Why modern services quietly push work onto the people who use them
Despite years of digital transformation, a surprising number of modern services still feel strangely difficult to use.
Every service requires work to function. The real question is who ends up doing it.
The Claim
At 8:12 on a Tuesday morning, Maria is sitting in her car outside a repair garage, engine off, phone balanced on the steering wheel.
The accident itself had been minor. A distracted driver nudged into her rear bumper at a traffic light the previous evening. No injuries. Just a cracked bumper and a dented boot door. The kind of thing insurance exists to make routine.
She opens the claims portal on her phone.
The form asks for photos of the damage. She steps out of the car and takes three pictures. When she uploads them, the portal rejects the files.
Image size too large.
She resizes them and tries again.
Now the system asks for a police reference number. She didn’t call the police — it was a minor accident. The form won’t proceed without it. She scrolls through the help section. No answer.
At 8:46 she calls the support line.
A recorded voice thanks her for calling and informs her that due to unusually high demand the wait time is approximately forty minutes.
Maria leans back in the driver’s seat and waits. The repair shop opens at nine. Her car is booked in for inspection.
She still hasn’t managed to submit the claim.
What Maria wants is simple: confirmation that the repair will be covered so she can move on with her week.
Instead she is slowly discovering how much effort the service requires.
The Dashboard
Across the city, Deepak is looking at a very different screen.
It’s 9:03 AM and he’s already on his second coffee. His dashboard shows a spike in fraudulent claims over the last quarter — staged accidents, manipulated photos, duplicate submissions.
The number isn’t small. Millions in losses.
Deepak works in risk operations for the same insurance company Maria is trying to contact. His job is to reduce fraud without damaging the customer experience.
Last month his team introduced a new verification rule: image analysis that detects manipulated accident photos.
The system works well. Fraud detection improves. But there’s another graph on the dashboard. Claim completion rates. They have dropped.
Some customers abandon the process halfway through. Others call support because the system rejects their uploads.
Support call volumes have increased by fourteen percent. Deepak knows what that means. Somewhere on the other side of the system, people like Maria are getting stuck.
Two People, One System
Maria experiences the system as frustrating and bureaucratic.
Deepak experiences it as fragile and risky.
Neither of them is wrong. They are both responding rationally to the same system — a system that must verify claims, prevent fraud, and process requests at scale. The difficulty Maria experiences is not the result of a careless employee or a poorly designed screen. It is the result of a deeper question every service eventually faces:
Where should the effort of the service actually live?
Because every service requires effort somewhere.
The Idea
I’ve started thinking about this invisible effort as service burden.
Every service requires work to function. Documents have to be verified. Requests have to be processed. Risks have to be managed. None of that effort disappears once the service launches.
It simply moves around the system.
Some of it sits inside the organization — in operations, compliance, infrastructure, and internal coordination. Some of it lands on employees. And increasingly, some of it lands on the user.
The form that takes twenty minutes to complete.
The five verification steps before opening a bank account.
The QR code restaurant menu that assumes you have a charged phone and good eyesight.
This total effort is what I call service burden.
You can think about it roughly like this:
Service Burden = Operational Burden + User Burden
Operational burden is the effort required inside the organization to deliver the service. User burden is the effort required from the person trying to use it.
The total burden never disappears. It can only move.
A Question Worth Asking
If you work inside a product, platform, or service, it’s worth pausing for a moment and asking a simple question.
- Where does the burden sit in your system today?
- Is most of the effort absorbed internally by the organization?
- Is it carried by frontline employees?
- Or has it gradually been pushed onto the people trying to use the service?
Most companies track revenue, churn, engagement, and operational efficiency with remarkable precision. Very few track where the effort required to run their service actually lives. Yet that effort often determines whether a service quietly degrades — or becomes genuinely better over time.
The Innovation Blind Spot
Companies today spend enormous energy on innovation.
Inside most organizations you’ll find AI pilots running in parallel, product teams shipping new features every sprint, and strategy documents promising step-change improvements in efficiency or growth.
But if you step outside the roadmap and look at how many services actually feel to use, something curious appears.
A surprising number of them are getting harder to navigate, not easier.
The insurance claim that takes hours.
The airline refund that requires multiple phone calls.
The healthcare portal that logs you out halfway through booking an appointment.
The problem isn’t necessarily a lack of technology.
More often, it’s that companies never stop to ask where the effort of the service has ended up.
Once You See It
Once you start looking for service burden, it becomes difficult to ignore.
You begin to notice it everywhere: in the extra verification step added to prevent fraud, in the self-checkout machine asking customers to do the work of a cashier, in the customer support queue quietly absorbing the complexity of a system that never quite worked.
Most organizations don’t track this burden.
They measure revenue, growth, engagement, and efficiency. But the effort required to keep a service running — and the question of who ultimately carries that effort — often goes unexamined.
And that turns out to matter more than most companies realize.
Because when service burden accumulates in the wrong places, systems start to fail in subtle ways.
Customers become frustrated.
Employees become exhausted.
Competitors appear with simpler alternatives.
In Part II, we’ll explore why companies often push service burden outward without realizing it — and why the organizations that learn to reduce it often end up winning.
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