When scale puts a squeeze on support

Picture this: It's 2:47 a.m., and Sarah, a customer success lead at a fast-growing fintech startup, is still awake, scrolling through her phone. Not by choice, but because she can't stop thinking about the 147 unresolved tickets sitting in her team's queue. What started as celebratory champagne moments just six months ago (record signups and unprecedented growth!) have morphed into sleepless nights and a creeping sense that they're drowning in their own success.

Sarah's story hits close to home for me. Over the past decade in SaaS, I've lived through this exact scenario more times than I care to count. I've watched our own company scale from $20M to over $600M in revenue, and let me tell you something: The support squeeze is real, it's brutal, and it will make or break your growth trajectory.

But here's what I've learned from being in the trenches with hundreds of customers and living through our own hypergrowth: The companies that recognize this challenge early and tackle it head-on don't just survive. They turn superior customer support into their most powerful competitive weapon. That's exactly what we did, and it's why we're now helping thousands of companies escape this squeeze with Freshdesk.

With most customers expecting an immediate response and a majority of companies planning to increase CX investment, we're witnessing an industrywide phenomenon I call the customer support squeeze, where explosive growth collides headfirst with outdated systems, overwhelmed teams, and skyrocketing customer expectations.

I've seen the same pattern play out repeatedly: The initial euphoria of growth is followed by the sobering reality that your support infrastructure wasn't built for this scale.

The question isn't whether you'll hit this wall. It's how quickly you'll recognize it and what you'll do about it.

The anatomy of the squeeze: When success becomes your biggest problem

Let me tell you about a customer of mine. This growing SaaS company came to us after experiencing 400% growth in six months. On paper, they were killing it. In reality, their support team was dying a slow death by a thousand cuts.

Read also: Building a connected omnichannel experience

Their morning standup had become a trauma-bonding session:

• Average response time: Ballooned from 2 hours to 14 hours

• Agent turnover: Up 65% in just four months

• Customer churn: Creeping upward despite their amazing product

The kicker? Their support team was working harder than ever. With anxiety causing up to 40% decrease in productivity and burnout affecting task completion rates, they were trapped in what I call the "hamster wheel of heroics" where you're running faster and faster while going nowhere.

I remember when Freshworks hit a version of this wall back in the late 2010s. We'd zoomed past the $100M mark, and our support metrics were starting to look not so great. Response times were creeping up, agent burnout was increasing, and worst of all, customers were starting to complain about the experience that used to be our pride and joy. That's when I realized that the same growth engine that was propelling our success could also be our downfall if we didn't get ahead of it.

Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick DeLisi address this in their book “The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty.” “The idea that companies must delight customers by exceeding service expectations is so entrenched that managers rarely even question it,” they wrote. In truth, the reality is far more complex.

The perfect storm: Three forces colliding

1. The "Amazon effect" on customer expectations

Today's customers have been trained by Amazon, Uber, and Netflix to expect magic. Consumers expect personalized interactions. They don't just want fast; they want fast, accurate, contextual, and seamless across every touchpoint.

Jay Baer captures this phenomenon perfectly in his book, "Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers.” His research shows that "80 percent of companies say they deliver outstanding customer service, but only 8 percent of their customers agree," highlighting the massive perception gap that's widening in today's hyper-connected world.

2. The agent reality gap

While customers demand more, our agents are dealing with:

• Tool chaos: Juggling 6-8 different systems per conversation

• Context switching: 53% report this as their biggest productivity killer

• Emotional labor: Managing increasingly frustrated customers with fewer resources

Agents face rigid schedules, repetitive tasks, and interactions with frustrated customers, with annual turnover rates hitting 40%.

3. The scale-or-fail pressure

Here's the brutal truth I've learned from a decade in SaaS: Hiring your way out of the support squeeze is like trying to bail out a sinking boat with a teaspoon. It's expensive, slow, and ultimately futile because you're not addressing the root cause: broken systems and processes that don't scale. We learned this lesson the hard way during our own scaling journey, and it's why we became obsessed with building systems that could grow with us, not against us.

The breaking point: What happens when the squeeze hits

Back to my customer. Their breaking point came when a major client, representing 7% of their ARR, threatened to churn over what should have been a simple billing question. The issue? Our customer’s agent couldn't access the client’s full interaction history across email, chat, and phone, leading to three separate conversations asking for the same information.

This perfectly illustrates what Dixon and his team call "customer effort," which is the single biggest predictor of customer loyalty. As their research shows, it's better to "win customer loyalty by reducing customer effort, rather than trying to delight them."

I've seen this play out countless times with our own customers. The moment a customer has to repeat their story three times across different channels, you've lost them emotionally, even if you eventually solve their problem. 

This is where the squeeze reveals its true cost:

• Customer lifetime value erosion: Even loyal customers start questioning their relationship with you

• Brand reputation damage: Support experiences become the loudest voice in your brand narrative

• Team morale collapse: Your best agents start updating their LinkedIn profiles

• Growth stagnation: Poor support becomes a bottleneck for sales and expansion

That's why we made omnichannel continuity a cornerstone of our platform design.

The counterintuitive truth: Your support challenge is your competitive moat

Here's what most leaders get wrong: They see the support squeeze as a problem to solve rather than an opportunity to differentiate. The companies that crack this code first won't just survive—they'll dominate.

