LOS ANGELES — (September, 30, 2025) — Self-service tools promised speed and convenience. Instead, many customers say they feel like they’re doing the company’s work and walking away when it becomes too much. Liferay, a leading provider of Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs), reveals in its latest research that 73% of customers have skipped a purchase because the process was too frustrating, exposing a costly gap between digital investment and digital experience.
The 2025 Liferay Digital Self-Service Report, conducted in August 2025 via the third-party platform Pollfish, surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults to understand how people navigate online tasks, where friction drives abandonment, and which fixes would restore trust.
Key findings include:
- Friction kills completion: 68% have abandoned a digital task and 73% have skipped a purchase because the process was too annoying.
- Customers feel like unpaid staff: 82% feel they’re doing work an employee used to handle, either sometimes or very often.
- Frustration is the norm, even for the tech-savvy: 64% feel frustrated and 39% exhausted, while only 12% feel empowered; 67% say they’re tech-savvy yet still overwhelmed by digital customer service.
- The heaviest burden sits in compliance-heavy sectors: Healthcare (48%), government (37%), insurance (32%) and financial services such as banking (32%) are where customers feel most overworked.
- Consumers want clarity and support: Clear instructions (57%), simplicity (54%), support when needed (42%) and reliability (34%) top the list of improvements people say would make self-service easier.
The takeaway: a clear journey and reliable performance build confidence. When designed well, digital self-service delivers the speed and control customers want.
The report outlines key strategies to improve completion and ensure technology works for customers, not against them:
- One profile that travels: Unify identity and profile data so forms prefill and details persist; reduce repetition to save time for the customer.
- Save progress and guide the path: Auto-save each step so customers can pick up where they left off, and use a simple step tracker with plain-language instructions and inline validation.
- Add human help without a reset: Surface live help in context for repeated errors or high-stakes tasks, and ensure agents have up-to-date information so customers don’t have to repeat themselves.
- Build for reliability and reduce effort over time: Monitor each stage of the digital journey, identify where retries or restarts occur, and focus improvements on removing those roadblocks.
“People remember how a journey ends,” said Bryan Cheung, CMO at Liferay. “At the last step, what matters is ease and a clear outcome. When customers get a receipt or confirmation and know what happens next, the experience ends in confidence instead of doubt. Retention is the compound effect of endings like that, repeated across days and channels. Make the digital journey unmistakably clear and dependable, and you stop pushing people away and start earning their trust.”
Visit the 2025 Digital Self-Service Report at Liferay’s website for the complete survey results and additional insights.