Is Your Website Losing Customers Before They Even Contact You?
Yes, most business websites lose customers silently. Broken forms, missing phone numbers, and internal jargon stop people from making contact before you ever know they tried.
8 min read
What Does It Actually Mean for a Customer to 'Easily Do Business' With You?
Easy business means a customer can find your number, complete a form, and book or order without friction or confusion in under a few minutes.
Go to your website right now. Pretend you have never heard of your company. Can you find a phone number quickly? Can you actually submit the contact form, or does the button do nothing? Can you sign up for the newsletter and get any kind of confirmation that it worked?
These sound like basic questions. They are. And that is exactly why so many businesses skip them.
At Kunden Erlebnis, Anne-Marie Vissers runs website accessibility checks for B2B clients as part of the broader customer experience audit process. What she finds repeatedly is a gap between how polished a website looks and how functional it actually is. Beautiful design. Great team photos. And a contact form that silently fails on submission.
The customer on the other end of that failed form does not send a complaint. She moves on. She finds your competitor. You never know she was there.
What Happens When a Contact Form Does Not Work?
When a contact form fails silently, the customer disappears without a trace. You lose the lead, and you never receive any signal that something went wrong.
Anne-Marie Vissers audited two different company websites at client request. The first was visually strong: professional photography, staff portraits, clearly invested design budget. Then she looked for the contact options.
The phone number was hard to locate. There was no international dialing code, despite the company operating near a national border where cross-border customers were a realistic target group. She tried the contact form. There was no working submit button. The form accepted her input and went nowhere. She then attempted to subscribe to the newsletter, entered her email address, pressed Enter, and received nothing. No confirmation. No error message. Silence.
That silence is the problem. The customer does not know the form is broken. She only knows she could not reach you. And in most cases, she will not try again.
Customers who have a difficult time reaching a company often churn without ever filing a formal complaint. The signal never reaches the business. The gap between what the company believes is happening and what the customer actually experiences is precisely what Kunden Erlebnis calls the 'delivery gap.'
Why Does Industry Jargon on a Booking Page Drive Customers Away?
Industry jargon creates friction because it assumes the customer already knows what you know. First-time visitors do not share your internal vocabulary, and confusion triggers abandonment.
The second website Anne-Marie reviewed belonged to a campsite. For a campsite, the website is even more critical than for most businesses, because it is also the booking engine. She ran a mystery booking, the same process any first-time guest would follow.
Midway through the booking flow, she encountered terminology she simply did not understand. As a customer, her immediate reaction was: what does this mean? What am I supposed to fill in here?
The terms were completely natural to the campsite owner. She lives inside the business every day. She knows exactly what each field means, how the site is organized, what the categories refer to. But a guest arriving for the first time carries none of that context.
This is the Kundenbrille problem in its most direct form. When you design a process from the inside out, using the language your team uses internally, you create friction for everyone approaching from the outside. The customer is not confused because she is inattentive. She is confused because she was given no reason to understand your internal system.
At that moment, the customer has two options: push through the confusion, or abandon the booking and find a campsite whose process is clearer. Both outcomes matter. Even if she completes the booking, she has already had a friction experience before she arrives. That shapes every interaction that follows.
How Do You Test Your Own Website From a Customer's Perspective?
Run a structured mystery test: try to contact the company, complete a form, and place an order or booking as a first-time visitor with no prior knowledge of the business.
The method is straightforward, and it costs nothing except an hour of honest attention. Open your website on a browser where you are not logged in to any internal system. Approach it as someone who has never heard of you.
Work through these checkpoints:
First, can you find a phone number quickly, and does it include the correct international format if your customers cross borders? Second, does the contact form actually submit, and do you receive any confirmation that it did? Third, if you have a booking or order function, complete a full test transaction from start to finish. Note every moment of confusion, every field label that requires guesswork, every step where you would hesitate if you did not already know the answer.
This is not a design audit. Aesthetics are secondary. The question is purely functional: can a customer who wants to reach you actually do so, without friction, without confusion, and without prior knowledge of how your internal systems work?
Anne-Marie Vissers runs this exact check as part of the customer experience audit process at Kunden Erlebnis. It sits alongside NPS campaigns and customer interviews as a diagnostic tool, not an afterthought. Because the data from a mystery check often reveals what no survey will ever capture: the moment a customer gave up and you had no idea.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should a business test its own website for customer accessibility?
A full functional test - covering contact forms, phone numbers, booking flows, and newsletter sign-ups - should happen after every significant website update and at minimum once per quarter. Broken elements rarely announce themselves. A test run by someone outside the organization, who carries no internal assumptions, catches problems that internal teams consistently miss.
Why do customers not report broken contact forms or confusing booking pages?
Because reporting requires effort, and the customer owes you nothing. When a form fails or a booking page confuses her, the path of least resistance is to leave and find an alternative. Research consistently shows that the vast majority of dissatisfied customers say nothing before they stop doing business with a company. The silence feels like satisfaction. It rarely is.
What is a mystery booking and why does it matter for customer experience?
A mystery booking is a structured test in which an auditor completes a full customer transaction, such as a booking, order, or contact request, from start to finish, posing as a genuine first-time customer. It reveals friction, jargon, and broken steps that internal teams are blind to because they already know how the system works. Kunden Erlebnis uses mystery checks as part of the diagnostic Nullmessung phase.
Is website jargon really enough to make a customer abandon a purchase?
Yes. When a customer encounters terminology she does not understand mid-transaction, she faces a choice: invest effort to figure it out, or leave. If her motivation is not exceptionally strong, she leaves. The problem is not the customer's patience - it is that the business designed the process for someone who already knows the answers.
What is the first step if a business suspects its website has friction points?
Run a structured mystery test yourself, or ask someone with no prior knowledge of your company to attempt to contact you, book a service, or place an order. Document every moment of confusion or failure. Then fix the broken elements before looking at anything else. Friction at the contact stage means you lose customers before the relationship has even started.