What Happened to Customer Service? An Insider’s View of a Broken System
In 2019, Forbes ran an article asking whether customer service was dying. At the time, it sounded dramatic. But over the past few years, it’s become harder to argue with the premise. Anyone who has tried to resolve a billing issue, return a defective product, or get a straight answer from a company knows the feeling. You open a support ticket and receive an automated reply. You call a help line and get trapped in a phone tree. You finally reach a human being who seems exhausted, overworked, and unable to actually solve your problem.
Somewhere along the way, the experience of being a customer started to feel… adversarial.
Companies treat customer service like a cost center. Customers approach support interactions expecting a fight. Employees are stuck in the middle, trying to navigate systems that make it harder, not easier, to help people.
I’ve seen this shift from every angle: as an employee, a team lead, a customer, and now a marketer working with brands that care deeply about their reputation. And the truth is, the decline of customer service didn’t happen overnight. It was the result of a thousand small decisions about hiring, compensation, technology, and what companies believe customer-facing teams are actually for.
To understand what went wrong, it helps to start with the people doing the work.
Where did it all go wrong?
Over the past decade, the role of customer service has evolved dramatically. What used to be a support function—answering questions, resolving issues, helping customers navigate a product—has increasingly been turned into a revenue function. Support teams are now expected to retain accounts, upsell products, gather data, and protect margins.
At the same time, companies have invested heavily in automation. Chatbots, ticketing systems, knowledge bases, and AI assistants promise to make support faster and more scalable.
Some of those tools are helpful. Many of them are necessary. But the combination of higher expectations, tighter margins, and heavier reliance on technology has changed the nature of customer service work. Employees are asked to do more with less. Customers interact with systems before they ever reach a person.
The result is an experience that often feels impersonal, frustrating, and strangely combative. And that shift didn’t happen in theory—I watched it unfold from the inside.
My customer service background.
Several years ago, I started a job as a member of a company’s Experience Team, which was, essentially, their customer service department. The manager of the Experience Team absolutely hated when we were referred to as customer service. The truth was, we did far more than just assist customers—we placed orders, ran dozens of quotes, communicated between clients and our prepress department.
We were essentially account managers for dozens of six-figure clients, so the moniker of “customer service” was eschewed in favor of something more holistic.
I made $15 an hour at the start. Not bad for a part-time barista and ESL teacher. I was excited. I could finally sit down and answer emails instead of sling coffee.
After a few years and a change in management, I was bumped up to a Team Lead position. The manager and I were trying to figure out how to make the Experience Team better, specifically by teaching them consultative selling. In hindsight, we were being asked to transform a support team into a revenue team—without changing the title, the training, or the pay.
We read books. We listened to podcasts. We had meetings an hour before work every morning for professional growth, and Asana boards to track our individual goals.
Company-wide, we read The Four Disciplines of Execution. Everybody had WIGs. Employees were pushed harder than ever during a time of significant growth for the company, and it created incredible strain on a lot of people.
The expectations were raised for all our roles, but we didn’t get compensated for it accordingly.
It was sink or swim. And then COVID-19 hit. Do the math.
What happened to customer service?
Looking back on those years, a few patterns became impossible to ignore. From the inside, customer service didn’t collapse overnight. It eroded slowly, shaped by decisions about compensation, technology, and how companies think about both employees and customers.
So… what’s going on?
Employees aren’t paid enough.
Customer service is often framed as a training problem, but it’s frequently a compensation problem.
An appropriately compensated employee—meaning someone whose basic needs are met by their job—will naturally give good customer service. The inverse is also true: an under-compensated employee will struggle to give good customer service. Worrying about rent doesn’t make someone chipper.
Wages haven’t kept pace with the rising cost of living for a long time. A Pew Research analysis found that real wages for most American workers have barely changed over the past several decades when adjusted for inflation.
Meanwhile, recent inflation has only intensified the problem. Between 2021 and 2025, consumer prices rose slightly faster than wages overall, meaning many workers technically earned more money but had less purchasing power. When basic living costs keep rising and compensation doesn’t keep up, it becomes much harder for employees to bring patience, empathy, and energy into every customer interaction.
Customer service requires emotional labor. It requires patience, empathy, and the ability to calmly solve problems when someone else is frustrated. Those are real skills. When companies treat customer-facing roles as disposable or entry-level positions that anyone can do, they create a revolving door of burned-out employees. That instability shows up in the customer experience.
Companies treat customers like numbers at best, enemies at worst.
Customers with issues often don’t get prioritized. Companies don’t want to lose money, no matter what industry they’re in.
Instead of solving problems quickly, some organizations build entire systems designed to prove the customer wrong first. Refunds become investigations. Simple fixes turn into long email chains. Customers are asked to provide photos, serial numbers, timestamps, and multiple explanations before anyone will help them.
Sometimes fraud happens, I get that. But many companies design their systems around the assumption that the customer is trying to cheat them. When you start from that premise, the entire experience becomes adversarial. Good customer service requires the opposite mindset.
