How Customer Service Quietly Became More Friction, Less Service

October 29, 2026

There was a time when customer service was mostly judged by what happened after something went wrong. Did someone answer the phone? Did the company fix the problem? Did you leave feeling like they cared whether you came back?

Today, the friction often starts much earlier.

The price you first see may not be the price you eventually pay. A free trial may be easy to start and oddly difficult to stop. A return policy may sound generous until you discover the fee, the narrow window or the requirement that the product remain almost untouched. Need help? You may first have to convince a chatbot that your problem deserves a human.

None of these things automatically makes a company bad. Returns are expensive. Fraud exists. Employees cost more than software. Shipping, materials and labor have all become more expensive. Businesses are allowed to protect their margins.

But customers experience the result, not the spreadsheet behind it. And lately, the result often feels like this: doing business with a company requires more work than it used to.

That raises a bigger question. Has customer service actually become worse, or have companies simply become better at shifting inconvenience onto the customer?

Returns Are Becoming a Good Place to See the Problem

A recent Wall Street Journal article suggests that the frustration around returns is not imagined. According to data cited from Loop Returns, 68% of retailers now charge a return fee at least some of the time, compared with 43% five years ago. Return windows have also been shrinking. Among larger brands tracked by Loop, the average return period fell by roughly 12% over the past two years.

There are legitimate reasons for this. A return has real costs attached to it. Shipping. Payment processing. Labor. Inspection. Repackaging. Inventory that may no longer be sellable. The Journal cites estimates from Optoro that processing a return costs retailers an average of 27% of the original purchase price. Retailers also deal with abuse, including customers who visibly wear products before returning them or effectively use ecommerce sites as rental services.

The issue is not that every return should be free forever. The more troubling part is how that cost is sometimes managed.

A fee appears only after purchase. A policy is buried several clicks away from checkout. A refund takes weeks. A clothing item must remain unworn and unwashed even though wearing and washing it may be the only honest way to know whether it fits, feels right and holds up.

At that point, the policy stops simply protecting the retailer. It starts moving more of the risk onto the customer.

The Journal highlights an especially telling detail. Trustpilot found that reviews mentioning returns were associated with a decline of roughly 1.6 stars on its five-star scale. According to Trustpilot, much of the anger was not necessarily about strict rules themselves. It came from customers feeling surprised by rules they did not clearly understand before buying.

Customers can live with rules. What they dislike is finding out what the rules are after the game has already started.

The Friction Is Spreading Beyond Returns

Returns may be one of the easiest examples to measure, but the larger pattern appears almost everywhere.

Consider hidden charges. In 2025, a Federal Trade Commission rule took effect requiring businesses selling live-event tickets and short-term lodging to display mandatory fees as part of the total price upfront. The rule does not ban fees. It simply says the customer should be able to see what something actually costs before reaching the end of the transaction. The need for such a rule says something about how common the opposite experience had become.

Subscriptions offer another example. Automatic renewal can be genuinely useful. Nobody wants to manually renew a streaming service every month. But convenience changes character when starting takes seconds and leaving requires a search for the cancellation page, several confirmation screens and perhaps a conversation with a retention department.

The FTC reported in 2026 that it had received more than 100,000 complaints during the previous five years involving negative-option programs and related practices. Those complaints included inadequate disclosures, charges customers did not knowingly agree to and cancellation processes that were difficult or sometimes effectively impossible to complete.

Then there is pricing itself. Consumers have become accustomed to introductory offers that creep upward, promotions that seem permanent and sales that somehow end just in time for another sale to begin. When everything is 30% off every other weekend, it becomes reasonable to ask whether the discounted price is actually a “sale” price or simply the real price presented more dramatically.

The same tension appears in products designed around rapid replacement. Cheap materials can make replacement easier than maintenance. Trend cycles can make a perfectly functional garment feel outdated before it wears out. Constant product refreshes can turn "new" into an argument against keeping what you already own. The business may still deliver exactly what it promised, but the underlying relationship begins to depend on the customer needing something else sooner rather than later.

None of these strategies has much to do with the traditional image of bad customer service. Nobody necessarily ignored your email or behaved rudely.

Yet all of them can make the experience worse.

When Technology Helps the Company More Than the Customer

Artificial intelligence makes the same distinction especially clear.

AI can be wonderful for customer service. If a bot tells you where your order is in five seconds, that is better than waiting ten minutes for a human to look up the same information. If automation processes a simple exchange instantly, everyone wins.

The trouble starts when automation is designed primarily to prevent access to a person.

You have probably experienced some version of it. You explain the problem. The chatbot gives you an unrelated answer. You phrase it differently. It offers an FAQ. You type "human." It asks you to select another category. By the time you reach an employee, you have repeated the same information three times and spent longer solving the problem than you would have before the technology supposedly made service more efficient.

