Customer support: Tha Game You Can't Win (But Should Play Anyway)

Let’s be honest. In an ideal world, customer support wouldn’t even exist.

Perfect products, perfect users, perfect outcomes. No questions, no errors, no “why is this blinking red?” moments. Just smooth efficiency, day after day.

But back here on planet Earth, things look a little different. Someone will always try to paint a wall with toothpaste. And when your product happens to be a piece of smart home technology—layered with routers, Wi-Fi dead zones, third-party installers, and a dozen integrations—it’s not toothpaste anymore, it’s superglue.

Which brings us to support: the necessary glue holding everything together when reality doesn’t match the brochure.

Support as a Daily Reset

Recently, I spent two weeks covering support at 1Home.

A support teammate took some well-deserved time off, and rather than handing the inbox to someone else, I decided to step in myself. After all, “This looks like a job for Dr. Smart Home.” It had been a while since I’d been on the frontlines, and the timing felt right. What better way to recalibrate than by experiencing support firsthand again?

It also brought me full circle. When I first joined 1Home—coming in as COO with a strong sales background—I deliberately spent my first month in support. It was the fastest way to understand where the real problems were. Back then I learned an important truth: if you want to create meaningful solutions in this area, you can’t just sit above the process. You have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty.

Here’s the thing: support is both satisfying and strangely Sisyphean. Every closed ticket gives you that little dopamine hit—like finishing a mission in a role-playing game. “Yes! Quest complete. Customer saved. +10 XP.”

But the next morning, you log back in… and you’re at square one. None of yesterday’s victories matter. A fresh wave of quests awaits, and you’re back in the trenches. It reminded me of the Alethi on the Shattered Plains in The Way of Kings: armies clashing in fierce battles every day, not to end the war, but to gather gemstones for their highprinces. The soldiers fight, bleed, and win ground — only to have it all reset by the next dawn. Support can feel the same: meaningful in the moment, yet strangely cyclical, with no final victory waiting at the end.

It’s addictive (just one more ticket…) and demoralizing (why am I still on level 1?) all at once. And it gave me a deep respect for the professionals who live in this cycle every day.

Why Support Feels Broken

Support is also where you see all the cracks in a company. Step into the inbox, and suddenly you’re looking at problems that aren’t “support” at all:

Sales questions that belong with sales.
Logistics questions about returns and shipments.
Accounting questions about invoices and refunds.
Marketing questions (“let's exchange some backlinks…”).
Lot's of mumbo jumbo like promotions, requests for donations, even some looney toons characters out of another dimension :)

Meanwhile, you’re also trying to spot the critical tickets—like system integrators under pressure on-site—before they get buried under “How do I reset my password?”

The truth is, products are rarely priced to include real, human support. If you buy a couple of hundred € tech product - how many hours of one-on-one attention can a company afford to give you before they start losing money? It’s why big tech companies funnel you through forums, bots, and endless FAQs.

If engineers charged like lawyers or bankers, we could have armies of support staff solving every problem under the sun. But they don’t. Instead, support becomes a daily exercise in triage, transfer, and trade-offs.

Think about it: a single exam at the doctor or a 15-minute consultation with a lawyer can cost as much as an entire piece of technology. A notary places one stamp on a document and the bill is €400 — no maintenance, no after-sales questions, no version 2.0 three years later. Architects and accountants can invoice you for a phone call. Yet the time of the people who design and maintain the very systems we rely on every hour of our lives is treated as if it were free.

Meanwhile, tech products don’t just appear. They have to be developed, manufactured, maintained, and — inevitably — supported. And by the time you’ve done all that, the product is halfway to being outdated. The economics simply don’t allow for infinite human support, which is why efficiency, triage, and smart process design matter so much.

Support as Calibration

We can’t change the price of notary stamps or the billing model of lawyers, but we can shape how support works inside our own walls. And one of the most effective ways to do that is to occasionally step into support ourselves — not as a stunt, but as a form of calibration.

Because here’s what happens when you do:

You rediscover the human side of technology—the confusion, the frustration, the relief when it finally works.
You spot the process gaps—where tickets get lost, misrouted, or slowed down.
You get a reality check on how your product actually behaves in the wild, routers and installers included.

Support isn’t just a function. It’s a mirror. It shows you what’s working, what’s broken, and where you’re letting customers down.

The Strange Truth About Engineers

One final conspiracy theory for you: if doctors or bakers stopped working today, we’d have chaos tomorrow. If engineers stopped working today, it would take a little longer—just until the systems and gadgets we all rely on started breaking down.

And when that happens, it won’t be the engineers we hear from first. It’ll be the support teams, picking up the phones, answering the tickets, and holding everything together with human patience.

So maybe customer support shouldn’t exist in an ideal world. But in this one, it’s one of the most important professions we’ve got.

Massive respect.

✨ Dr. Smart Home, signing off — now back to Level 1.