Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
What if your support process quietly costs more than the customer you’re keeping?
We obsess over churn rates, retention metrics, and glowing customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. Yet, we rarely measure what customer support actually costs, especially when issues escalate to engineering.
It’s the Pareto principle applied to customer support: roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes. Routine questions about billing, onboarding, and “how-to” queries make up a large portion of support volume and get handled efficiently. But technical questions, bugs, security vulnerabilities, edge cases, and outages? While these issues are less frequent, they are exactly the high-impact cases that make costs spiral, involve multiple teams, and cost hours of engineering time.