Customers seem quite clear about where the line should be. In a 2026 Gartner survey of 3,566 customers, 87% said access to a human agent was essential when companies use generative AI for customer service. Gartner also found that only 27% would be willing to try a chatbot again after having a bad experience with one.

That does not sound like resistance to technology. It sounds like resistance to bad technology.

The question companies should ask is not simply, "Can AI handle this interaction?" It is, "Does AI make this interaction easier for the customer?"

If the answer is yes, automate it. If the answer is no, the savings may be coming from the wrong person's time.

How Small Frictions Become a Big Customer-Service Problem

Most businesses do not set out to make customers miserable. What happens instead is more understandable.

Returns cost money, so add a fee. Customer-support payroll rises, so add automation. Acquisition gets more expensive, so send another promotional email. Revenue is below target, so create urgency around a weekend sale. Margins get squeezed, so make cancellation slightly harder or add another charge.

Every decision may make sense independently.

Customers experience them collectively.

Suddenly you have to remember when the promotional rate expires. Read the return policy before ordering. Check whether shipping is refundable. Save every piece of packaging. Search for the cancellation page. Wait for the chatbot to surrender. Monitor your credit card to make sure the subscription really stopped. Hold off buying something because you know another sale will probably appear next Thursday.

That is the part companies can miss. Customer service is not limited to the customer-service department.

The pricing model is customer service. The return policy is customer service. Product durability is customer service. Email frequency is customer service. So is the amount of time a customer must spend understanding what the company is trying to sell him.

A good business should remove unnecessary friction from a customer's life. Too many modern business practices quietly add it.

What Happens When You Build the Company From the Customer's Side?

At IF... THEN WELL, we have the advantage of being small enough to approach many of these decisions from a simple perspective: What would we want if we were the customer?

That is not a marketing slogan. It is essentially how the company began. We were customers looking for an everyday T-shirt we could not find, so we made one. As the business developed, the same question began shaping other decisions. What return policy would feel fair? How often would we actually want to hear from a clothing company? How do we offer a deal without artificial urgency? What would make us trust a business enough to order again?

Our answers have generally favored fewer rules and less pressure.

Our "Make Sure it Fits" policy allows first-time customers to actually wear and wash a T-shirt during the trial period and still return it if it is not right for them. For eligible U.S. returns, we also refund the original shipping charge. That exposes us to more cost because a worn or washed return cannot simply go back into inventory, but we think a customer deserves a real opportunity to decide whether a shirt works.

We also avoid constantly rotating promotional sales. Our men's T-shirt bundle provides permanent savings based on efficiencies that actually exist when multiple shirts are purchased together. Shipping, handling and marketing costs per shirt decline, so part of that savings can go back to the customer. We intentionally send fewer emails as well. If every message says "last chance," eventually the words stop meaning much.

Price stability matters for the same reason. The core price of our men's premium T-shirt has remained unchanged even as materials, manufacturing, freight and other costs have increased. We have been able to absorb part of those pressures by limiting marketing spending, relying more heavily on repeat customers and word of mouth, and keeping the business focused on one product rather than building a large assortment that requires more overhead.

Quality is part of customer service too. Our men's Pima cotton T-shirt uses 100% Peruvian Pima cotton, with long fibers that help produce the soft feel and durability we wanted from the beginning. We use a classic fit, a narrow double-stitched neckline and details designed around longevity and versatility rather than seasonal novelty. A dependable T-shirt that continues to work under a blazer, with jeans or as part of a simple capsule wardrobe creates less friction than a garment that needs replacing because the quality failed or the design quickly felt dated.

None of this means our approach is perfect or that every business should copy it. Our model works in part because we remain focused. It also works because customers tend to keep what they buy. Our return rate has historically remained below 5%, which makes it easier for us to be generous when someone does need to send something back.

That may be the larger lesson.

Customer service does not require saying yes to everything. Businesses need boundaries, margins and protection against abuse. Technology should absolutely be used when it makes things easier. Returns cannot be unlimited. Prices sometimes have to increase.

But there is a meaningful difference between protecting a business and designing a business around customer resistance.

A fair return policy can discourage abuse without becoming a maze. AI can answer simple questions without hiding the humans. A subscription can renew automatically without making cancellation a scavenger hunt. A company can make money without creating artificial urgency every weekend.

Good customer service may ultimately be much simpler than the systems we have built around it.

Make something good. Explain what it costs. Stand behind it. Respect the customer's time. And when something goes wrong, help.

That should not feel revolutionary.

Increasingly, it does.