Companies are investing too much in tools, not people.
You don’t need a fancy CRM or AI system to deliver great customer service. You need to treat people fairly—both your employees and your customers.
Technology can absolutely help teams stay organized and communicate better. But tools don’t replace empathy, judgment, or the ability to read a situation and respond like a human being. Many companies keep buying new software hoping it will fix a culture problem. It won’t.
If your teams are underpaid, understaffed, and burned out, no ticketing system in the world will magically create great customer experiences.
The “death” of customer service is a bad thing.
Because your customer-facing team is one of your most powerful marketing channels.
Every interaction a customer has with your support team becomes part of your brand story. Long before someone writes a review, recommends your product to a friend, or decides to buy from you again, they’re forming an opinion based on how your company responds when something goes wrong. Marketing can promise a great experience, but customer service is where that promise gets tested. When companies neglect their support teams, they’re not just creating operational problems—they’re undermining their own marketing.
Your customer service team are the people who talk to your customers every day. They are the ones answering questions, solving problems, and shaping how people feel about your brand. If they’re unhappy, stressed, and overworked, that will show in every interaction.
On the other hand, when companies empower their customer teams—when employees have the authority and support to genuinely help people—the results can be remarkable. A single positive interaction can turn a frustrated customer into a lifelong advocate.
How to adopt a radically human approach to customer service.
If the decline of customer service was caused by systems, incentives, and culture, then fixing it requires changing those things too. There isn’t a magic platform, script, or framework that will suddenly make customers feel valued again. What it takes is a shift in mindset.
Companies that deliver great customer experiences tend to share a few simple principles: they trust their employees to solve problems, they prioritize long-term relationships over short-term gains, and they understand that treating people well isn’t just good ethics. It’s good business.
None of this is complicated. But it does require companies to resist some of the instincts that have shaped modern customer service.
Here are a few places to start.
1. Adopt a people-first culture across your organization.
There are programs out there claiming they’ll teach you how to do this for a fee, but resist the temptation. The principle is simple: prioritize the wellbeing of your employees.
That includes proper compensation, reasonable workloads, and giving your team the authority to solve problems without jumping through ten layers of approval.
That philosophy should also extend to your customers. Stop trying to extract the maximum amount of money from every interaction and start focusing on helping people. When customers feel respected and supported, they become long-term partners and brand loyalists.
2. Be willing to take some losses—and eat some humble pie.
No matter what industry you’re in, mistakes will happen. Orders will get mixed up. Products will ship with defects. Someone on your team will make an error.
When customers reach out for help, don’t treat them like criminals.
Too many companies build elaborate ticket systems and investigation processes when something goes wrong. Sometimes those systems exist to identify patterns and prevent larger issues—and that’s fine. But the customer shouldn’t bear the burden of that investigation.
Fix the problem, apologize, then make it right. Quickly. Then do your investigation behind-the-scenes.
3. Make a good product.
This might seem obvious, but it’s worth saying: make sure your product or service is actually good.
Customer service teams are often forced to compensate for deeper problems inside the business. If your product is inconsistent, poorly designed, or constantly breaking, even the best support team in the world will struggle to keep customers happy.
When that happens, customer service stops being about helping people and starts being about damage control. Support teams spend their time issuing refunds, explaining delays, or apologizing for problems they had no role in creating. Over time, that wears people down. It’s frustrating for employees and even more frustrating for customers who feel like they’re stuck in a cycle of the same issues over and over again.
Great customer service becomes much easier when the underlying product works the way it’s supposed to. That doesn’t mean mistakes won’t happen. Every company ships a bad batch, sends the wrong order, or rolls out a feature that doesn’t land the way they expected. But when the core product is reliable and thoughtfully designed, those mistakes become the exception rather than the norm.
Customer service should exist to help customers get the most out of a good product—not to constantly apologize for a bad one.
Customer service was never the problem.
When people talk about the “death” of customer service, they often frame it like a cultural shift. Customers have gotten worse, employees don’t care anymore, people have lost their work ethic. I don’t believe that’s true.
Most people still want to do good work. Most employees want to help customers. And most customers simply want their problems solved quickly and fairly. What’s actually changed is the environment those interactions happen in.
Customer-facing teams today are expected to do more than ever before. They handle support tickets, manage accounts, retain customers, upsell products, and act as the emotional buffer between frustrated customers and the rest of the company. At the same time, many teams are understaffed, underpaid, and measured against an ever-growing list of metrics.
When companies talk about “improving customer service,” they often look for new tools, new scripts, or new productivity frameworks. But the issue usually isn’t the frontline employees, it’s the system around them.
When businesses invest in their people, give them the authority to solve problems, and build products they’re proud to stand behind, good customer service tends to follow naturally. And so does growth.
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I’m Lauren, an SEO strategist who loves turning chaos into structure. I work with brands to build thoughtful, search-driven content systems that grow steadily, not randomly.