Think about it: When everyone in your industry is struggling with the same support challenges, the company that figures out how to deliver consistently excellent experiences at scale doesn't just retain customers. They become the obvious choice for prospects, too.

This was our "aha moment" during our own growth journey. Instead of seeing our support challenges as a necessary evil of scaling, we started viewing them as our opportunity to differentiate. While competitors were struggling with the same issues, we invested heavily in getting our support experience right. The result? Support became one of our strongest selling points in enterprise deals. Prospects would literally choose us over competitors because they could see how we treated our existing customers.

The strategic response: 3 pillars of scale-ready support

Pillar 1: Intelligent automation that actually helps

Forget the chatbots that make customers want to throw their phones across the room. I'm talking about agentic AI that thinks like your best agent and acts with purpose.

My SaaS customer implemented Freddy AI Agent, and the results were immediate:

• 45% query deflection without sacrificing quality

• 3x ticket handling capacity per agent

• 74% faster first-response times

The secret? The AI didn't replace human judgment. It augmented it. Agents went from being data archaeologists to solution architects.

What I love about this approach is that it mirrors what we discovered during our own scaling challenges. The best technology doesn't replace your people. It makes them superhuman. When we implemented similar AI-powered workflows internally, our agents went from dreading Monday mornings to actually enjoying their jobs again. Productivity went up, burnout went down, and customer satisfaction soared.

Pillar 2: Self-service that customers actually use

The best support interaction is the one that never happens. But here's the catch: Traditional self-service fails because it's built for companies, not customers.

Modern self-service needs to be:

• Contextually aware: Knowing where the customer is in their journey

• Omnichannel native: Available whether they're in-app, on mobile, or social media

• Continuously learning: Getting smarter with every interaction

Pillar 3: The human-AI partnership model

This isn't about thrusting AI on your agent. It's about creating super-agents who see the power of AI organically. The future lies in blending human empathy with AI capabilities, where AI helps your agents deliver their best support by helping them draft clear responses, suggesting the right answers, and translating messages to help them support anyone, globally. AI handles the mundane so humans can focus on the magical moments that create customer loyalty.

After 10 years of watching companies struggle with this balance, I'm convinced that the future belongs to organizations that master human-AI collaboration—not companies that try to automate everything or resist AI entirely. The winners will be those who use AI to amplify human potential, just like we've done in building Freshdesk's capabilities.

Measuring what matters: Beyond vanity metrics

One of the main elements in measuring your success in support is the numbers that show it to you. The challenge right now is, more often than not, support leaders look at the basic metrics only, see them improve, and conclude they are doing well—but still lose customers and wonder why. Here's my perspective on metrics that actually matter:

Traditional metrics (necessary but not sufficient):

• Average handle time

• First contact resolution

• Tickets closed

Strategic metrics (these tell the real story):

• Customer effort score: How hard was it for them to get help?

• Net promoter score: Are they actually recommending you?

• Agent satisfaction: Happy agents create happy customers

• Time to value: How quickly do customers achieve their desired outcome?

This metric-focused approach aligns with research from Harvard Business Review, which emphasizes the importance of measuring emotional engagement in customer interactions. Their AI analysis of over one million customer service calls revealed "a dramatic increase in customer's emotional levels" during high-stress periods, underscoring the need for metrics that capture the full customer experience.

The Freshdesk advantage: Why we built different

At Freshdesk, we didn't just build a customer support solution. We engineered an escape route from the support squeeze because we lived through it ourselves. Every feature, every workflow, every capability was designed with one question in mind: How do we help companies scale support without losing their soul?

Long before AI became a buzzword, we were already building chatbots, automation, and intelligent workflows because we knew firsthand how much of a difference it made for our customers and agents. AI wasn’t an afterthought for us but a natural extension of our product philosophy.

Our platform isn't just about managing tickets. It's about:

• Complete customer context across every touchpoint

• Intelligent workload distribution that prevents agent burnout

• Proactive issue detection that solves problems before customers notice them

• Seamless human-AI collaboration that makes every agent superhuman

Every single feature exists because at some point in our growth journey, we desperately needed it. That's the difference between building software and building solutions born from necessity.

Your next move: From reactive to strategic

The support squeeze is coming for every growing company. The question is: Will you let it crush you, or will you use it as fuel to build something extraordinary?

Here's my challenge to you:

1. Audit your current state honestly: What's your real customer effort score?

2. Map your growth trajectory: Where will your current systems break?

3. Invest ahead of the curve: Don't wait until you're drowning to learn how to swim

4. Measure what matters: Focus on outcomes, not just outputs

Two months after implementing their new approach, my SaaS customer is not just surviving their growth. They're using superior support as a key differentiator in sales conversations. Their latest NPS score? 67, up from 23.

This reminds me of our own transformation. Once we dialed in our support experience, our sales team started leading every enterprise demo with our customer success stories. Prospects would spend more time asking about our support methodology than our core product features. That's when you know you've turned support from a cost center into a competitive moat.

The bottom line: In a world where products increasingly look the same, customer experience is your final frontier for differentiation. The companies that master support at scale won't just retain customers. They'll turn them into their most powerful growth engine.

I've seen this playbook work for many companies over the past decade, and I've lived it myself as we scaled from startup to enterprise. The choice is yours: Will you let the support squeeze crush your growth dreams, or will you use it as fuel to build something extraordinary?