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?
