When the business or platform is new, founders should tackle all customer support because it’s the fastest way to understand customers. It’s like having direct access to their pains, frustrations, and expectations.
But at some point, doing it yourself starts to hurt more than it helps.
As a founder, you need to know when it might be time to outsource that support to an customer support expert:
1. When support starts stealing time from product
If you’re fixing tickets instead of fixing the product, it’s time to hand off.
While support’s important, it shouldn’t stop you from building what’s next.
2. When your replies get shorter
Those first few customers are so important, and your replies tend to show that. You write with care, take time to go into the details, and really make the customer feel special.
Then come the templates and canned response which just copy and paste.
When that happens on most tickets, you’ve learned what you needed to, and it is now time for someone else to handle the helpdesk.
3. When your customers are waiting too long
As a founder, you’re likely busy building the product, marketing it, and getting it to work the way its designed. That means less time for support as your customer numbers go up.
Growing support queues where you start putting off non-important tickets is a clear sign you need better help now.
4. When the insights repeat themselves
When you start, it can seem like every support ticket has something to teach you. But before you know it, you start recognizing patterns and almost know what the ticket is about by just looking at the title (or even the customer!)
That’s your cue to document it, train a team, and move up a level.
Of course, it’s tough to outsource support – it means disconnecting from your customers, not knowing what’s going on in their day-to-day usage of your product, and trusting someone else to handle your core customers with the same empathy and accuracy is a difficult thing on its own.
It doesn’t have to be that way though.
It just needs you to build a system where empathy, speed, and accuracy don’t depend on one person, even if it’s you.
That’s exactly what our human agents are trained for: to carry forward the empathy and insight founders begin with, at the scale your customers deserve.
Because growth begins the day you stop answering every ticket and start empowering people who can.