Want Lazy Employees? Just Add Time Pressure.

Although it's great to make customer support as efficient as possible, taking this urge to its logical conclusion can do serious damage to the right end goals. We've become so obsessed with making sure every support request is resolved at lightning speed that we create processes that forget the human in the equation—and make huge sacrifices to business outcomes in doing so.

Customer support has got to be about more than quick fixes. When you're forced to rush through every support interaction, putting people on hold to jump on the next caller in the queue, you miss the chance to really hear what each customer has to say. What other issues or needs are going unspoken, begging to be uncovered? What opportunities are we walking past every day because we're not willing or able to lean in and listen? The issue goes far beyond lost sales—every CS call is a chance to capture information about market demand, useful insights that competitors lack, and early warnings for looming issues that need to be proactively remedied. If we're in such a rush to contain resolution time, we take a pass on all these other fountains of value.

Sales reps have this figured out. They're not fearful of letting a call linger for 15 extra minutes if it means yielding 15x the revenue. Selling gives them permission to be interested, to dig deeper, to be human in a way support teams don't—though they often have just as important a role in building customer relationships. It's really sad to me, seeing our economy become so drone-like that CS reps are judged on speed over everything. For every dollar we squeeze out with faster resolution times, we probably leave $100+ on the table by creating an experience that's forgettable at best and frustrating at worst. Your customers want to feel seen in support interactions, not handled by a robot who only cares about ticking ticket boxes.

It's a case of correlation over causation. We see companies with happy customers who happen to have great CS numbers, so we jump to the conclusion that if we fix those metrics, the satisfaction will follow. But it's the other way around! When you create a support framework that truly listens to and empathizes with customers before doubling back to their specific pain points—that's how you get the loyalty and good word-of-mouth that CS metrics are trying to expose in the first place.

Taken to its extreme, an overly optimized CS process starts to seem more delinquent than diligent. You're too hasty to look into nuanced issues, too reluctant to edge into new topics, too narrowly focused solely on efficiency gains. If you saw your own business being handled this way, you'd go somewhere else. So as convenient as it may be to forget a user, it's brutally unwise.

Start giving your support agents permission to really talk to the person on the other end of the line. When employees can have free-flowing conversations devoid of clocks ticking in the background, your customers will start to feel "wow, these people get me"—the hallmark of great CS that ultimately drives revenue and trumps any other metric. Being able to actually listen before trying to empathize? Well, that changes the whole equation.

The more important information we can surface from each call, the more it pays for itself a thousand times over. So next time your CS team leader is anguishing over efficiency metrics, ask yourself: is speed really what matters most to this business? Or is that just the thing that makes it easy to measure? Jenkins of Instacart was right to say that once your support starts to get tight, every interaction is an expensive task. What's equally true is that cramming those interactions into an ever-smaller box will only drive retention down the drain.

The real magic happens when we stop treating support as a race against the clock and start seeing it as an opportunity to build genuine connections. Sure, we need to be efficient—but not at the cost of being effective. When we give our support teams the space to be human, to really listen and engage, we don't just solve problems—we build the kind of customer relationships that keep businesses thriving long-term.

Is your business struggling with rising customer service demands? At OpenCall, we're reinventing what's possible in customer support by combining AI efficiency with human understanding. Our AI agents are ready 24/7 to help deliver the kind of thoughtful, unhurried support experiences that build lasting customer relationships.