Do you make customers register an account in order to leave comments on your blog, access information or shop? You could be driving them away. A study by Blue Research for Janrain found 86 percent of respondents get annoyed by having to create new accounts on websites, an increase of 10 percent from the same survey last year. While 14 percent complete the registration despite being annoyed, more than half (54 percent) say they either leave the site or don't return again, and 26 percent go to a different site.
Even those who register are getting more impatient with the process. Eighty-eight percent of respondents say they have either left blanks in a registration form or used fake information to register, up from 76 percent a year ago. And if they forget a password, 90 percent won't bother to reset it or answer security questions to recall it -- double the 45 percent who did this the prior year.
Why it matters to your business: Consumers have more choices than ever, especially online. If you make them work too hard or spend too much time on your site, you risk losing them to a more familiar or speedier site. One option touted to grow in popularity in the future: The study found that 77 percent of respondents wanted websites to let them log in with their usernames and passwords from social media sites -- an increase of 11 percent from 2010. As someone who spends much of my day accessing different websites, I agree this sure would make things go faster -- though I'm uneasy about the possible privacy and security issues involved.