Burned through 2 support hires in 6 months — the real reason (and what finally fixed it)

Honest post-mortem.

8 months ago, my support inbox was overwhelming. I was spending 3 hours a day on it personally.

The solution seemed obvious: hire a dedicated support person.

I hired. Things got better for about 3 weeks.

Then volume kept growing. New hire started struggling to keep up.

By week 8 they were burned out.

Week 10: they quit.

I hired again. Same outcome. Different person.

Somewhere around hire #2 I stopped blaming the people and started questioning the system.

I did something I should have done before hire #1:

I pulled 3 months of tickets and categorized every single one.

Results:

• 61% of tickets: answer already in our FAQ. Same answer every time.
• 24% of tickets: needed 2-3 back-and-forth exchanges to resolve
• 15% of tickets: genuinely complex, needed senior attention

I had been paying humans to answer FAQ questions at $40K/year.

That 61% was eating 5+ hours of their 8-hour day. Every day. The repetitive grind that makes good people quit.

The fix wasn't a better hire. It was a system that handled the 61% so humans could actually focus on the 39%.

SupportBridge is the system I ended up building for this exact problem. AI handles the FAQ tickets — with strict rules: only approved content, max 1 reply, then human. Humans handle everything else.

Third support person has been with us 4 months. No burnout signs.

Did anyone else discover this the expensive way?