the part nobody prices in
Your support queue is a leading indicator of churn, and you are reading it too late.
Most SaaS teams measure support the way a call centre does: tickets in, tickets out, time to first reply. Those numbers describe the queue, not the account. A customer who asks the same question three times during a trial is not a support statistic — they are a renewal you have already lost and have not booked yet.
This goes unnoticed for a structural reason: support sits in one tool, product usage in another, the renewal date in a third. The ticket closes, CSAT comes back at four stars, and nobody connects it to the seat count that quietly drops in March.
There is a second failure mode, and it is what makes SaaS different from every other industry on this site. In ecommerce, a customer who stops contacting you has probably received their parcel. In SaaS, a customer who stops contacting you may simply have stopped trying. Silence during onboarding is not satisfaction — it is often what happens just before a seat goes unused for a quarter and someone declines the renewal without ever filing a ticket.
So the question we ask is not "how fast do we close." It is which of these contacts were the same person twice, and which accounts hit something and went quiet instead. Neither shows up in a ticket count; both are cheap to spot once somebody is looking. Looking is a person's job, not a bot's.