A close look at the numbers behind one team's first 90 days with document Q&A — what moved, what didn't, and what surprised us.
DR
Daniel Reyes
Support Lead · Lumen
We measured 90 days of support tickets at a 40-person SaaS company before and after rolling out source-backed Q&A over their help center and internal runbooks. Resolution time fell 43%. Here's the honest breakdown of where the time went.
What actually moved
First-response time: down 61% — reps stopped hunting for the right article.
Escalations to engineering: down 28% — runbook answers came with citations.
Repeat questions: down 52% — macros now embed the sourced answer.
What didn't move
Complex, multi-system bugs stayed exactly the same length — as they should. Q&A doesn't fix engineering problems; it removes the search tax from every other ticket. That distinction kept expectations realistic and the rollout boring.
“The best outcome was cultural: reps started pasting citations into tickets, and customers started trusting the answers.”