Your support costs are hiding your biggest competitive advantage.
Most founders run customer service the same way: hire someone patient, write some scripts, keep response times low. The metric that gets measured is ticket volume. The goal is to close them fast and move on. But that framing treats every support contact as a problem to manage, and that's exactly backwards.
Jeff Bezos called customer service a failure. Literally. Not a department that needed better tools, but evidence that something in the operation broke. When a customer contacts you, your product, your website, your process, or your delivery failed them. The service contact is the symptom. The broken process is the problem.
Amazon spent years building systems designed to eliminate the need for service contacts entirely. Their automated refund system detected abnormal streaming behavior and issued a refund before the customer even realized they had a problem. No ticket. No complaint. No resolution time. The contact class was eliminated because the underlying process was fixed.
For founders in growth stage, the practical implication hits harder than it looks. You probably don't know where the friction is in your customer journey. Most founders don't. Start by sending a secret shopper through your own product. Ask someone who doesn't know your business to buy something, use it, and try to get help. Where did they hesitate? That friction point, early in the journey, is generating downstream service volume that could be eliminated at the source.
The second lever is churn. Acquiring a new customer costs five to twenty-five times more than keeping an existing one, but most growth-stage companies pour their budget into acquisition and nothing into understanding why customers leave. The customers giving you the most useful data are the ones quietly disengaging before they cancel. Behavior shifts, feature drop-off, silence after a problem. These signals are predictable with data you already have.
The third lever is rep authority. Scripts are a management tool. At small scale, they work against you. Pret-a-Manger gives every employee discretion to comp any item at any time, no approval required. Their service recovery costs run higher than competitors. Their customer lifetime value outpaces the category. The trade-off is intentional, and it compounds.
None of this requires a large team or an enterprise budget. It requires a decision about who wins when service and revenue conflict. Most founders resolve that conflict in the moment, inconsistently. The ones who write down the answer before the pressure arrives build companies that customers talk about.
Watch the Full Episode on Customer Service Strategy with expert Steve Anderson below:
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