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Loading up this thread I knew this kind of response would be here. Like, I was willing to bet money on it.

Examples of support people worth $200k+ are abundant, and the business case is the same every time. When you do the work to place a monetary value on customers and their retention your support personnel costs relative to that are easy to justify. When a support person is preventing churn of X number of customers worth $Y dollars a year the math becomes trivial.

The (American) tech industry is so accustomed to massive scale and lack of competition that the notion of giving a damn about customer retention has risen to the level of a cultural, not economic, problem.