When I joined Pigment in 2020, we had zero support tickets a month and just a handful of customers. By the time I left at the start of 2026, we were approaching a thousand tickets a month, running a 24/7 on-call system, generating revenue directly through support, and picking up industry awards along the way.

I've since moved on to become global head of support at ITRS Group, but the story of how we got there, and the framework we built along the way – the scaled funnel – is one I still lean on today.

Starting from scratch

When I joined, there was no support function at Pigment. We built it from the ground up, and the growth that followed is worth tracking year by year:

  • 2021: Averaging 33 tickets a month. We hired our first support specialist, launched our community, and ran entirely instructor-led training, with no e-learning or academy yet in place.
  • 2022: Up to 144 tickets a month. We brought in a second support specialist, established e-learning, started running events, and put our first automations in place. This was also the year we hit roughly $1 million in customer ARR per support headcount, a metric we used as our core efficiency benchmark.
  • 2023: 311 tickets a month and $2 million ARR per support headcount. We started hiring in the US, launched a 24/7 on-call system for incidents, and introduced a premium support offering. By packaging enhanced SLAs and on-call availability into a paid tier, we turned it into a revenue line.
  • 2024: Our ticket forecasting reached an accuracy of around five tickets a week, built from data on customer stage, pipeline movement, active users, and planning cycles. (We serve a lot of finance teams, so we learned to anticipate seasonal rhythms: ticket volume would drop during planning periods but urgency would rise, then volume would climb again once customers moved into model-building.) 
    We also hired our first team lead and introduced "support strands," pairing generalist case handling with dedicated specialists for specific product areas. By year-end, we were at $3 million ARR per support headcount with 99.8% CSAT, and had started earning industry recognition.
  • 2025: We began feeding quarterly data back to our product managers: where tickets were coming from, which product areas were generating friction, and what enhancements would reduce volume. The goal throughout was the same: less friction in the customer journey.

By 2026, we were forecasting around 850 tickets a month; by the time I left in late January, we'd already reached close to 1,000. We were preparing to expand into APAC and add live chat, having handled support through email alone up to that point.