Everything in tech is getting faster, smarter, and more automated. Products ship in days. Models improve weekly. Onboarding flows are slicker than they've ever been.

And yet there's one part of the experience that has quietly fallen off a cliff over the last few years. Nobody talks about it, because it isn't exciting, it doesn't demo well, and it definitely doesn't make it onto a pitch deck.

Customer support!

I don't have research to point to here - this is just an observation. But I'd bet that every single person reading this knows exactly what I mean.

You call your bank. You get stuck talking to an AI agent that doesn't understand the question and keeps offering you the same four options on a loop. You eventually mash zero enough times to reach a human - outsourced to the cheapest possible location, reading from a script, with no real authority to fix anything.

This isn't a dig at outsourcing or at offshore teams. The economics make sense at scale, and plenty of offshore support is excellent. The problem is the priority. Lower price for the company has quietly become lower quality for the customer, and somewhere along the way we all just accepted that as normal.

At the same time, something has shifted in us as customers too.

AI and technology haven't just changed products. They've changed our expectations.

We now believe - somewhere deep down - that everything should work instantly, seamlessly, and without friction. If a model can write a complex essay in four seconds, surely a company can fix a billing error without making us wait. Our tolerance for things going wrong has collapsed. We get frustrated faster. We give up sooner.

Put those two trends together and you get a genuinely combustible situation: support quality is declining at exactly the moment customer patience is at an all-time low. The systems are getting worse at handling problems, and we're getting worse at tolerating them.

This is why people are cancelling. Not because the product is bad - but because the experience around the product made them feel like nobody cared.

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Let me give you a real example, because it's what got me thinking about all of this.

Earlier this week I signed up to a well-known product, DocuSign - a service for signing agreements online. Within minutes I'd hit a couple of bugs that got in the way of what I was trying to do. Annoying, but fine. Bugs happen. I just needed to talk to someone.

That's when the real problem started.

I couldn't email them - email support was only available to paid users, and even though I was a paid user, the system didn't recognise me as one. I couldn't call them, for exactly the same reason. Live chat didn't work either. Every single route to a human being was either hidden, broken, or gated behind a system that had failed to identify me correctly.

It took me over an hour to reach anyone. And when I finally did, the person on the other end simply wasn't equipped to understand the problem, let alone fix it.

So I did what an increasing number of customers now do. I cancelled. And now I'm looking for an alternative.

Here's the part worth sitting with: the company didn't lose me because their product was broken. A couple of bugs wouldn't have done it. They lost me because they had designed their entire support experience around one goal - removing humans from the process - and never stopped to consider what happens when the automation itself fails.

This is the trap, and it's an easy one to fall into when you're a founder under pressure to do more with less.

Automation looks like pure upside. It cuts cost, it scales infinitely, it never sleeps. So the instinct is to automate as much of the customer journey as possible and treat every remaining human interaction as a failure of efficiency.

But automation isn't a substitute for support. It's a filter for it.

AI is genuinely brilliant at the predictable, high-volume, low-stakes stuff - password resets, order tracking, "where are my settings," basic FAQs. Let it handle all of that. That's where the cost savings are real and nobody loses anything.

But the moments that actually matter are the unpredictable ones. The bug. The edge case. The billing error. The moment the customer is frustrated, confused, or angry. Those are precisely the moments when a customer needs a human - and precisely the moments most companies have made it impossible to reach one.

When your product fails a customer, that's not the moment to also fail them on support. That's the moment that decides whether they stay or go. And almost everyone is getting it backwards: they pour resources into the automated front door and treat the human fallback as an afterthought, when it should be the other way around.

The single most important feature of any automated system is the part that recognises "this isn't working" and hands the person to a real human, fast, before they've spent an hour rage-clicking through dead ends.

Here's where it gets interesting, and why I think this matters for anyone building something right now.

Switching used to be hard. There wasn't much competition, customers weren't aware of alternatives, and moving from one provider to another was a genuine pain. None of that is true anymore. Competition is everywhere. Alternatives are one search away. And competitors are now so eager for your business that many of them will actively help you switch - they'll do the migration for you, just to win you as a customer.

In that world, customer experience stops being a "nice to have" and becomes one of the few things that genuinely separates you from the company next door.

Think about what that means. If a customer will now leave a perfectly good product because the support experience made them feel ignored - then the reverse is also true. A customer will stay with a less polished, less feature-complete product if the experience around it makes them feel genuinely looked after.

That is an enormous opening, and it's one that doesn't require a bigger team or a bigger raise. You can't out-feature a competitor with ten times your funding. But you absolutely can out-care them.

You can be the company that actually answers. The one where a real person responds quickly, understands the problem, and has the authority to fix it. The one where reaching a human when something breaks is easy by design, not buried three menus deep behind a broken paywall check.

I know that for most early-stage founders, "prioritise customer support" sounds almost laughable. You're stretched thin. You're building the product, raising money, doing everything at once. Support feels like something you'll get to later, once you're bigger.

But this is exactly the kind of thing that's nearly free to build in early and very expensive to bolt on later. If you design the customer journey from the start with a simple principle - when automation fails, a human appears quickly - it costs you almost nothing. Retrofit it onto a company that spent three years optimising humans out of the loop, and it's a painful, expensive cultural rebuild.

Make great customer experience part of the actual product. Not a department. Not a cost centre. A feature - arguably your most defensible one.

None of this is easy. Nothing about building a company is easy right now.

But the pattern keeps repeating, across fundraising, across sales, and now across customer experience: the thing that makes you stand out is your willingness to stay human while everyone else races to remove the humans.

The companies that win the next few years won't be the ones with the most automation. They'll be the ones who understood where to automate, and - more importantly - where not to.

When everyone else is busy designing humans out of the experience, being the company a customer can actually reach is no longer a basic courtesy. It's a competitive advantage.

✅ Know a founder heads-down building product and treating support as a "later" problem? Forward this their way. The earlier they design the human fallback into the journey, the more customers they'll keep when something inevitably breaks.

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