CX Friction Isn’t Just Inconvenient — It’s Expensive

Nov 24, 2025

Most builders don’t need to be told that the little things matter. They live it every day. Every delayed update, every missing document, every unclear next step — they all add up. Teams feel it, buyers feel it, and leadership definitely feels it when the referral numbers come in.

What often gets overlooked isn’t the frustration itself, but the sheer cost of it.

CX friction doesn’t just frustrate buyers — it drains margin, eats time, and quietly slows down your entire organization.

And as we head into 2026, the price of friction is rising.

The builders who win the next cycle won’t simply be the ones with the best product or the flashiest sales center. They’ll be the ones who eliminate the operational friction that buyers feel and teams absorb — the friction that is often invisible, but everyone ultimately pays for.

The hidden cost of doing everything manually

Let’s start with one of the biggest culprits: manual workflows.

According to a 2024 Warranty & Service Operations Benchmark Review, builders spend an average of 8–12 hours per customer during the construction journey on communication and coordination alone. Those hours come from:

rewriting updates
clarifying muddy timelines
responding to the same question multiple times
chasing internal teams for information
putting out fires caused by unclear handoffs

That’s not a mild inconvenience — it’s a meaningful labor cost that affects sales velocity, admin bandwidth, and warranty responsiveness.

The good news is that these hours aren’t inevitable. When the repetitive, easily-preventable tasks are handled in a consistent, structured way, teams stop getting pulled into rework and can focus on the interactions that actually move the needle.

When the basics run smoothly, everyone gets to operate at their best.

Warranty: the most expensive place to be misunderstood

Builders often accept warranty volume as “just the cost of doing business.” But industry data shows that a surprising percentage of that volume comes from misalignment, not defects.

According to the 2024 Building Services & Warranty Review:

6–13 percent of warranty claims are non-warrantable.
75 percent of denied claims stem from misunderstandings about coverage.
25 percent of truck rolls are avoidable.

Put differently: a quarter of all truck rolls start with missing information, miscommunication, or unclear buyer expectations.

That’s fuel costs, labor hours, scheduling overhead, capacity strain, and lost opportunities — not because something was actually broken, but because the buyer didn’t know what to expect.

This is why Virtuo’s digital documentation tools and HomieAI layers matter. When buyers can quickly access warranty guides, triage common issues, and understand what is and isn’t covered, teams avoid spending time where they don’t need to — and avoid sending trucks that never needed to roll.

Reducing friction here removes friction everywhere else.

Construction updates: where uncertainty becomes expensive

Ask buyers what stresses them most about building a home, and the answer is almost always the same: not knowing what’s happening.

And the industry knows it.

Builders send 15–20 construction updates per buyer over the life of a build. Those updates take time — often 8–12 hours per customer over several months — and become one of the biggest sources of unnecessary friction when they’re inconsistent, confusing, or missing altogether.

When that happens, the ripple effects show up fast:

sales teams get pulled back into post-sale issues
warranty gets questions earlier than they should
operations get pressure from frustrated buyers
CX teams drown in requests for clarification
satisfaction drops before the house is even finished

This isn’t a CX issue.
It’s an operational drag with real financial consequences.

More builders are moving toward structured update workflows for a reason. When updates follow a consistent rhythm and format, teams avoid the downstream chaos that ad-hoc communication creates.

Consistency doesn’t cost time. It saves time.

Documentation: the quietest but most expensive friction point

Builders often think documentation is simple:

share the manuals
hand over the binder
email the documents
send the occupancy letter

But the real cost isn’t the initial delivery — it’s the reactive work that follows:

“Can you resend that?”
“I can’t find the PDF.”
“Where do I access my warranty info again?”
“What was the paint code?”

According to industry benchmarks:

Hard costs average $50–$150 per buyer
Assembling closing materials takes 1–2 hours per buyer
Additional document-sharing adds another 30–60 minutes
Re-sends and follow-ups aren’t tracked, but are universally known to be substantial

The real cost of documentation isn’t the initial delivery — it’s everything that happens afterward. A centralized, long-term home for documents eliminates the endless searching, resending, and recreating that teams take for granted.

Documentation friction is silent — but it’s expensive.

General buyer inquiries: small questions with massive ripple effects

Non-warranty inquiries rarely get attention in executive conversations, but they’re one of the biggest sources of lost productivity across sales, CX, and warranty teams.

Industry research shows:

Buyers generate 3–5 non-warranty questions in the first 30 days
Each question takes 15–30 minutes to resolve
82 percent of homeowners expect immediate responses
90 percent consider immediacy “important or very important”

This means that even the simplest question — “Who handles my possession date?” — creates a cascade:

stops someone from focusing
extends a task backlog
delays other responses
increases buyer anxiety
erodes confidence
and ultimately impacts referrals

HomieAI absorbs a significant portion of these questions — especially the predictable, frequently repeated ones — allowing humans to focus on empathy, nuance, and problem-solving.

It’s not automation for the sake of efficiency. It’s automation that protects the quality of the relationship.

Friction compounds — and compounding is costly

One of the most important truths about CX friction is that it doesn’t add up linearly.

It compounds.

A missed update → creates 2 inbound questions → creates 10 minutes of reactive work → creates confusion → triggers a misaligned expectation → results in a frustrated buyer → reduces recommendation intent → erodes referrals.

This is exactly why the 2024 CustomerInsight report showed such a dramatic drop in builder recommendation scores:

97% at contract → 71% after move-in.

That gap isn’t about finishes, floorplans, or pricing.

It’s friction. And friction is far from free.