Why Have We Become So Intolerant of Poor Customer Service?

How often do you hear someone say that “the country is broken”?

The train is late. The public toilet is filthy. The waiter seems to be hiding rather than looking after the customers. You spend 20 minutes trying to get through to a call centre, only to discover that the chatbot you have been talking to cannot actually solve your problem.

And then there is the familiar cry:

“Why is customer service so bad these days?”

But perhaps there is another question we should ask.

Have businesses actually become much worse at serving us – or have we become much less tolerant of things going wrong?

I suspect the answer is a bit of both.

Over the past two decades, our everyday experiences have changed dramatically. Technology has trained us to expect speed, convenience and almost flawless execution. At the same time, businesses have automated more and more of the interactions that used to involve another human being.

The result is an interesting paradox.

We have never had more sophisticated technology for serving customers. Yet we seem to have become increasingly irritated by the service we receive.

So why have the little things started to bother us so much?

1. The Amazon Prime effect

We have become accustomed to hyper-efficiency.

Amazon has taught us that buying something can take seconds. Uber lets us watch a car approaching on a map. Netflix remembers what we were watching. Food-delivery apps tell us where our meal is and, sometimes, exactly how many minutes away it is.

These experiences have quietly changed our definition of normal.

Twenty years ago, waiting two or three days for something to arrive was perfectly ordinary. Today, waiting two or three days can feel like poor service.

If a website takes five seconds longer to load, we notice.

If we have to navigate six options on an automated telephone system before finding the one we want, we become irritated.

If we cannot track a delivery, we wonder what has gone wrong.

The technology has not merely made things faster.

It has raised the baseline against which we judge everything else.

And that creates what we might call a friction penalty.

We know that technology can remove the friction. So when it doesn't, we ask ourselves: Why on earth can't they make this easier?

2. We are suffering from digital exhaustion

There is another factor.

Modern life bombards us with information.

Emails. WhatsApp messages. Teams notifications. Texts. Passwords. Two-factor authentication. Pop-ups. Apps. Choices. Alerts telling us that an item we looked at three weeks ago is now on sale.

By the time we reach the supermarket checkout or finally get through to customer service, our cognitive bandwidth may already be exhausted.

This helps explain why apparently trivial failures can produce surprisingly strong reactions.

The cashier is slow.

The discount doesn't scan.

The machine says “unexpected item in bagging area.”

The person on the telephone asks us to repeat information we have already supplied.

None of these things is particularly serious.

But they may be the last straw.

The irritation is not necessarily about the particular problem in front of us. It is the accumulation of dozens of tiny frustrations throughout the day.

There is another psychological factor too: loss of control.

Digital technology has given us an extraordinary feeling of control. We can order what we want, when we want it and often see exactly what is happening.

Then we encounter a service process that takes that control away.

Suddenly we are waiting.

And waiting feels much worse when we believe that the problem could have been solved instantly.

3. Customer service has become less human

There was a time when a service failure usually involved another person.

You complained to the shopkeeper.

You spoke to the bank manager.

You asked the waiter.

You called the company and eventually spoke to someone who could make a decision.

That human connection mattered.

Today, an increasing proportion of customer service is mediated by chatbots, self-service systems, automated telephone menus and highly scripted employees.

There are obvious advantages for businesses. Automation is cheaper, scalable and available 24 hours a day.

But there is a hidden cost.

There is nobody there to forgive.

If a human being says, “I'm really sorry, we've made a mistake. Let me sort it out,” we are often surprisingly forgiving.

If a chatbot tells us for the fourth time that it doesn't understand the question, our patience can disappear very quickly.

And there is a strange reciprocity at work.

We tend to behave differently towards people than machines.

If the interaction feels entirely mechanical, we may feel less obligation to be patient, polite or understanding.

The machine cannot be offended.

Or so we think.

4. We feel that we are paying more and getting less

There is another powerful ingredient: price.

Inflation, subscriptions, service charges and increasingly complicated pricing structures have changed the way customers think about value.

If we believe we are paying more, our expectations rise.

And when expectations rise, tolerance falls.

A £5 service failure might once have been shrugged off.

A £50 service failure is another matter.

And if a customer discovers that they are paying a monthly subscription for something they barely use, while being charged extra for additional services, resentment can build rapidly.

This is particularly important because customers don't simply evaluate whether a product works.

They evaluate whether the company is giving them fair value for what they are paying.

The Institute of Customer Service's latest UKCSI shows that value, competitive pricing, quality and being easy to deal with have become increasingly important to customers. The July 2026 UKCSI score was 78.3 out of 100 – just 0.1 points higher than six months earlier. In other words, despite all the investment in customer experience, there is little evidence of a dramatic improvement.

So are customers actually becoming more dissatisfied?

