The Hidden Cost of Digital Friction: How Product Analytics Can Solve It

Digital friction is increasingly undermining the significant investments made in modernising workplace systems, ultimately hindering the progress of digital transformation. This hidden challenge encompasses micro-stalls, misclicks, rework, and context switches that collectively waste countless hours across organisations. According to the Ivanti 2025 Technology at Work Report, 38% of IT professionals perceive tech complexity as a hindrance, and 63% believe that new workplace technologies frequently create more tasks than they alleviate.

The systems intended to enhance productivity and engagement often lead to the opposite outcome, resulting in considerable financial losses each year due to wasted effort. Tackling this hidden friction has become crucial for unlocking the true potential of digital transformation.

The Modern Digital Burden

Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and other executive leaders are confronted with an urgent question: Why are expected outcomes failing to materialise despite significant investments in premium software solutions?

This disconnect is increasingly apparent as companies find it difficult to correlate technology spending with measurable returns. Employee digital friction is at the core of this issue.

Digital friction can be described as the accumulation of micro-stalls, misclicks, and rework that gradually erode productivity. As organisations broaden their technology ecosystems, employees must navigate a fragmented digital landscape.

A recent study by Deloitte revealed that companies with engaging and supportive workforce experiences enjoy 22% higher employee engagement. Additionally, employees in such environments are four times more likely to stay in their roles, which significantly enhances the ROI of technology investments.

However, if digital friction continues to exist, organisations will struggle to realise the complete value of their technology investments and improve user satisfaction.

As enterprises expand their technology ecosystems, friction manifests in familiar patterns:

• Tool sprawl and constant context switching compel employees to manage multiple systems, disrupting focus and slowing execution.
• Poorly designed user journeys leave leaders unaware of where employees face challenges, which delays necessary fixes.
• UX debt and configuration drift arising from frequent customisations or new updates lead to inconsistent experiences across teams.
• Training conducted outside the workflow causes employees to forget what they learn, resulting in repetitive mistakes and escalating support needs.

On their own, these challenges may seem insignificant; however, at scale, they collectively create substantial hurdles to productivity and adoption. This is why enterprises frequently observe that feature rollouts stall rather than accelerate, even after considerable investment.

The core problem is deceptively straightforward: employees become disengaged, errors increase, and adoption stagnates. Previously, identifying friction required extensive weeks of engineering requests and fragmented analyses before uncovering root causes.

Today, modern no-code product analytics revolutionises this process. Every user interaction is automatically captured from the outset, providing leaders instant insights into user struggles. GenAI further enhances this by automating pattern detection, uncovering friction points, and generating UX recommendations that previously required days of manual effort.

With session replays offering clear insights into the “why” behind user actions, teams can quickly resolve issues, converting stalled adoption into measurable improvements the same day.

These seemingly minor friction points, when multiplied across workflows, lead to hidden inefficiencies that subtly diminish productivity and technology ROI. Indeed, insights from Forrester indicate that digital friction results in higher service costs, stifles innovation, and hinders growth.

As workarounds, context switching, and troubleshooting become more prevalent, these costs rise exponentially. Although such hidden expenses rarely feature in traditional financial documents, their impact on employee productivity, user experience, and technology adoption is profound and far-reaching.

Product Analytics: Realising ROI From Every User Interaction

The gap between technology expenditure and adoption frequently arises from an inability to measure and enhance digital experiences.

Product analytics enables organisations to tackle employee digital friction by offering real-time insights into how employees engage with tools. By monitoring user behaviour, such as interaction flows, error rates, and support requests, organisations can identify inefficiencies, optimise technology for improved outcomes, and ultimately enhance employee productivity and satisfaction.

Progressive organisations are leveraging features that automatically capture every user interaction, including clicks, scrolls, and page views, from the moment a system is implemented. This eliminates the necessity for manual tagging, tracking spreadsheets, or engineering efforts.

Constantly updated behavioural data feeds directly into AI-driven analysis, empowering teams to pose simple questions and promptly receive actionable insights, summaries, and session replays that clarify the motivations behind the numbers.

Real-time cohorts develop automatically, adapting as user behaviour shifts, allowing insights to transition effortlessly into targeted actions without delays between discovery and resolution.

For example, a prominent beverage manufacturer relied on Microsoft Dynamics to oversee its raw material procurement, a process riddled with requisition entry inaccuracies, resulting in frequent rework and delays.

Utilising Whatfix’s User Actions feature, the firm tracked critical fields within the procurement workflow. The analytics, powered by GenAI, revealed specific fields with elevated error rates while also identifying at-risk user segments.

Equipped with this information, the company deployed Whatfix’s GenAI-enhanced Digital Adoption Platform, effectively minimising friction by masking invalid options, streamlining workflows, and offering in-app guidance.

The outcome was transformative: support tickets decreased by 75%, over 850 erroneous requisitions were caught before submission, and processing time per requisition was shortened by 25 to 30 minutes, resulting in a saving of over 425 person-hours.

Crucially, the company tackled underlying inefficiencies by directing users to remedial training, thus reducing repetitive errors. To effectively manage digital friction, organisations must monitor the right metrics.

Key performance indicators should encompass task success rates, time to completion, step-level error and abandonment rates, tickets per 100 users, and guidance adoption uplift. These metrics not only highlight areas where friction exists but also illustrate the business value of resolving it.

Impact Of Digital Friction On Organisational Performance

The true essence of digital transformation is not merely in technology adoption but in the quality of the user experience it fosters. Product analytics serves to bridge the gap between technology investment and human outcomes, delivering organisations nuanced insights into employee engagement with digital tools.

By harnessing behavioural data, organisations can pinpoint friction points that lead to task abandonment, frequent errors, or excessive reliance on support. These insights empower firms to deploy targeted interventions, like in-work guidance, while continuously refining digital processes based on authentic user data.

This method not only yields superior outcomes but also provides objective measures of the efficacy of digital initiatives.

Product Analytics Powering Workplace Productivity

As the digital workplace continues to evolve, product analytics has emerged as a strategic asset redefining the future of work. Nearly 70% of employees express their readiness to adapt their roles and skills to advance digital initiatives, presenting a rare opportunity to centre human experience within transformation efforts.

Firms that equip employees with real-time, data-driven insights and seamless digital experiences can unlock growth and gain a long-term competitive edge. Product analytics facilitates this process by transforming raw interactions into immediate, targeted actions—similar to the global beverage company that used analytics to identify workflow bottlenecks, take real-time action, and elevate frontline productivity.

By anticipating employee needs, fostering organisational flexibility, and cultivating a culture of ongoing innovation, companies can dismantle traditional barriers and create intelligent, resilient workplaces. This framework serves as a blueprint for modern enterprises, converting every insight into decisive action, each action into measurable results, and every investment into maximised returns on technology.

Ultimately, digital transformation is not achieved through merely delivering more features; it is realised by eliminating the seconds that waste hours.