Do support that doesn’t scale

Jul 28, 2025

Company

It’s easy to ruin your company’s support by trying to scale it too early – not carelessly or intentionally – but by following the standard support playbook.

That standard playbook – async tickets, chatbots, and rigid KPIs – is meant to improve the customer experience. In practice, it often makes it worse.

Stedi is a healthcare clearinghouse for developers. We sell APIs to highly technical buyers, and we differentiate based on our technology and products. But when we ask customers why they chose us – what we do better than anyone else – they almost always say the same thing:

Support.

As one customer put it:

"I wish I could tell you that I chose Stedi because you have the best APIs or documentation, but the reality is that I went with you because you answered every message I sent within 15 minutes.”

We hear versions of that all the time. It’s not because we’ve mastered support best practices. It’s because we ignore them. Instead, we focus on one thing: solving the customer’s problem as quickly and completely as possible.

When you do support this way – the way that supposedly doesn’t scale – something unexpected happens:

You fix the root causes of customer issues. When you fix root causes, fewer things break. And when fewer things break, you avoid the type of problems that the standard support playbook was designed to manage in the first place.

Why most customer support is bad

Bad customer support is everywhere: useless chatbots, long wait times, unhelpful canned responses. Almost every company offers support. So why is support usually bad?

It’s because typical support tools and practices aren’t designed to help customers. They’re designed to make support easier at scale.

Most support systems assume your company is drowning in support requests. That might be true for some. But, early on, most companies aren’t. So when you implement these systems too soon – to solve a problem you don’t have – you don’t make the customer experience better. You make it worse.

The scale trap

Most teams start with hands-on support. Founders talk to customers, fix their problems, and improve the product. Then they make their first support hire – and assume what they’ve been doing will no longer work. This is typically when companies adopt traditional support systems.

Regardless of intent, those systems cause the company’s incentives around support to shift. You build systems that make support easier to manage at scale – all your tools are optimized for it.

That’s the scale trap.

For example, a typical support workflow looks like this:

  1. The customer creates a ticket.
    A ticketing system makes support easier to manage. Agents can organize work into queues and juggle dozens of conversations at once.

    But those same ticketing systems make it harder for customers to reach out. To get help, customers have to find the (often buried) support portal, create an account, learn a new interface, file a ticket, and, finally, get in line – just when things are already going wrong for them.


  2. Then you make them wait.
    Support teams use queues to manage their workload. Queue-based metrics also help you staff support predictably.

    For the customer, a queue means waiting. You need a quick answer to finish your work. Two hours later, you're still waiting. So customers learn: Don't ask until you're desperate.


  3. Then you don’t fix their problem.
    Support KPIs track things like closed ticket counts and time to resolution, not solved problems. There is no “root causes fixed” metric. What gets measured gets done, so agents master quick workarounds and band-aid fixes.

    For customers, that means they wait days to get shallow responses and temporary fixes. It also means they end up running into the same issues over and over again. The root cause isn’t fixed. The tickets are closed, but the problems stay. Over time, customers stop trusting you to fix their problems at all – and stop reaching out.

If you look at typical support KPIs, this setup works: There are fewer tickets per customer and faster resolution times. But the metrics don’t answer two important questions:

  1. Is the root cause of the customer’s problem really solved?

  2. Does the customer trust you enough to bring you their next problem?

The job of customer support

Support exists to address customer pain. When something breaks, people want the same things anyone in pain wants:

  1. To stop the pain.

  2. To fix the root cause so it doesn’t happen again.

  3. If that’s not possible, to manage the symptoms.

  4. If that’s not possible, to get a direct, honest explanation so they can plan around it.

And they want those things fast. When you’re in pain, you want it to be over as soon as possible.

For support teams, speed isn't just about providing relief. It’s also about empathy. When you respond quickly to someone in pain, it shows you care.

Fixing the scale trap isn’t about tools – it’s about where you focus.

Delivering good support

At Stedi, the job of support is to eliminate customer pain as quickly and thoroughly as possible.

Most people brace for delays and friction when they contact support. Instead, we respond quickly and over-index on being helpful. The contrast often surprises them.

Any company can deliver good support. It just takes hard work, consistency, and the willingness to do things differently. Here’s what that looks like for us:

Work where your customers work.
Every customer gets a dedicated Slack or Microsoft Teams channel. No tickets, no help portals. Slack and Teams are already the customer’s virtual office. When they need help, they don't have to go anywhere. We're already there.

Respond quickly.
We’ve had customers say they were surprised to get a real human response within minutes. We don’t use bots or scripts. Just people who care and can help.

Anyone can help.
Any employee can answer any question in any customer channel. Engineers who built the feature. PMs who designed it. Even the CEO. We have customer success engineers, but support is everyone's job.

If something’s broken, fix it.
Everyone is empowered to make things better. If you have the answer, share it. If something's confusing, explain it and update the docs. If there's a bug, fix it. Don’t wait or assume someone else will do it.

Turn up the volume.
We want customers to bring us more problems, not fewer. Our best customers are often the loudest. They’re pushing our product to the limit, and the questions they ask make our product better.

