Scaling customer support destroys it – here's the proof

I’ve been running a SaaS for 2 years. I thought I was “improving” customer support. In reality, I killed it.

Month 1: Me answering every email. Response time: 5 minutes. Customer satisfaction: 98%. People sent thank-you notes.

Month 24: 8 support reps + Zendesk + Intercom + “best practices.” Response time: 18 hours. Customer satisfaction: 43%. People leave angry reviews.

Cost per ticket: $0 → $23 Churn from support issues: 0% → 31%

I literally made support worse by “scaling” it.

The brutal truth: Every support tool promises to “scale customer success.” What they actually scale is customer frustration.

Added a chatbot → customer satisfaction dropped 40%. But hey, the dashboard said “response time improved,” so it looked like a win.

Agents spend 70% of their time in tools, 30% actually helping people.

Customers would rather wait 2 hours to talk to someone who gives a damn than get an instant reply from someone reading a script.

The impossible choice:

Personal support → expensive, doesn’t scale

Efficient support → cheap, customers hate it

No support → honest, but brutal

I’m now experimenting with voice AI to recreate the “founder answers personally” experience for 10,000 customers. Not because I think AI will save us — but because human support breaks the second you scale past yourself.

Has anyone here actually scaled support without it turning to shit? Or is good support and growth just… mutually exclusive?