I spend a lot of time talking with leaders about digital transformation. Everyone agrees that self-service has become essential for scale, convenience, and cost efficiency. What’s less comfortable to admit is that much of it isn’t working as promised. Our new Liferay 2025 Digital Self-Service Report shows how the promise of convenience is quietly eroding customer trust.
The report, conducted with Pollfish, surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults about their digital experiences. The findings confirm what many of us have suspected for years. People are tired of doing extra work in the name of self-service.
When a Shortcut Becomes More Work
Sixty-eight percent of consumers said they have abandoned a digital task. Seventy-three percent said they’ve skipped a purchase because the process was too annoying. That means nearly three out of four customers have walked away simply because a task made them feel burdened.
I understand why this happens. Teams often design digital processes to make internal systems more efficient, not to make the customer journey more intuitive. Each form field, password reset, or broken session adds friction that the customer absorbs. Eighty-two percent of respondents in our survey said they feel they are now doing tasks that employees used to handle. That’s a problem of perception as much as design. When people feel like unpaid staff, the entire experience becomes emotionally taxing.
Healthcare, government, and financial services illustrate this tension clearly. Customers in those sectors often face the steepest effort because every action requires verification or compliance. These patterns indicate that we’ve lost sight of what “self-service” really means.
When Friction Replaces Confidence
The emotional toll of poor design is easy to overlook. Sixty-four percent of people told us they feel frustrated during digital self-service tasks. Thirty-nine percent said they feel exhausted. Only twelve percent said they feel empowered. Even tech-savvy users who should feel the most confident report feeling overwhelmed.
Behind every abandoned journey is a ripple effect. Customers who can’t complete a task online don’t disappear. Instead, they switch to higher-cost channels or vent their frustration in reviews and surveys. Only a third of respondents said instructions in digital journeys are clear. Eighty-four percent said they have had to re-enter information a company already had, and ninety-one percent said they’ve restarted a task after an error.
The work just moves elsewhere. Seventy-eight percent of people said they’ve helped someone else complete a digital process because the steps were confusing. That’s a powerful signal. The burden of bad design spreads through families, workplaces, and communities.
What People Want Is Simple
If you ask customers what they actually want, the answers are refreshingly straightforward. They want clarity, simplicity, support, and reliability. They want progress that saves automatically and instructions that make sense the first time. They want errors they can fix without starting over.
Thirty-one percent of our respondents said the ability to save progress and return later would make their digital experiences less stressful. Twenty-six percent want clear step-by-step feedback so they know what remains to be done. Nearly a quarter want access to chat or help within the same screen. They aren’t expecting luxury treatment. They just want to know that service providers respect their time.
When companies focus on these fundamentals, the customer experience becomes smoother almost by default.
Measuring the Right Effort
One of the lessons I’ve learned is that reducing friction requires measuring it. Too many organizations focus on completion rates or click-throughs. Those metrics don’t capture how much effort customers expend along the way. Start tracking the number of restarts, the time between retries, and how often people switch channels for help. Those are the moments where confidence breaks down.
What gets measured gets managed. By quantifying effort, you begin to see opportunities for improvement that weren’t visible before.
Where Human Help Fits In
Despite all the progress in automation, people still want to know a human is nearby when something goes wrong. Our survey found that 36% of respondents prefer to talk to a person when self-service fails. Another 19% want human support for important or sensitive tasks. These moments are predictable and should be built into the experience.
Live chat, callback options, and co-browsing tools allow companies to meet customers in the moment without forcing them to start over. The goal is to connect humans and machines in a way that makes sense for the customer.
A Journey Worth Finishing
What separates great organizations from the rest is how they handle the moments when customers need clarity and confidence. When I talk to companies struggling with high abandonment rates, I always remind them that people remember how a journey ends. When a customer completes a task easily, gets a clear confirmation, and understands what will happen next, the experience ends in trust.
Those small wins compound over time, shaping how customers perceive your brand. The promise of self-service hasn’t disappeared. It’s just waiting to be rediscovered through empathy, simplicity, and design that respects the customer’s time.
That’s a conversation worth having.