solve a differentiation calculus equation.

Gartner did a study that showed 70% of B2B buyers feel overwhelmed by complexity during vendor evaluation. It’s as though all of us banded together and decided to build the pain of the buying experience into a structural feature of how we’ve decided to sell.

Buyers are comparing us across variables other than features

Supposing you buy into my argument, and are prepared to review your organization’s buying experience to be more in line with what customers are expecting (good for you, by the way). Before we can even think about what we can do to make things easier, we need to ask ourselves the question, “What, exactly, are buyers comparing our buying experience to?”

Many business owners or senior managers will give a knee-jerk answer of ‘the competition’. While that maybe part of it, the more significant comparison is happening somewhere else entirely, and impacts us more significantly. Spotify has spent decades and substantial engineering capital collapsing the distance between a user wanting to hear something and actually hearing it. Netflix has done the same for video. Amazon understood early that every additional step between intent and purchase was revenue saying bye-bye, so built its entire logistics and UX infrastructure around that premise. We may think these experience examples have nothing to do with our business, but a customer looks at them as “calibration events”. Every time someone buys from, or uses, a product that seeks to reduce their tolerance for unnecessary friction, that level of convenience gets passed on to every product or service experience they have. Customers are lazy because the big brands make them that way, which has the secondary effect of making it more unlikely that they’ll ever go anywhere else.

Salesforce found that more than two-thirds of B2B buyers expect Amazon-like experiences from their professional vendor relationships, and the same proportion have switched vendors specifically to get something closer to it. Remember that the people making B2B purchasing decisions are B2C customers too. They spend their weekends buying and using products designed by some of the best UX teams in the world. Then they come back to work on Monday with newly-calibrated interaction expectations, and what they run into looks like a mudslide.

The organizational explanation for why we’re still doing this is because buying processes are designed from inside the organization, rather than from the buyer’s point of view. Sales teams build qualification steps to protect their time and fill-in spreadsheets that keep Management and Finance off their backs. Marketing builds lead capture mechanisms to protect their vastly over-inflated attribution numbers. Collectively they’re producing something that’s an obstacle course designed for everyone’s benefit except the buyer’s. It’s what happens when no single person or department is responsible for the experience of the stranger trying to decide whether we’re worth fifteen minutes of their time.

What buyers are doing before we know they exist

According to 6sense, buyers define their requirements independently more than four-fifths of the time before speaking to any vendor. The vendor that’s contacted first wins eight out of ten deals, meaning the shortlist is largely set before we’ve had the opportunity to make any kind of impression through a sales process. The impression that matters to the buyer has already been made (or not made) during their anonymous research phase: Googling, AI prompting, review reading, LinkedIn checking, or chats with a peer.

This reframes the friction problem, since we tend to think about buying friction as something that happens in the sales process. But the more decisive friction happens much earlier, in the moment when a buyer who has never spoken to anyone at our organization is trying to work out from publicly available information whether we’re even worth contacting. If our website speaks a different language than the one buyers use when they’re searching for what we do, we may have lost before we even knew the game had started. Most businesses haven’t interrogated which pages buyers actually land on first, or whether those pages do any useful work for a stranger. Ahrefs analyzed 14 billion web pages and found that 96.55% of them generate zero organic search traffic. Excluding technical issues, the biggest reason for this is down to vocabulary mismatch: the copy describes how the business views itself internally, rather than how a buyer would describe the problem they’re trying to solve.

Removing things instead of adding them

When Figma moved collaborative design to the browser, the conventional description was that they’d eliminated the software installation barrier. While that was certainly true, that only scratches the surface of what was really happening. The gain was less about users no longer having to download software, as that other project participants, ones who probably had never been part of a design review, could now open a file in a browser tab and leave a comment. Suddenly it changed the scope of who could be in the room, how collaboration could work and how the product could be useful to a category of person it had previously been invisible to.

Notion’s more interesting contribution wasn’t the editor. It was eliminating any low-level anxiety of version management — that stomach-sinking feeling of whether you’re looking at the current document, whether someone had changed it since you last opened it, or whether the version you’d just shared was the right one. Removing that fear, uncertainty, and doubt didn’t make document editing faster, as much as make a kind of collaborative working possible that had been incrementally impeded before.

Neither of these examples are meant to be seen as some kind of tech-based case study success story. What they have in common was someone willing to ask, “What is the actual thing standing between a person and what they’re trying to accomplish, and can it be removed rather than worked around?” The reason more people don’t ask this question goes in most buying process reviews is that it requires looking at the business process from the outside, and the people who to run the review are inside, can can no longer be unbiased and objective because the friction is no longer visible to them. It’s just the way we do things here…

When things go downhill after the contract

McKinsey’s B2B Pulse research found that buyers today use an average of ten touchpoints across the whole purchasing journey. They key word here is “whole”, since it means the evaluation doesn’t stop at signing the contract. Customers are continuously recalibrating, and the post-purchase experience is where a significant proportion of those recalibrations tip into negative territory. We want to give the excuse that customers leave us for the competition because of product features, but in many cases it’s because being a customer started to feel like more work than it should. Getting hold of someone took longer than it did when they were in pre-sale schmooze mode. When someone finally does respond, they ask for context that was already provided two months ago, because nothing was retained between conversations.

At a certain time there’s a tipping point where cost of staying starts to look comparable to the cost of switching. Once the see-saw has tipped, the relationship is essentially over, even if the formal notice comes six months later. Sustaining a consistent customer relationship is a problem at the organizational level, requiring someone to own the ongoing client experience as a specific responsibility, rather than assuming it emerges naturally from the general competence of the team. Since most businesses don’t have any person or team addressing that side of things, it’s not a surprise when many B2B client relationships end earlier than either side would have expected.

The standard framing of this issue treats ease of purchase as a customer experience metric — something to track, improve quarterly, and report upward. But that’s only a small part of it. When a business consistently removes obstacles from the path between a potential buyer and a decision, it’s communicating something to the outside word about how it thinks — about the relationship between its own convenience and its buyer’s time, about whether it has actually thought about the experience from the outside. Salesforce data claims the proportion of buyers who consider the experience a business provides to be as important as its products and services at around 80%.

Every time a prospect spends trying to decode a pricing page, or waiting for an email response that should have come days earlier, is a time they’re being expected to absorb the cost of our internal disorganization. Behavioral science has a clear account of how people respond to that kind of accumulated cost: they don’t articulate it, they don’t complain, they just use System 1 shortcuts and heuristics to go with whoever made the decision feel least costly. And then they tell you some fib like “the price wasn’t right”, because that’s an explanation that requires the least further conversation.