Support is where customers decide whether to stay, and where your company learns what to build next. Give it the tools, the data, and a seat at product planning, and it pays you back in retention, better products and cheaper growth. So ask yourself: is your support team equipped to deliver that return today?
Your product is only as good as the team that supports it.
In the race to build great products, companies pour resources into engineering, sales and marketing, while the support team quietly decides whether any of it sticks. Support sits at the most consequential point in a customer relationship: the moments things go wrong. Those moments are not a footnote — they are a verdict on whether the company was worth trusting. A team that resolves them with speed, context and real expertise closes the loop between a product's promise and the customer's actual experience.
When support gets those moments right, the returns reach well beyond the ticket queue. Keeping customers is far cheaper than winning new ones: depending on the study and the industry, acquiring a new customer costs five to 25 times more than retaining an existing one, according to Harvard Business Review. The same piece cites Bain & Company research showing that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. Companies that lead on service tend to lead on growth, too. In Zendesk's 2025 CX Trends report, the companies it classifies as CX Trendsetters reported 22% higher customer retention, 33% higher customer acquisition and 49% higher cross-sell revenue.
The less obvious return is intelligence. Support engineers are often the first people in a company to see a product fail in the real world. They meet the edge cases QA missed, the documentation that confused an enterprise customer, the API behaviour that broke a workflow.
One ticket
An enterprise customer reports that exported documents are silently losing form field values. The support engineer reproduces it, spots two older tickets with the same symptom, and hands engineering a clean reproduction. The fix ships in the next release, a knowledge-base article goes live that week, and the customers who would have hit that bug next never do.
One conversation became a product fix, better documentation, and tickets that never had to be filed.
Repeat that across a year of tickets, and support stops looking like a cost centre. It becomes one of the most cost-efficient growth levers a company can activate.
Getting those moments wrong is just as measurable, and far less forgiving. In Zendesk's 2025 CX Trends research, 63% of consumers said they were willing to switch to a competitor after just one bad experience — and many never tell you why: 56% of consumers rarely or never complain about a bad service experience and simply move to another brand, according to Coveo research cited by Shopify.
So why don't more companies collect the upside? Because support teams have long been under-resourced for the demands placed on them. Only 26% of support agents feel equipped with the tools and resources they need, according to Enchant, and in Zendesk Benchmark data, six in ten agents say a lack of customer data often causes negative experiences. The gap is systemic — which is also the good news: systems can be changed.
Not instead of engineers. For them.
The final and most urgent evolution in support is the integration of AI — not to replace engineers, but to give every one of them the context and instincts that used to live only in your most experienced people. In a study of more than 5,000 customer support agents published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, AI assistance raised issues resolved per hour by 14% on average and by 34% for novice and less-skilled agents. The gains went beyond speed: customer sentiment improved, more agents stayed in their jobs, and the tool appeared to pass the practices of top performers on to newer agents, helping them climb the experience curve faster. Salesforce's 2025 State of Service research points the same way: reps using AI spend 20% less time on routine cases.
Take a page from Klarna on automation without human oversight. Just over a year after reporting that its AI assistant was doing the work of 700 full-time agents and making a mass layoff, the company began recruiting human agents again in 2025, once its CEO acknowledged the drop in service quality.
A lot of organisations wanted to build for autonomous investigations. But faster investigations with a human empowered by AI have proven to deliver better results.
AI does not make the support engineer redundant. It makes them formidable.
It surfaces the right knowledge at the right moment, handles the repeatable tier-1 volume, and frees the engineer to do what only a human can: exercise judgment, build trust, and turn a difficult situation into a defining moment in the customer's story.