The Enduring Customer Support Lessons For Growing Companies

By Daria Leshchenko, CEO and Managing Partner at SupportYourApp, a global Intelligent Support-as-a-Service company.

Fifteen years of experience in global customer support have taught me that a customer who walks away in silence can pose one of the biggest threats to a business. A rigid, scripted response to a customer complaint can erode trust. But one empathetic interaction can create a lifelong brand advocate.

Losing clients to a poor customer experience is easier than businesses expect. Qualtrics research found that 53% of negative experiences cause consumers to stop spending with a brand. Qualtrics research also suggests that the cost of poor customer experiences has grown. In 2022, the company estimated that organisations globally risk losing $3.1 trillion due to bad experiences, and in 2024, that number rose to $3.8 trillion.​ For comparison, that figure is higher than the U.K.’s gross domestic product.​

Over the years, I have learned that companies rarely lose customers because they do not care. Often, growth arrives faster than their systems can adapt. Teams become overwhelmed, knowledge remains scattered, and customer support processes that worked yesterday suddenly stop working at scale.​​

When Growth Outpaces Systems

Some time ago, one of the companies we worked with faced exactly this challenge. Their mobile game gained global popularity, the user base grew rapidly, and the team prepared for expansion. But alongside new satisfied customers came thousands of frustrated ones.

The company didn’t yet have the systems needed to handle that volume of requests efficiently. There was no centralised knowledge base, training materials were still evolving, and support teams were forced to react faster than the business could adapt. Instead of celebrating success, they found themselves putting out fires.

It was not an unusual situation. Throughout my career, I have seen dozens of similar cases. A rapidly growing backlog begins to erode customer trust, damage the brand experience and create pressure across the entire business.

Experiences like these shaped one of my strongest convictions: Customer support is not a cost centre. It drives customer retention, trust, and long-term brand equity. Companies facing operational pressure rarely need another presentation about customer-centricity. They need practical systems that help them manage growth before it turns into a crisis.​

For that gaming company, the immediate priority was straightforward: They needed to grow and systematise support operations, reduce the backlog and significantly improve response times. In doing so, they resolved the crisis.

A Broader Question​

My experience with that gaming company raised a broader question: If so many companies keep facing the same challenges, why are they still learning the same lessons from scratch? Why do customer support leaders still discover fundamental principles through trial and error?

The more I thought about it, the more I realised one of the industry’s biggest challenges isn’t a lack of talent. It is a lack of accessible, practical knowledge that helps people avoid predictable mistakes before they become expensive.​​​

That realisation eventually led my company to focus more intentionally on knowledge sharing and education. Interestingly, my own path into customer support started while I was studying to become a teacher. Looking back, those two worlds had more in common than I expected. Teaching and leadership force you to answer the same question: Do you understand something well enough to explain it clearly to someone else? Transferring knowledge has always been one of the most effective tests of mastery.

We focused on a simple question: If someone stepped into a customer support leadership position today, what knowledge should they receive on day one? This challenged us to separate timeless principles from temporary trends and identify which lessons remained valuable regardless of changing technologies, platforms and workflows.

It’s difficult to distil 15 years of customer support experience into a few lessons, but I’ve found some principles remain remarkably consistent, and any growing company should keep them in mind.

What Endures In Customer Support

One customer support lesson stands above all others: Sustainable growth depends more on preparation than reaction. The companies that navigate growth most successfully are rarely the ones that solve crises fastest. They build structures that prevent those crises from emerging in the first place. For leaders thinking about the future of their customer experience operations, I find several principles continue to prove their value:

• Shift your focus from solving daily emergencies to identifying and building the systems that would prevent them.
• Create a centralised knowledge base and training for teams.
• Scale support systems before expected growth, not during it.
• Treat customer support as a driver of retention and trust, rather than a cost centre.​

Finally, remember the fundamentals: Clear communication matters. Empathy matters. Accountability matters. Knowledge sharing matters.​​ These remain relevant regardless of how technology changes around them.

Final Thoughts​​

I fully expect many of today’s practices to feel outdated in a few years. Customer support evolves quickly, and AI is accelerating that transformation even further. But I see that as a sign of progress, not a problem. In a changing environment, companies need stronger foundations. They need systems that help people learn faster, adapt faster and make better decisions under pressure.​​​

After 15 years in customer support, I still believe solving problems is valuable. But avoiding repetitive problems may be even more valuable.​​​ Ultimately, one of the strongest indicators of business maturity is the ability to transform experience into shared knowledge. In a profession built on continuous learning, that is what allows customer support to grow alongside the company.