The cost of friction

A friend of ours runs a small catering company. Their site is beautiful — custom photography, handwritten menus, a section where each dish has a backstory. It took a designer six weeks to build.

At the bottom of the site is a contact form. It has eleven fields. Name, email, phone, event date, expected guest count, venue, dietary restrictions, budget range, preferred contact method, how did you hear about us, and a message box.

37% of visitors open the form. 6% finish it.

That gap — the difference between the people who wanted to talk and the people who managedto talk — is pure friction. Every field is a cliff. Every dropdown is a pause. Every validation error is a rejection. By the time a visitor hits Submit, they've been tested eleven times on whether they care enough.

The weird part is: the information the form collects is all there in a normal conversation. "We're thinking about a rehearsal dinner in June, around 40 people, a couple of vegetarians, downtown somewhere, maybe $5k." Thirty seconds of talking. Every field filled. Zero friction.

This is the business case for voice. Not "it's cool" or "AI is the future" or any of the usual pitches. It's: the form is costing you 31% of your leads, and most of the time a thirty-second conversation gets the same data.

We measured this on the first customer we onboarded. Form completion went from 6% to 19%. The form didn't change. The voice agent just takes down the same details when visitors talk to it, and then fills the form on their behalf. Same data, eight times the completion rate.

Friction is the tax on every web interaction. Voice is the shortest path we know to stop paying it.

— The Seny team