Your most costly support function may not be your biggest budget. It could be the one you spend too much time resolving the same issue with.
Whether it’s customer service, IT, human resources, or accounting, businesses often want these teams to cost as little as possible. Just make sure we’re running, getting our questions answered, and that it’s not causing our business to slow down. This will all seem reasonable until you begin to realize what your business may be missing from these support functions.
Having support functions can reveal what is causing friction in a business. Used correctly, they can strengthen customer relationships, improve decision-making, and set your company apart from others. It’s just looking at how much it costs you to get the job done vs. what it allows you to do.
You Will Discover
- How Having A Support Team Is Costing You Money
- Why You Need To Improve Your Customer Service
- Ensuring Each Department Has A Business Goal
- Utilize Customer Issues To Solve Your Problems
- Implementing Automation For Support Functions
- Proving Value With Support Functions
- Final Thoughts
How Having A Support Team Is Costing You Money?
As mentioned before, businesses often treat support functions as cost centers. So it’s natural to analyze them based on how much they cost us. But is that the best metric to evaluate if they’re adding value?
If you decrease the amount of time your customers spend on the phone with your customer service team, you may think you are saving money. Well, what if that caused your customers to call back, request a refund, or not do business with you again?
This can be costly to your business. According to the Qualtrics XM Institute in their Q3 2025 Global Consumer Research consumers cut spending after 47% of bad experiences, according to Qualtrics’ Q3 2025 global consumer research. This does not establish ROI for a specific support team, but it illustrates the risk of bad experiences. What can happen when people have bad experiences?
The key takeaway here is that reducing the cost of a support function does not always equal increasing your bottom line.
Why You Need To Improve Your Customer Service?
There are many factors that can contribute to bad customer service. Maybe your product takes too long to ship, your website isn’t giving enough information, or you have too many hurdles when processing refunds. There is only so much your customer service team can do.
Which is why you want to start finding ways to improve your customer service across your business. Your support team needs a way to communicate to other departments where customers get stuck. And then those departments need to do something about it.
You can find customer service stats: a synthesis of US corporate business leaders’ online views on customer service, rather than statistics reported directly by individual companies, and their most pressing customer service topics from Mark Sanborn. Use these as a baseline and dig deeper into what customers are telling you through complaints, number of calls, and surveys.
If a package takes too long to ship, you can tell your customer why and provide an updated date. But your operations team can dig into why it’s taking so long to ship. Your finance department can look at what’s holding up your refunds. By working together as a company, you can improve the customer experience in many ways.
Once you do this, you can create more of a competitive advantage by providing better customer service.
Ensuring Each Department Has A Business Goal
The first thing you want to do is find ways to help your support functions better serve your business. Instead of setting them with goals to ensure they are working, set them with goals that allow them to create better outcomes for your business.
1. Customer Service:
Allow customers to resolve issues with fewer touchpoints and no more confusion.
2. IT:
Provide employees with the tools and time they need to get their jobs done.
3. Human Resources:
Decrease time to proficiency while still allowing adequate time for learning.
4. Finance:
Improve clarity of billing and help resolve billing issues with customers.
5. Procurement:
Find vendors that can consistently supply your business with products at an affordable price.
There will always be ways to save money, but having your management understand what value these teams can bring you will allow you to better make those decisions.
Utilize Customer Issues To Solve Your Problems
As you know, support functions can give you great insight into where your customers may be struggling. The key is you don’t want your team to close those tickets and move on. You need to start digging into those issues to solve the root problem.
Find those problems that are recurring or require multiple points of contact. Once you’ve identified them, follow these steps:
- Identify repeating problems; maybe look at why the tickets are being labeled a certain way.
- Find out which team owns the issue; it could be a policy, lack of information, or improper handoff.
- Change one thing; once you know why they are failing, you can address the problem before purchasing new software.
- See if it improves; start measuring if customers are calling back with the same problem or their CSAT scores improve.
Maybe your customers keep calling to reset their passwords. This could be due to poor communication with your employees, or it could be your website not explaining how to properly log in. Either way, you can better your employees’ experience and decrease the workload on your IT department.
Remember, your customer service team can only do so much; find ways to make their issues known to other departments and give them time to correct them.
Implementing Automation For Support Functions
Automation can be great if it’s helping reduce tasks that your employees are performing day in and day out. However, if you’re only automating things to save money, you could be hurting your business.
If you have a chatbot that can tell a customer where their package is, great! But what if that customer wants to dispute a charge? Make sure they know how to reach someone who can help them with that issue.
According to a Gartner article from April 2026, many service leaders plan to give their human agents more duties as they begin to automate more processes. This shows that automation can allow your employees to spend more time on harder issues.
Always look at what the customer is trying to accomplish before implementing automation. Make sure your customers are able to complete that task and monitor whether they continue to call back or transfer to a live agent.
Decreasing the amount of tickets handled by humans may be beneficial, but if your problems aren’t being fixed, then it’s not worth it.
Proving Value With Support Functions
Of course you want to save money, but make sure your support functions can report what value they are creating as well.
You can measure your value by monitoring:
Cost per issue, instead of just looking at cost per contact.
Repeat contact: are customers calling back to resolve the same issue?
Time to resolution: are your customers waiting a long time to get an issue resolved? Maybe they’re getting passed around between departments.
CSAT: make sure you have qualitative data to go along with your scores.
Preventative: how many issues were avoided by implementing new procedures.
Try to monitor these metrics over a longer period of time to see if there’s any improvement. If your customers stopped calling after updating your website, it could be beneficial to look at why. But you shouldn’t credit your support team with every sale or customer you retain.
According to Deloitte Digital’s 2026 Contact Center Survey, providing a better customer experience was the #1 goal respondents wanted to focus on this year. While we all want to save money, it’s nice to have a metric that will show you your spending is creating something valuable for your customers and business.
Final Thoughts
Having support functions in your business can allow you to become a more competitive business. It’s just finding ways to better utilize the information your support teams can provide you.
Start by identifying a common customer issue, find out who can help stop it, and see if your customers’ experience improves.
Also Read :- The Role of Distributed Teams in Supporting Modern Business Operations
