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When you outsource your customer support to a call centre where the people there have no power whatsoever to actually help you, who are just trained to get you off the call with a "if there's anything else we can help you with...", why bother? Support needs to be in-house, and the people doing it need to have the power to actually do something when you call them. Otherwise, it's just for show, it's ticking a box in some compliance or PR checklist

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I agree. I've run a support team for a mid-sized SaaS company for many years and have so far resisted any outsourcing. Unsurprisingly, Support is one of the commonly cited high points of our product. The members of my team are well trained and knowledgeable and can escalate things easily so that the vast majority of customer problems can be resolved satisfactorily.

The challenge with resisting outsourcing is justifying the cost of it. I try and frame it as: what is the likelihood that a customer churns if their problem goes unresolved?

Of course in our case, each customer represents thousands of dollars in ARR, so that's an easier argument to make.

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