Why India's Best Founders Still Answer Support Tickets

Picture this: you run a business worth $23 billion. You lead 14,000 people. Your calendar is booked out for months. And yet — every single month — you block out a few hours to sit down and personally read customer complaints.

No PR filter. No summarised report from your support team. Just you, a ticket queue, and real people telling you exactly what's broken.

This isn't hypothetical. It's Asha Sharma, CEO of Xbox, according to a recent Wall Street Journal profile. She spends hours every month going through support tickets herself — reading about broken consoles, buggy games, and frustrated players — before making decisions that affect millions of people.

If a CEO running a global gaming empire has time for this, what's really stopping you — a founder building a digital startup in India — from doing the same for your first 500 customers?

Here's why this one habit matters more than most growth hacks you've tried, and how to copy it starting this week.

The CEO who refuses to hide behind a dashboard

When Microsoft handed Asha Sharma the keys to its $23 billion Xbox business, she had never worked in gaming before. She inherited a division of 14,000 people running on a thin 3% profit margin, with revenue sliding and Game Pass subscriptions falling short of internal targets.

Instead of retreating into slide decks, Sharma went straight to the source. She reads real player complaints — about ecosystem glitches, specific games, or hardware friction — and lets them shape her calls.

Her motto for hard conversations is simple: "Clarity is kindness." When the news is difficult — and for Xbox in 2026, it has been, including layoffs and a major restructuring — she chooses straight talk over spin.

That same directness showed up publicly at Gamescom, where she told the BBC that the gaming industry "needs to start to innovate on affordability and efficiency," pointing to rising component costs, GPU shortages, and shifting player demographics as real, unglamorous problems no dashboard can fix. She also announced a disc-to-digital program covering 1,000 titles — a customer-first move aimed straight at the frustration of owning a shelf of discs but wanting a digital library.

None of this came from a market research report. It came from paying attention.

The psychology behind why this works

Here's what's actually happening when a founder does this — and why it beats almost any dashboard or NPS score.

It closes the empathy gap. As a business grows, leaders naturally drift from the ground truth. Feedback gets summarised and softened by the time it reaches a slide. Reading real complaints yourself closes that distance instantly — you feel the friction your customer feels, not a rounded-off version of it.

It builds authenticity bias. People trust leaders who are visibly willing to do the unglamorous work. When your team sees you replying to a support ticket late at night, standards quietly rise across the whole company. Nobody wants to cut a corner their founder wouldn't cut.

It sharpens decision-making. Psychologists call this the availability heuristic — we act more decisively on things that feel vivid and immediate. A founder who has personally read fifty raw complaints will make faster, sharper calls than one relying on a monthly summary slide.

None of this needs a big team or a big budget. It needs attention — the one resource every founder actually controls.

Why this matters even more for digital startups in India

India's startup story looks bigger than ever on paper. By mid-2026, the country had crossed 130+ unicorns and raised more than $8 billion in funding in the first half of the year alone. New unicorns keep getting minted, and headlines keep celebrating scale.

But scale hides a quieter problem: distance. As Indian digital startups — fintech apps, D2C brands, SaaS platforms, quick-commerce players — chase growth, founders get pulled further away from the one thing that built their first thousand customers: direct conversation.

In India, this shows up in a specific way. Most unhappy customers don't file a formal support ticket. They leave a one-star review, post a complaint on X, message your Instagram DM — or they just quietly uninstall the app and move to a competitor. There's no ticket to read, because they never trusted you enough to raise one.

That's exactly why the Xbox lesson matters more here, not less. In a market this competitive, where acquisition costs keep climbing and switching costs for users are close to zero, trust isn't a soft metric — it's your moat.

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The "clarity is kindness" rule for Indian founders

Sharma's phrase is worth pinning above your desk.

Indian startups go through the same hard moments Xbox is going through right now: tightening margins, funding pressure, layoffs, pricing changes, pivots. The instinct is often to soften bad news, delay it, or announce it quietly on a Friday evening.

But delayed clarity doesn't protect people — it only delays their trust in you. Teams sense when something is being hidden long before it's announced, and customers notice inconsistency faster than they notice honesty.

Being upfront early, even when the news isn't good, isn't weakness. It's the fastest way to keep your best people and your best customers through a hard season.

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6 ways to build a customer-first culture (copy this checklist)

You don't need Xbox's budget to build Xbox's habit. Here's a founder-sized version:

1. Block two hours a month, no exceptions. Put "read customer tickets" on your own calendar — not your support team's, yours.
2. Build your own "Player Voice" channel. A simple WhatsApp community, a monthly AMA, or a short pinned form can do what Xbox's Player Voice program does — give customers a direct line to you.
3. Practice clarity, not comfort. Before your next hard announcement, ask: am I making this clear, or just making it comfortable for myself to say?
4. Choose efficiency over vanity scale. Sharma's advice for the gaming industry — innovate on affordability and efficiency — applies just as much to Indian startups burning cash to hit growth targets that don't hold up.
5. Treat small complaints as data, not noise. The bug three customers mentioned this week is rarely just three customers' problem.
6. Communicate change before customers find out elsewhere. A price hike, a feature removal, a policy update — say it first, plainly, in your own words.

The bottom line

You won't build a $23 billion company by accident. But you can borrow the one habit that keeps a $23 billion CEO grounded — reading what your customers are actually telling you, in their own words, on a schedule you protect.

Founders who scale well don't get further from their customers as they grow. They just get more deliberate about staying close.

Start this month. Block the two hours. Read the tickets yourself.