Customer Service is Broken by Design (and How to Actually Get Heard)

Let’s be real: customer service isn’t broken by accident. It’s broken on purpose. The long hold times, the endless transfers, the chatbots that pretend to help but actually trap you in a loop. All of it is a strategy. The goal isn’t to solve your problem quickly. The goal is to wear you down until you give up.

And if you’ve ever found yourself screaming “just let me talk to a human,” you already know exactly how exhausting it feels.

Why Customer Service Feels Useless

Most companies don’t look at customer support as an investment in happy customers. They see it as a cost. The less time they spend helping you, the better it looks on their bottom line. So they design systems that:

• Push you toward bots instead of people
• Limit what frontline agents are allowed to do
• Create endless layers of escalation so you’ll quit before reaching someone with real authority

This isn’t incompetence. It’s intentional.

The Reality: Executives Actually Care

Here’s the irony. Executives usually do care when a complaint lands in their inbox. Not because they want to be your friend, but because they understand what bad press and angry customers do to the company’s reputation and profits. A complaint that lingers in customer service doesn’t hurt them much. A complaint in an executive’s inbox? Whole different story.

How to Break the Cycle

If you’re tired of banging your head against support scripts, the answer isn’t to try harder. It’s to change the game. Here’s how:

1. Find the right contact – Executives and their assistants are reachable. It just takes a little digging (or tools like DearCEO.wtf that do the heavy lifting for you).
2. Keep it professional – No rants, no name-calling. A sharp, concise, professional email gets results.
3. State the problem clearly – Include dates, order numbers, and a short explanation of the issue.
4. Ask for a reasonable resolution – Be clear about what you want: a refund, a replacement, a cancellation fee waived, etc.

When you do this, your odds of being ignored drop dramatically.

The Bottom Line

Customer service is broken because it was designed to be. But you don’t have to play by their rules. Escalating to the executive level puts your complaint in front of people who actually have the power — and the incentive — to fix it.

If you’re ready to stop wasting hours on hold and start getting real resolutions, check out DearCEO.wtf. We will show you how to write the kind of email that gets answers.