Top 5 Most Frustrating Digital Customer Experiences

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Written By Jeff Winter

Ever find yourself vigorously swiping or scrolling on that image, only to realize…nope, it’s not moving? It’s the digital version of pushing a ‘pull’ door in public: slightly embarrassing, but mostly just frustrating! If you’re feeling the sting, trust me, you’re not alone.

Be honest...How many times did you swipe right on this image to see the content? How many swipes did it take before you felt the sting of frustration?

We’ve all had those “Oh come on!” moments with digital interfaces.

Just like this image, our customers experience frustration when they encounter unexpected increases in effort, time, or cost, choice overload, and privacy concerns during their interactions with businesses. Despite technological advancements enhancing efficiency and decision-making, these factors contribute to negative emotional experiences that taint the overall customer journey.

From busy signals to loading spinners

A generation ago, customer frustration looked very different. People waited on hold, got a busy signal, stood in a physical line, mailed a complaint letter, or tried again tomorrow. The experience was often slow and inconvenient, but expectations were shaped by the physical world. Delay and friction were built into life.

Today, most of our daily interactions run through glass. We learn patterns from consumer apps that feel instant and intuitive. Pages respond in milliseconds, gestures are predictable, and systems quietly adapt to our preferences.

That muscle memory does not switch off when someone logs in at work or deals with a B2B supplier. Operators, planners, engineers, and executives carry the same expectations into an order portal, an industrial analytics dashboard, or a maintenance scheduling tool. When those systems lag, confuse, or contradict the patterns people expect, it does not just feel clunky. It feels wrong.

The older frustrations were about time. The newer ones are about trust.

Digital friction as a brand signal

Customers do not separate “the product” from “the experience.” To them, the software is the brand. A login loop that fails on the second factor is not only an IT issue. It tells the user, “This company is not as modern or competent as it wants me to believe.” A dashboard that buries a critical control under layers of menus does not just slow someone down. It communicates, “No one who built this understands how my day really works.” A mobile page that refuses to scroll or respond, like that joke image that will not swipe, says, “You should not trust this environment in a high stakes moment.”

Over time, small moments like this accumulate into a story. The story might sound like: “This provider makes life harder,” or “This brand is behind the times,” or simply, “I do not want to deal with this again.” That story is brand erosion, and it often starts in pixels, not in marketing.

Bridging the Empathy Gap in a Digital-First World

Every online touchpoint (website visit, an in-app interaction, or a simple swipe) is now potentially a defining moment for how customers perceive and connect with a brand. Yet, it’s astonishing to learn that according to CSG, 38% of senior executives acknowledge a glaring gap in empathy. Put simply, they admit they cannot fully understand what their customers go through when navigating digital platforms or interacting with services.

Why does this disconnect matter so much? Because empathy is more than a feel-good, soft-skill buzzword. It’s the engine behind truly customer-centric innovation and design. Companies that make empathy a core component of their digital strategy often see increased customer loyalty, higher satisfaction scores, and, ultimately, stronger business performance. When leaders can step into their customers’ shoes and feel their pain points, understand their frustrations, and celebrate their small victories, it fuels more thoughtful product design and engaging user experiences.

However, many businesses still design technology and processes purely from an internal perspective: How does this feature benefit our bottom line? or How do we simplify our operations? The result is frequently a labyrinth of confusing forms, hidden fees, or unexpected steps that make the customer journey feel like a never-ending obstacle course. This friction doesn’t just undermine user satisfaction; it erodes the trust customers place in a brand. Trust, once lost, is notoriously difficult to rebuild, especially in the hyper-competitive digital space, where the next best alternative is literally a click or tap away.

Rising digital expectations, backed by data

Recent research shows that digital expectations are not just higher, they are rising faster than many organizations can match.

Verint’s 2023 State of Digital Customer Experience report found that 77% of businesses say consumer expectations for engaging with them digitally have increased over the previous year, an increase of about 10% compared with the prior survey. The same report shows that a growing share of consumers report higher customer service expectations than twelve months earlier, with that shift particularly pronounced among people who prefer to use digital channels.

