Conventional wisdom advocates the concept of ‘all hands support’ — getting everyone from the CEO to the lowliest intern supporting customers so the entire team understands the customer’s problems. It’s a great goal, but is there a downside? What if your dev team starts spending much more time than usual on support and it eventually starts impacting your business?

Our Churn Issue

Around January 2015, we noticed an unusual increase in customer churn. A user churn rate of 3.9% had increased to 7% in just a couple of weeks.

We’re a revenue transparent company, so yes — these are our real numbers.

And it didn’t stop there. Over the next couple of months, our user churn slowly increased to a peak of 9.8%! This was alarming, so we decided to go a...