Customers Are Lazy

It’s no longer just about WHY a customer buys our product or service. Today it’s also about HOW. The ease in which customers are able to do business with us.

As consumers, we’ve become spoiled and lazy. We’re used to marketing-savvy companies making things easier for us. Streaming a song on Spotify or watching a film on Netflix is as simple as clicking a button.

Amazon recommends products that it thinks may interest us, based upon our purchase and viewing history. Businesses that understand the importance of user experience make it easy for us to buy from them.

However, as a result these companies are setting the standard for how every business, regardless of size, interacts with its own customers.

Making It Easy To Buy From Us

As buyers, we’re drowning in information. At the same time, we’re gagging for simplicity. Today’s customers have unprecedented access to information to help them make the right buying decision for them. Product specifications, pricing comparisons, user reviews, and 1001 other data points are all available through social media, trusted channels, brand content marketing, and AI-powered front ends such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.

But all of this wealth of information hasn’t made consumers more diligent in their research. Quite the opposite, actually. In reality it’s made them more impatient with friction. Why? Because having all the information in the world is useless if it requires too much effort to parse. The cognitive load of decision-making in an information-rich environment leads to what psychologists call decision fatigue, and our prospective customers are experiencing it daily.

Our competitors aren’t just businesses selling similar products to our own. It’s any business that’s setting a new standard for purchasing ease and simplicity. Once you can reorder office supplies with a voice command or a single click, all of a sudden it’s like climbing the South face of Everest when another vendor makes us fill in some order form, or go through everything over the phone.

Just to be crystal clear: when I say that customers are “lazy” I don’t mean it in a derogatory sense.

In this context, the act of being lazy is actually very efficient from a behavioral science, evolutionary biology kind of way. Evolution has wired us to conserve as much mental energy whenever possible. We’re naturally drawn to the path of least resistance. It’s where things like cognitive biases, heuristics, and System 1 thinking comes into play. The companies that acknowledge this fundamental aspect of human behavior and design their buying processes accordingly will win.

Look at your organization from the outside in. Answer the following questions truthfully:

• How easy is it to find the telephone number of your company from your website?
• How long does it take for an email enquiry to be answered?
• How many times does a caller have to be transferred within your organization to get to the person who can answer their question?
• What happens after the sale? Does anyone contact the customer to check if everything’s OK?

The Hidden Cost of Friction

For every bit of unnecessary friction in the customer’s buying process, there’s a quantifiable drop-off rate. Each additional form field, each extra click, each moment of confusion creates an exit opportunity. In B2B, where purchase decisions already involve multiple stakeholders and approval processes, adding such additional complexity simply slows down a process that is already often glacial. Do we really think buyers are in the mood to tolerate a 12-field contact form and a mandatory discovery call?

Consider that 57% of the B2B buying process is completed before a customer ever contacts a salesperson. If our digital infrastructure can’t support that independent research and evaluation phase with minimal friction, we’re not even in the consideration set.

Clearly, AI isn’t going to become a greater part of the buying consideration process. As it does, it’s pretty obvious to anyone that customer expectations for simplicity will only increase. Tomorrow’s buyers won’t tolerate hunting through our website for information when they can simply ask an AI assistant to summarize our offerings, compare them with competitors, and place the order. All in a single interaction, from a single interface.

Organizations that proactively design their customer journeys to complement an AI-enhanced buying process have a greater chance to capture market share compared to businesses still clinging on to outdated, high sales-friction based processes.

Simplicity as a Business Strategy, Not Simply an Afterthought

Making the process of buying from us as easy as possible easy isn’t just a customer service tactic. It’s fundamental business strategy.

When Figma transformed design collaboration by moving it entirely to the browser, it eliminated software installation requirements and file versioning nightmares. What Figma did wasn’t just a technical achievement. It fundamentally changed who could participate in the design process. Suddenly product managers, developers, and marketing teams weren’t just recipients of designs. They were active collaborators. Organizations that forced clients to download bloated software, or sending email attachments called ‘_FINAL_v3_APPROVED_THIS_ONE.pdf’ looked positively Jurassic overnight.

When Notion simplified document collaboration by eliminating the need for constant saving and version control, it wasn’t just convenient. It fundamentally changed how teams worked. Organizations like Notion and Figma understand how removing purchase friction directly correlates with business growth.

Buyer expectations has increased exponentially over the past few years. We have become less forgiving (and more demanding) because the internet has shown us that there are businesses prepared to go the extra mile to make life easier for us.

All of us have better things to do than whatever we’re currently doing. If we consider customer attention as being the scarcest resource, the businesses that respect that scarcity by requiring minimal effort will surely do better than those that don’t give a stuff. The most successful businesses don’t just create great products. They remove obstacles between customers and those products. And yes, I recognize the irony of writing a lengthy article about making things simpler. Sometimes we need to think deeply about simplicity.

Our customers aren’t lazy, they’re efficient. The question is: are we? If we don’t make our customers’ purchasing experience an easy and pleasant one, we shouldn’t be surprised if they go and find a business that does.