There is some compelling evidence that something is going on.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index provides a useful long-term perspective. Its national score was 76.9 in the fourth quarter of 2025 – virtually unchanged from 2017 and roughly where it was more than a decade earlier.

Then came the first quarter of 2026.

The ACSI score fell to 76.7, while customer complaints surged by 16% in a single quarter, reaching a record level.

That is an extraordinary combination.

Businesses have invested enormous sums in digital transformation, apps, automation and artificial intelligence.

Yet the underlying measure of customer satisfaction has barely moved.

And research by customer-service expert Shep Hyken points in a similar direction. His 2026 research found that 42% of consumers said they had experienced more bad customer service than in previous years, compared with 40% in 2025 and 38% in 2024.

So perhaps our perception that customer service is getting worse isn't entirely imaginary.

But there is another possibility.

Perhaps our expectations are rising faster than businesses can keep up.

The great industry divide

Not all industries have the same problem.

The latest UKCSI illustrates how widely customer experience varies across sectors. Banks and building societies, for example, reached a score of 82.0 in July 2026 and became the highest-rated sector in the index.

Other industries face much greater challenges.

Telecommunications are a good example. The US ACSI's 2026 research put internet service providers at 73 out of 100, despite an improvement from the previous year.

This suggests something important.

Technology itself isn't necessarily the problem.

The problem is what happens when technology is introduced to make life easier for the company rather than the customer.

Why hasn't AI solved the problem?

This brings us to the great hope – or great promise – of the moment:

Artificial intelligence.

Surely AI will finally solve customer service?

Possibly.

But only if companies use it intelligently.

The danger is that businesses see AI primarily as a way of reducing the number of people they employ.

A customer has a problem.

The company sees an opportunity to automate the interaction.

The customer sees a maze.

The company sees a saving.

And that is where things can go badly wrong.

Research from Vision One found that 57% of UK consumers surveyed had abandoned a purchase because of poor support, while Zendesk's research continues to point to the importance of providing a route to a human when an issue becomes complicated or emotionally sensitive.

The lesson isn't that AI is bad.

Quite the opposite.

AI can deal with simple enquiries extremely efficiently. It can find information, answer routine questions and help human agents solve complicated problems more quickly.

The mistake is assuming that every customer interaction should be automated.

The best use of AI may be to remove the boring stuff so that humans have more time to deal with the things that require judgement, empathy and discretion.

In other words:

Automate the transaction. Don't automate the relationship.

The really worrying paradox

There is, however, a bigger issue lurking beneath all of this.

Historically, there was a relatively simple relationship between customer satisfaction and business performance.

If a company treated customers badly, customers went elsewhere.

Bad service led to lost customers.

Lost customers led to lower profits.

That created a powerful incentive to improve.

But what happens when customers can't easily leave?

Perhaps there is only one broadband provider available.

Perhaps switching energy suppliers is complicated.

Perhaps every bank looks much the same.

Perhaps a subscription is difficult to cancel.

Perhaps the market is dominated by a handful of enormous companies.

This is what the American Customer Satisfaction Index has described as a potential “decoupling” between seller profits and buyer satisfaction. Its analysis points to factors including market concentration and higher switching costs as reasons why customers may remain with companies even when they are less satisfied.

That creates a fascinating situation.

A customer can be unhappy without leaving.

And that changes everything.

The customer's frustration doesn't necessarily show up as churn.

It may show up as complaints.

Anger.

Bad reviews.

Reluctance to recommend.

A deteriorating relationship.

Or simply the feeling that “they don't care about me.”

Perhaps the customer isn't the problem

So, are we becoming an intolerant nation of impatient customers?

Perhaps.

But businesses shouldn't rely on that explanation.

Customers have always been impatient when they feel badly treated. What has changed is the environment in which that impatience operates.

Technology has raised expectations.

Digital overload has reduced our tolerance for friction.

Automation has removed some of the human empathy that used to smooth over mistakes.

Higher prices have increased our sensitivity to value.

And in some markets, switching to a competitor has become difficult.

Put all of those things together and the result is predictable.

The little things matter more than ever.

A late train may only be five minutes late.

A website may only take five seconds to load.

A waiter may only disappear for ten minutes.

A chatbot may only fail to understand us three times.

But each one is a tiny reminder that the organisation has failed to deliver the effortless experience we have come to expect.

And perhaps that is the real lesson for anyone responsible for customer experience.

Customers aren't necessarily demanding perfection.

They are demanding that companies respect their time, their money and their effort.

In an age when technology can make almost everything instant, effortless and convenient, the biggest customer-experience mistake may be to make customers work harder than they believe they should have to.

And that leaves us with a rather uncomfortable question:

If our customers have become less tolerant, have we done enough to give them less to be intolerant about?