Four Ways Interior Designers Create Client Friction Without Realizing It
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Since 2017, I've been trying to reduce friction for designers and their clients. Friction is the parts of your process and your interactions that are painful, whether for you, your clients, or your team.
In an interior design business, client friction often shows up when something takes too much time, creates too many questions, feels unclear, or makes the client do more work than they expected.
One way to remove friction is to provide information.
An investment guide that walks through your pricing and process.
A welcome guide so new clients know what's expected of them and what they can expect from you.
A contract & detailed scope of work that spells everything out plain as day.
Another way is to use software that makes things easy on clients.
HoneyBook or another CRM so clients can digitally approve proposals and sign contracts (no more printing files and scanning them back, yes, this is still a thing).
An appointment scheduler so clients can pick a date and time, add it to their calendar, and get reminders.
Product management software to prepare proposals and spec books with ease.
But there are less obvious ways interior designers are creating friction for their clients, ones they might not notice unless they’ve been on the client side of this process, meaning they’ve built, renovated, or hired a designer or architect for their own project and they’ve been through it themselves.
Here are four common friction points I see interior designers create without realizing it.
01 | Is Your Interior Design Intake Process Creating Client Friction?
If a potential client has to answer a ton of open-ended questions on your contact form, share their Pinterest boards, upload pictures of their home, and describe their design style and how they want their space to look and feel, you've likely just said goodbye to ten leads who didn't even attempt to reach out.
That level of work just to fill out a contact form to get some basic information is painful, and it’s COMPLETELY unnecessary.
The contact form's goal isn't to get into design mode. If someone is reaching out to you, your style is their style. You don't need their inspiration boards before you've even had a conversation.
The point of the contact form is to get them to contact you and to figure out if they're a good fit for your firm. That's it.
I'm not saying strip your form down to nothing. But it shouldn’t turn people away because it's too much work to fill out when they don't even know if they're going to hire you yet.
Why would someone spend thirty or forty-five minutes filling out a form and uploading files if they don't know i) that they’ll even get a response, or ii) if they can afford you or not.
02 | Does Unclear Pricing Create Friction for Interior Design Clients?
For the love of all that is sacred and holy, if you don't know your pricing, don't expect a client to trust it either.
Say you book a discovery call with me, a business operations consultant for interior designers, and tell me you want to hand your business over so I can fix it. Logins, passwords, carte blanche, all of it.
I tell you, absolutely, I know exactly what to do, I've done this a hundred-plus times before.
Then you ask what it will cost, and I say I have no idea, it depends on seventeen thousand factors, it's complicated, every case is different, I can't even give you a range.
Would you feel confident in me? Would you believe I've done this before? Or would you want a little more certainty?
Now picture the other version.
I say, “I can't give you a firm number until I write out a detailed scope of work, but projects like yours generally run eight to fifteen thousand dollars and span a few months, and here are the things that can drive that number up …”
Knowing your numbers removes friction.
03 | Does How You Present Your Furnishings Pricing Create Client Friction?
This one's a fifty-fifty topic, and I know some of you already handle it well.
But when you mark up a non-custom item a client can find online at Pottery Barn for a thousand dollars, and you can't explain why it's reasonable for them to pay twenty-five to fifty percent more to buy that same thing through you, congrats, you've just created friction. 🔥
Charge retail for the retail item, then add a procurement fee or build your time into your design fee to cover ordering, installing, and handling claims, and that makes sense to a client. Because THAT is a service.
Nobody wants to pay over retail for something they can get at retail.
They do understand paying for your expertise and for the insurance policy of you handling it if something goes wrong.
Even making a client question your pricing in the first place is you creating friction.
Here's where it shows up again:
You hand a client a total for a room, forty thousand dollars, and list it out with almost no detail.
Sofa, coffee table, side chairs, side table, window treatments, rug, pillows, two lamps, forty thousand dollars total.
How many questions does that raise?
Does it include shipping? Tax? Pillow inserts? The window treatment for that little window above the table? Install, assembly, lightbulbs?
That's friction.
Compare that to naming the sofa's construction and fabric, the coffee table's finish and material, the fabric and trim detail on the side chairs, and the delivery and installation included in the window treatment line, still landing on the same forty-thousand-dollar total plus fifteen percent for shipping, receiving, white glove delivery, and tax.
The client sees exactly what they're getting without you breaking out a per-item price, and they're less likely to push back on a lump sum price.
04 | Are Too Many Design Options Creating Client Friction?
Your client wants you to design their living room, so you create five different options and present them all.
Yeah, no.
Yet plenty of you are doing exactly this.
When you ask your client to act as the designer and pick the option that's best, you've shifted your job of creating a curated, timeless, unique space from your shouldersto theirs.
That's stressful for someone who isn't a designer and hired YOU to make these decisions for them.
Present the best option based on their space, budget, preferences, and function.
Let them ask for a different sofa or a different pillow after you’ve presented your best design to them.
Don't build two more full designs and ask them to choose between three.
My take? If you're doing this because it feels generous or thorough, I get the instinct, but it backfires.
Imagine hiring me to redesign your business, and instead of telling you the best combination of software, service offerings, and pricing for your specific business, I hand you five full plans and ask you to pick which one you like best.
You're not going to feel taken care of.
You're going to wonder why you're paying me to make you do the work of deciding, and how much of your money went toward me building four options you'll never use.
How Do You Reduce Client Friction in an Interior Design Business?
Every one of these friction points comes down to the same question: does your client feel confident, or do they feel like they need more certainty?
When you remove friction at every one of these points, from the first outreach to the proposal to the contract to the walkthrough, your client feels like they're in expert hands, even with a hundred and seventy-eight other vendors and trades involved in getting their project done.
The goal is to make it easier for your client to understand what happens next, what things cost, what they're getting, and what you need from them.
And when those pieces are clear, you usually make your own job easier too. Fewer questions, fewer unnecessary revisions, fewer pricing conversations that go sideways, and less time spent managing frustration and pushback that could have been avoided earlier in the process.
Ready to Fix All the Friction Points in Your Interior Design Business?
The intake form, pricing conversation, furnishing proposal, and design presentation are all individual parts of the client experience.
But if you're fixing one friction point only to find another one two steps later, it's worth looking at how all the parts of your process work together.
That's exactly what we do inside The Designed to Scale® Method.
The DTS Method helps interior designers tighten their services, pricing, sales process, onboarding, project delivery, and client experience so your clients have a better experience and you can spend more of your time doing the work you love.