Fast forward one year and in Verint’s 2024 State of Digital Customer Experience report, digital channels became the preferred way to interact with a business for the first time, with about 61% of customers favoring digital over other options. When asked what matters most, respondents put speed and simplicity at the top. 87% said that when they reach out to a company, fast replies are essential. 70% said they would move to a competitor after a terrible customer experience.

In other words, the standard is not just “have a digital channel”. The standard is “make it fast, clear and easy or I will leave”.

At the same time, CSG’s 2024 State of the Customer Experience report concludes that small, effortless moments now matter more than “epic” experiences. The report highlights a shift in the CX playbook toward quick, simple interactions that get the job done and away from complex, heavily produced journeys.

If rising expectations describe the pressure, the impact of bad experiences shows how unforgiving the environment has become. Unfortunately, Forrester’s 2024 US Customer Experience Index reports that overall CX quality in the United States has fallen to its lowest point since the index began, after three consecutive years of decline. Thirty nine percent of brands saw their CX scores fall in the most recent year, and only a tiny minority qualify as “customer obsessed.”

Taken together, these findings show two forces moving in the same direction. Customers expect more from digital interactions, and they increasingly reward brands that deliver low effort, high clarity experiences.

Beyond retail: why this hits harder in complex environments

It is easy to hear these statistics and picture streaming services, online shops or consumer apps. The stakes are even higher in complex B2B and industrial environments.

When a consumer app misbehaves, you might abandon a purchase or delete the app. When a production dashboard, maintenance tool or planning portal misbehaves, people do not simply uninstall it. Instead, they lose confidence and quietly route around it.

An engineer who cannot trust a screen to show the latest state of equipment exports data to a spreadsheet. A planner who finds a scheduling interface confusing calls people or sends emails instead. A plant manager who is burned by a glitch during a critical shift is far less likely to rely on the system the next time.

Those workarounds rarely appear in financial reports, but they show up in slower decisions, duplicated effort, inconsistent data and hidden operational risk. They also shape how internal users talk about the vendor or platform. By the time contract renewal conversations start, a decade of brand advertising cannot outweigh a year of “this tool makes life harder”.

In these contexts, digital experience is not window dressing. It is how the brand delivers on its promise in the moments that matter most.

Generations shaped by different frictions

Part of the challenge for leaders is that not everyone grew up with the same baseline.

People who began their careers in a pre-digital world remember manual forms, physical queues and limited choice. For them, the idea that they can see live data from a remote site at all may still feel impressive, even if the interface is clumsy.

Younger workers have a different reference point. Many of them learned interactions from smartphones that auto-complete, recommend and respond in milliseconds. To them, a system that requires multiple logins, obscure menu paths or guesses about what a button will do does not feel impressive. It feels broken.

Both groups work side by side inside the same organizations. If senior decision makers underestimate how jarring digital friction feels to the younger half of the workforce, they also underestimate the damage that friction does to trust and engagement.

The gulf between those experiences helps explain why some executives still view UX as “nice to have”, while the people using the tools every day view it as the difference between a good day and a bad one.

Designing for trust, not just completion

Given these dynamics, treating UX as a cosmetic layer is not sustainable. The data from Verint, CSG, Forrester and others all point in the same direction. Expectations for digital experiences are higher, patience is lower and the penalty for getting it wrong is severe.

For complex digital products, that implies a shift in design priorities. Some pieces of advice:

  1. Success should be measured in effort, not just in completion. A workflow that “works” but leaves users confused, exhausted or constantly double checking is not successful. It is eroding trust.

  2. Teams should treat small interactions as strategic. That is as true for an operator acknowledging an alarm as it is for a consumer checking a delivery status.

  3. Digital investments should be grounded in observed reality. Watching how people actually use a system, under pressure, reveals far more about trust than survey scores alone. It also exposes how often users try to “swipe” on metaphorical static images inside the product - moments where their mental model and the interface diverge.

  4. Brands should connect UX metrics to business metrics. Every reduction in friction, every improvement in clarity and every faster response is not just a nicer interface. It is risk reduction and revenue protection.

References:

Jeff Winter
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