“This happens all the time” is not a customer service strategy.
By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC
Chronic customer service failure occurs when an organization identifies a recurring problem that negatively impacts customers but chooses to absorb the complaint volume rather than address the root cause—often because the problem has become so normalized that staff no longer recognize it as fixable. In an era of increasing automation and AI-driven customer interactions, chronic failures are becoming more, not less, common as technology handles transactions efficiently but removes the human touchpoints that once caught and corrected errors before they impacted the customer.
This isn’t a hypothetical. This is something that happened to me recently.
Their problems became my problem
I’ve reached the age where I can begin receiving Social Security benefits. I was looking forward to it. What I was not looking forward to was spending an afternoon at the local Social Security office (forgoing plans I’d actually been looking forward to) to fix a direct deposit error that should never have become my problem to solve.
Here’s what happened. A payment I was expecting never arrived. When I checked my Social Security portal, I found an ominous red box on the front page: Account suspended. No prior notification. No email. No call. Just a suspended account.
I called the Social Security Administration. To their credit, I got through immediately and spoke with a genuinely helpful representative. He explained that my account had been suspended because my financial institution had returned three attempted payments. Three times, someone tried to give me money. Three times, the money was sent back.
And neither the SSA nor my financial institution had thought to let me know.
So I called my financial institution—a credit union. Yes, they confirmed, they had returned three payments. Why? Because three digits were missing from the end of my account number. Yet somehow they had managed to connect the attempted deposits to my account in order to return them. They just hadn’t managed to connect them to me as a person who might want to know what was going on.
When I asked why I hadn’t been notified, the representative’s answer stopped me cold.
“This happens so often we just wouldn’t be able to follow up on all of them.”
And there it is.
When “all the time” becomes acceptable
I don’t doubt that this does happen all the time. That’s precisely the problem.
At some point, this financial institution encountered a pattern: attempted deposits being returned due to incomplete account numbers. At that same point, a decision was made—consciously or by default—to process those returns quietly and move on. Not to investigate why the numbers were incomplete. Not to notify affected members. Not to work with the sending organizations to prevent it. Not to better educate customers. Just to handle the return and absorb whatever downstream consequences followed.
That decision has a cost. Members who don’t receive expected payments have to figure out why on their own. Many of them call in. They navigate phone trees, interact with bots, and eventually say those five words that every customer service manager dreads: “Let me speak with an agent.” The very volume the institution was trying to avoid creating by not following up proactively is being generated reactively—at greater cost, with greater customer frustration, and with far less opportunity to resolve anything well.
This is the chronic failure trap: normalizing a problem doesn’t make it smaller. It makes it permanent.
The technology factor
I want to be fair here. Automated payment processing is genuinely complex. Financial institutions handle enormous transaction volumes. Not every anomaly can be manually reviewed.
But that’s exactly the argument for fixing the root cause and not accepting the anomaly rate.
We are living through a moment of remarkable technological capability. AI and automation can process transactions at scale, flag anomalies in real time, generate personalized communications, and identify systemic patterns across thousands of interactions. The tools exist to catch this kind of problem before it reaches the customer.
The question is whether, and to what extent, organizations are using those tools to improve the customer experience or simply processing higher volumes of the same failures more efficiently.
There’s a meaningful difference between using technology to eliminate problems and using technology to handle problems faster. The first is genuine innovation. The second is sophisticated normalization.
In my case, the technology clearly caught the problem—the return was processed, the attempted deposits were identified and linked to my account.
What the technology wasn’t configured to do was tell me about it. That’s not a technological limitation. It’s a choice. Someone decided that outbound member notification for returned deposits wasn’t worth building. Given that this “happens all the time,” I’d argue it very much is.
What organizations should do instead
The principle here is simple, even if the implementation isn’t: if something is happening “all the time” in your organization that creates problems for your customers or your staff, that frequency is not a reason to accept it. It’s a reason to prioritize fixing it!
A few questions worth asking in any organization where a chronic problem has been normalized:
What is the actual volume? “All the time” is not a metric. Quantify the issue. How many instances per month? How many affected customers? How many downstream contacts does each incident generate? When you have real numbers, the business case for a fix becomes much clearer—and often far more compelling than the cost of the fix.
What is the root cause? In my case, the root cause appears to be account numbers being submitted without complete digits. Is that a customer understanding problem? A data entry problem? A system integration problem? A process problem at the sending organization? Each of those has a different solution, but all of them are solvable. Root causes don’t fix themselves.
What does the customer experience look like? Walking through the customer journey for any chronic failure is illuminating. In my case: missed payment → portal check → suspended account notice → phone call to SSA → phone call to credit union → trip to SSA office → problem resolution. That’s a significant imposition on a customer. Mapping that journey makes the human cost of the failure visible in a way that transaction data alone cannot.
What would proactive communication cost versus reactive handling? In most cases, a proactive notification—“We received an attempted deposit that we were unable to process. Here’s what happened and here’s what to do”—costs a fraction of the reactive handling it would prevent. As I’ve noted in my post on 5 Key Communication Skills for Career Success, communication is the foundational skill that underlies everything else.
Organizations that communicate proactively build trust. Organizations that communicate reactively, only when the customer forces the issue, erode trust.
The customer service opportunity hiding in the chronic failure
Here’s the thing about my credit union. In most respects, I’ve been happy with them. They’re a credit union which means they’re member-owned, community-oriented, and at least theoretically built around the idea that members matter.
This incident didn’t have to be a failure. It could have been a moment of genuine service excellence. A call or message saying: “We noticed that an attempted deposit to your account was returned. We wanted to let you know right away so you could sort this out before it causes any disruption.” That outreach, had it happened, would have reinforced everything a credit union is supposed to stand for.
Instead, I’m writing this blog post. And I’m going to the Social Security office.
If something is happening “all the time” in your organization, don’t normalize it. Don’t absorb it. Don’t train your staff to deliver it as an explanation. Investigate it, quantify it, and fix it. Your customers and your customer service staff will be better for it.
Frequently asked questions about chronic customer service failures
What is a chronic customer service failure?
A chronic customer service failure is a recurring problem that an organization has identified but chosen to absorb rather than address at the root cause—often because the volume has become so high that individual follow-up seems impractical. Unlike one-time failures, chronic failures are systemic: they happen repeatedly, affect multiple customers, and generate predictable downstream costs in the form of complaint contacts, staff time, and customer dissatisfaction. They are also, in most cases, fixable—once organizations stop treating their frequency as a reason for acceptance rather than a reason for urgency.
How does technology contribute to chronic customer service failures?
Automation and AI can process transactions at scale and flag anomalies efficiently—but they can also remove the human touchpoints that once caught errors before they reached the customer. When technology is configured to handle failures silently (processing a returned payment without notifying the account holder, for example) rather than communicating them proactively, it can create the conditions for chronic failure at scale. The problem isn’t the technology itself—it’s the organizational choice to use it for volume efficiency rather than customer experience improvement.
What should organizations do when a customer service problem happens frequently?
Frequent occurrence is a signal to act, not a justification for inaction. Organizations facing chronic customer service failures should: quantify the actual volume and downstream impact; investigate and identify the root cause; map the full customer journey to understand the human cost; calculate the cost of proactive communication versus reactive handling; and build or configure systems to address the problem at its source. In most cases, the business case for fixing a chronic failure—in reduced contact volume, improved customer retention, and staff efficiency—is stronger than the cost of the fix.
Has your organization ever discovered a chronic customer service problem hiding in plain sight? What did you do about it—and what did fixing it cost versus what it had been costing you to absorb it?
