Every growing business dreams of hypergrowth: the champagne moments when customer sign-ups soar and revenues accelerate.

But for many organisations, celebrations are short-lived. Growth often exposes cracks in customer support systems that were never built to scale. The result is a customer support squeeze, when surging demand collides with outdated processes, overstretched teams, and customer expectations that only seem to rise.

The consequences can be severe. Increased churn and stalled momentum can turn success into frustration fast. The good news is that by spotting the early warning signs, leaders can act before support becomes a growth blocker.

Here are three signs your business might be heading for the squeeze, and what to do about it.

1. Rising customer effort

When customers are forced to repeat their story across multiple channels, frustration sets in quickly. Research consistently shows that customer effort, meaning how hard it is to get a problem resolved, is the strongest predictor of churn.

Struggling SaaS firms often have instances where a single billing query has spiralled into three separate conversations because agents could not see the full history across email, chat, and phone. Even when the issue was eventually solved, the relationship had already soured.

Leaders should examine how many steps customers go through to resolve issues. If your teams lack the systems to provide full context across touchpoints, you are not just creating inefficiency, you are eroding loyalty. Freshworks’ latest Employee Experience Benchmark Report found that nearly half of organisations see silos as the biggest barrier to effective service delivery, and for customers those silos appear as repeated questions and fragmented interactions.

2. Agent overload

As customer expectations climb, agents are left juggling too many tools, too many contexts, and too many unhappy conversations. More than half of support agents cite constant context switching as their biggest productivity killer. Add in rigid schedules, repetitive tasks, and escalating emotional labour, and it is no wonder annual turnover rates can exceed 40 per cent.

This kind of overload does not just hurt employees, it directly impacts customers. Burned-out agents cannot deliver empathetic service. If morning stand-ups feel like trauma-bonding sessions rather than strategy discussions, you are already in the danger zone.

Forward-thinking companies are addressing this by adopting human–AI partnership models. Rather than replacing people, AI acts as a digital co-pilot. It can draft responses, surface the right knowledge, and handle repetitive queries. That shift turns agents from data retrievers into problem-solvers, boosting both morale and productivity. Organisations using AI-powered service tools cut average resolution times by more than three quarters, proving the potential for AI to reduce pressure while improving service.

3. Scale-or-fail pressure

When support queues grow, the reflex response is often to hire more people. But here is the reality: adding headcount without addressing broken systems is the equivalent of treating symptoms rather than the underlying condition. It is expensive, unsustainable, and fails to tackle the root cause.

Reliance on manual processes creates bottlenecks. Support descends into a cycle of unsustainable effort, with teams working harder but without meaningful progress. Companies that break out of this cycle do so by redesigning workflows, not just inflating payroll.

The focus should be on intelligent automation, modern self-service, and systems that scale with growth. That is how you create resilience without sacrificing customer experience.

From cost centre to competitive advantage

Support does not have to be a drag on growth. For companies that get it right, it becomes one of the strongest differentiators in competitive markets.

The key is to measure what really matters. Traditional metrics such as average handle time and tickets closed only tell part of the story. Smarter leaders are now focusing on whether customers feel their issues were easy to resolve, whether they would recommend the company after the experience, and whether support teams themselves feel equipped and empowered to succeed. By concentrating on these outcomes, rather than simply outputs, businesses gain a more accurate picture of customer experience and employee wellbeing.

When combined with the right balance of human insight and AI augmentation, these measures can transform support from a reactive cost centre into a proactive growth engine.

The bottom line

Hypergrowth will test every part of your organisation, but customer support is often where the pressure shows first. Rising customer effort, agent overload, and scale-or-fail pressure are more than operational headaches, they are leading indicators that growth is at risk.

The companies that recognise these signs early, and act decisively, will not just avoid the squeeze. They will emerge with customer support as a lasting advantage, driving loyalty and sustainable growth.

Simon Hayward is vice president of sales, EMEA at Freshworks.

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