Go deep.
We tackle questions most healthcare clearinghouses won't touch. We debug errors with customers. We explain complicated responses line by line.

No bots.
We use AI everywhere at Stedi – but not to deflect customer questions. When you need help or have an emergency, you want a human who understands your problem, not a chatbot suggesting knowledge base articles.

Be honest and direct.
When something's broken, we say so. We tell customers why it broke and when we'll fix it.

Do what you say.
If we commit to something, we give customers a date and hit it. If we can't make the deadline, we tell them early. 

Treat every customer the same.
We don’t sell support. Every Stedi customer gets the same level of support, whether you're a two-person startup or processing millions of transactions. There are no support tiers or upsells.

Hire the best people you can.
We hire smart, technical people to do support, and we pay them well. They work hard, understand systems, and can go deep into customer problems.

We didn't start with this playbook. When we started, we were just doing the obvious: trying to help.

Later, we found that our support model has a powerful side effect: it made our product much better.

The support-product flywheel

Good support means fixing things fast. More importantly, it means fixing root causes. We never want customers to hit the same problem twice.

To fix root causes, you have to understand the real problems. Where does our product break? Where do the docs confuse people? Where are users getting stuck?

You can't fix what you don't see, but if you respond quickly and fix things, customers will start to tell you where to look. They’ll point out issues. They’ll trust you to address their pain. And because they trust you, they reach out more. The feedback gets better. The signal gets stronger.

When you fix real problems, your product improves. Fewer customers hit snags. Your support team stops firefighting and starts building. They ship tools, chase harder problems, and spend less time repeating themselves. They’re happier because they’re doing work they’re proud of.

A better product with better support attracts more customers, including ones who push your product to the limit. They find new edge cases. Which you fix. Which makes the product better. Which attracts more customers.

That's the flywheel.

When the flywheel is in effect, the most important support-related metrics can't be measured in CSAT scores or ticket counts. They show up in net revenue retention, churn, and referrals.

But does it scale?

"Your support model won't scale. It works fine with a few customers, but it won’t work past that."

We hear this a lot.

When we were just getting started with our first customers, people would tell us that our approach wouldn’t scale past 10. When we had 10 and didn’t have any issues, people told us that it works fine with 10 customers, but it wouldn’t scale to 100 customers. We keep waiting for the wall, but it still hasn't shown up – even with hundreds of customers.

Why? Our guess is the flywheel is in full effect.

But, to be fair, we have some other things working in our favor. Stedi is built for developers. Our customers are smart and often technical. When they reach out to us, they've done their homework. They ask specific questions. They test things themselves. Smart customers asking real questions keeps our support manageable, even as we grow. Our model might not work if half our tickets were "How do I log in?"

People also assume our support team must cost a fortune. It doesn't. We pay our folks very well, and it pays off in spades. While good-enough support prevents churn, great support encourages customers to use our products even more. That makes for happier customers, and happy customers are our best salespeople.

Will we need to change certain aspects of our support eventually? Probably. But the idea that great human-to-human support can't scale assumes that every customer needs the same amount of help forever.

When you solve problems instead of managing them, support volume doesn't grow linearly with your customer count.

The hard choice

Here’s our pitch. If you run a support org, you have two options:

The safe path.
Buy the ticketing system. Track deflection rates. Answer customer questions with AI slop. This is what most companies do. No one gets fired for it. And your customers might not even complain – they’ve been trained to expect bad support. But no one will rave about it.

The harder path.
Ignore what everyone else does. Do the obvious thing: Be fast, be helpful, fix real problems. Don’t worry about whether it scales.

Our suggestion: Pick the harder path. When done right, support can become your company’s biggest competitive advantage.

Your competitors can copy your features. They can match your prices. But it takes courage to do support in a way that isn’t supposed to scale. Your customers will notice. 

See it for yourself

If you’re evaluating healthcare clearinghouses, give Stedi a try.

You can request a free trial and experience our support firsthand.

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Stedi is a registered trademark of Stedi, Inc. All names, logos, and brands of third parties listed on our site are trademarks of their respective owners (including “X12”, which is a trademark of X12 Incorporated). Stedi, Inc. and its products and services are not endorsed by, sponsored by, or affiliated with these third parties. Our use of these names, logos, and brands is for identification purposes only, and does not imply any such endorsement, sponsorship, or affiliation.

Get updates on what’s new at Stedi

Backed by

Stedi is a registered trademark of Stedi, Inc. All names, logos, and brands of third parties listed on our site are trademarks of their respective owners (including “X12”, which is a trademark of X12 Incorporated). Stedi, Inc. and its products and services are not endorsed by, sponsored by, or affiliated with these third parties. Our use of these names, logos, and brands is for identification purposes only, and does not imply any such endorsement, sponsorship, or affiliation.

Get updates on what’s new at Stedi

Backed by

Stedi is a registered trademark of Stedi, Inc. All names, logos, and brands of third parties listed on our site are trademarks of their respective owners (including “X12”, which is a trademark of X12 Incorporated). Stedi, Inc. and its products and services are not endorsed by, sponsored by, or affiliated with these third parties. Our use of these names, logos, and brands is for identification purposes only, and does not imply any such endorsement, sponsorship, or affiliation.