Consumer Behavior
There’s a High Cost to the Frictionless Customer Experience
Research shows human "friction" is vital for a meaningful life.
Updated December 23, 2024 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Key points
- Casual social interactions boost happiness, belonging, and mental health, research shows.
- Automation risks worsening loneliness by replacing valuable face-to-face human connections.
- Social "friction," even when challenging, fosters empathy, growth, and community resilience.
- Human checkout interactions could combat isolation and rebuild trust amid rising automation.
Here’s a scenario that might sound familiar. You’re finishing your holiday shopping, scanning the barcodes at the automated checkout counter. You hear a warm but artificial computerized voice thank you for shopping, and you suddenly realize this was the only semblance of a verbal interaction you had since entering the store nearly an hour ago. In that moment, you stop to contemplate a weighty question: ‘Is this the hi-tech future we’ve been waiting for?’
Many corporate retailers today might answer that question with a resounding ‘yes.’ Automation, they’ll argue, offers speed, convenience, and 24/7 availability, along with fewer issues of human error. There’s no risk of a misunderstanding with a customer service agent or an unfriendly attitude from an overworked employee at the register. Automation gives customers control while cutting costs, allowing businesses to then invest in lower prices and innovation.
It’s a microcosm of a broader argument about AI and labor replacement. We’re headed for a world where life can be efficient, error-free, and liberated from the dramas of human commingling. The term in marketing lingo is frictionless. Companies from Macy’s to Nike to CVS to Amazon to Airbnb are now actively implementing strategies to promote the “frictionless customer experience.”
But all this raises a bigger question:
What if ‘friction’ is the point?
What if messy, inefficient, inconvenient social interactions are a necessary condition for leading a meaningful life?
There’s mounting evidence that customer service automation carries more serious costs than we commonly recognize.
Consider people facing severe social isolation. An estimated 12 percent of Americans report having no close friends, a fourfold increase from 3 percent in 1990. In an age of remote work, a substantial number of people have few social interactions whatsoever in an average week. According to the US Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on the crisis of loneliness and social isolation, such severe disconnection disproportionately impacts older people. But the problem transcends age cohorts. For young people in the US—ages 15 to 24—in-person time with friends fell by nearly 45 percent between 2003 and 2020. And that was before the pandemic. In South Korea, the government recently began paying young people US$500 a month to leave their homes and re-engage with other people.
For whole segments of society, seemingly mundane encounters in grocery stores, pharmacies, and post offices can now constitute a significant proportion of their overall human interaction. The loss of these interactions to automation can have profound impacts.
Research from Ed Diener from the University of Illinois and Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania shows that even quick interactions with a cashier or barista can have unexpectedly large impacts on a person’s experience of belonging. They find that social relationships, even at the most casual level, are strong predictors of happiness and life satisfaction.
Julianne Holt-Lunstad of Brigham Young University has found that a deficit of face-to-face interaction significantly increases the risk of depression, anxiety, and even physical health challenges, like cardiovascular disease.
Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at UCLA, has explored the role of ‘mirror neurons’ in promoting empathy. He has found that face-to-face interactions are required to stimulate these neurons, which means that automated systems can deprive individuals of opportunities to develop compassion and emotional connection.
But here’s the more fundamental problem with the logic of the frictionless customer experience.
It implies that ‘friction’ is inherently a bad thing.
Psychology research going back more than 50 years shows that even unpleasant social interaction—including misunderstandings and disagreements—can foster personal growth, empathy, and problem-solving skills as well as resilience. Overcoming social conflict is integral to the work of building community.
The philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff once told his students that dealing with a difficult person could be like “yeast for the bread” of human development. Challenging social interactions can be required for learning “the meaning of patience, the meaning of loving kindness and compassion” and for learning “how to deal with your anger and irritation.”
While corporate marketers developed the term ‘frictionless’ to capture the appeal of avoiding human interaction through automation, I think the metaphor is instructive in the opposite way from how it’s intended.
In nature, friction and pressure aren’t burdens to be avoided. They’re inherent to the process of becoming. A rough rock, rubbed and tumbled over time with water and sand and other rocks, turns into a smooth and polished stone. Likewise, the irritation of a single grain of sand in an oyster shell becomes a pearl over time.
Something beautiful emerges through resistance.
It’s often wise to look to nature if you want to understand human nature.
For nearly all companies, the decision to replace staff with automated checkout machines is based on an economic calculation. And behind that calculation is—almost always—the assumption that the relationship between customers and workers is trivial or even an annoyance. Ordering coffee from an instant app or getting your groceries through an AI-based delivery system can naturally reduce time and effort.
But today—as society faces rapid technological changes and a widely recognized crisis of belonging—we need to reexamine those assumptions. At a time when many big corporations, including retailers, are facing unprecedentedly low levels of public trust, they should consider how policies like reinstating human checkout counters can help stem the tide.
It’s not about opposing technology. It’s about honoring that human connection—no matter how small—is what makes us thrive.