I’m observing signs of a micro-trend: customer pushback against the small, accumulated irritations of customer experience improvements.
I’m calling this CX Effort Creep.
My interpretation is that brands’ pursuit of greater engagement is adding layers of work customers never expected to undertake.
Each additional step may seem small in the journey, but the accumulated burden could be pushing customers towards a breaking point.
Customer Experience Effort Creep describes the expanding burden attached to buying and using a product or service, and the perceived complexity it adds to what customers expect to be a relatively easy task.
Brands require more and more steps as a condition of purchasing or using their products and services. Customers must download an app, create an account, provide personal information or complete verification to proceed.
Today, the burden of CX Effort Creep has become a customer experience norm, and the associated dissatisfaction is becoming louder on social media.
THE COMMERCIAL VIEW
Most customer journeys are complex, with layers of digital and human touchpoints. Compared with journeys a decade ago, customers are now expected to navigate more steps to complete a purchase.
Multiply this across every organisation they interact with, and the accumulated customer experience effort is a burden that is scaled.
These small CX irritations may surface in customer behaviour research, but most likely, not synthesised for cumulative impact across the hundreds of journey interactions that customers experience every day.
Everyday transactions now involve apps, loyalty points, account setup, passwords and password updates, personal information, repeated verification and logins to use. Afterwards come the marketing emails, review requests and surveys.
CUSTOMER VIEW
My observation is that more of these frustrations are voiced beyond the feedback surveys.
Every additional step that requires more customer engagement is making their experience feel harder-and-harder within their already busy, demanding and rapidly changing life.
CX UPSIDE
Customers may simply ask an AI assistant to complete a task. Reducing effort wouldn’t need to be part of the prompt.
As it handles the steps along the way, some of that low-level, grinding effort could disappear from their experience. It could very well become an everyday benefit of using AI.
CX DOWNSIDE
Customers are vocal about the brands they choose, asking for more and more, simply to purchase and use products and services:
- “When you unsubscribe from emails but still keep getting them😢.” 251 likes
- “Having to verify my email to view my power/gas bill with a code…” 942 likes
- “Annoys me when buying something online, and then suddenly I’m subscribed”… 180 likes
- “That you can’t buy most software now, you have to have a yearly subscription 🤷…” 390 likes
- “What annoys me is when I go to my local garden centre and an hour later I get an email asking how did we do?” 423 likes
BOTTOM LINE
AI could become the CX Effort Creep circuit breaker. Customers ask for the outcome, and reduced effort comes with it.
Brand and Customer Experience leaders are setting the direction for AI-enabled customer experiences. The opportunity is to reinvent the journey and remove the layers of enforced work, so customers can use our products and services with less CX effort.
OVER TO YOU…
Sources
Instagram, Things I hate more and more as I get older: Corporation Edition, comments captured 12 October 2026.
Government Information Quarterly, The accidental caseworker: How digital self-service influences citizens’ administrative burden, January 2022.
Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Chronic Stressors and Daily Hassles: Unique and Interactive Relationships with Psychological Distress, March 2004.
Google Pay Help, About Agentic Checkout with Google Pay, accessed 13 October 2026.