Bad CX Is a Growth Problem
You Just Can’t Measure It Yet
Most companies say they’re customer-obsessed. But the moment you try to cancel, get support, or report an issue?
That obsession goes real quiet.
This came up for me twice last week with two separate tools, two brutal experiences. And it got me thinking about something a lot of companies overlook:
Growth doesn’t just come from acquiring new logos. It comes from not burning the bridges you’ve already built.
Let me explain.
Example 1: The “Hostage Negotiation” Cancel Flow
I tried to cancel a tool I was paying <$100/month for.
Signup? Instant.
Cancel? Radio silence.
No button. No option in the app. No phone number. Eventually found chat support. After waiting, they told me I had to schedule a call to cancel. That’s right, jump through hoops to stop paying them.
So I argued. Back and forth for 20 minutes just to close my account.
I wasn’t mad when I started. I just didn’t need the product anymore. But by the end of that experience?
I thought their tactics were shady as hell. I wouldn’t use them again. I wouldn’t recommend them.
And if someone asked, I’d tell them exactly how painful it was.
All because they made it hard to leave.
Example 2: The “We’ll Get to It Eventually” Support Ticket
Different tool. This one’s $600/month and mission-critical for a client of ours. Their system went down. We couldn’t use the product. Our work hit a wall.
No option to call. Horrible chat experience. We submitted a ticket. The response?
“Support response times are backed up. Expect 2–4 days.”
That’s not acceptable when you’re blocking daily operations.
No workaround. No escalation. Just a generic delay message.
Again good product, but a horrible experience. And that’s what I’ll remember and will think twice before building things around them again.
Here’s the bigger issue:
When stuff like this happens, it doesn’t show up in your attribution tools.
It won’t trigger a Slack alert.
You won’t see a dip in your MQLs the next day.
I just become a churned customer.
I don’t show up as someone who left angry.
I don’t show up as someone who’s now telling other people not to use your product.
But the impact is real.
And it’s the kind of thing that tanks growth slowly without a clear root cause. Because bad customer experiences don’t just lose one account. They ripple.
So why don’t more companies fix this?
Because it’s hard to measure. There’s no clean KPI for “how many advocates you accidentally turned into detractors this month.”
And when something’s hard to measure, it’s easy to ignore.
Instead, companies double down on new acquisition. More ads, more outbound, more pipeline.
But if you’re not retaining customers or worse, if you’re creating anti-advocates it’s like trying to fill a leaky bucket.
Growth isn’t just about what you can track.
It’s about what your customers feel especially when things go wrong.
So here’s the takeaway:
Make it easy to cancel. You don’t need a phone call to lose $100/month.
Treat support issues like they matter—especially for high-paying, daily-use customers.
Don’t just optimize for acquisition. Optimize for trust.
Because brand isn’t just what you say.
It’s how people describe you when things don’t go perfectly.
And if your CX is an afterthought, don’t be surprised when your growth starts to stall and no one can quite explain why.
Thanks for reading,
– Adam
P.S. If your company’s trying to fix leaky growth but hasn’t looked at customer experience as part of the problem, we should talk. Growth Union helps companies scale demand and retention. Because long-term growth takes more than clicks—it takes trust.