Boosting operational efficiency for support?

Hey everyone, just joined the forum! We recently launched our SaaS and things are actually going pretty well, getting some decent traction which is awesome. The flip side is that our support volume has absolutely skyrocketed, and honestly, our current customer support setup is becoming a huge bottleneck. It's mostly manual right now, which means our response times are getting slow, and we're spending a ton of time on repetitive tasks. This is seriously impacting our operational efficiency and, more importantly, customer satisfaction is starting to take a hit which we absolutely want to avoid. To tackle it, we did implement a basic ticketing system, drafted some canned responses for common questions, and even brought on a part-time virtual assistant to help manage the incoming queries. Unfortunately, the basic ticketing system isn't really cutting it for managing more complex issues or tracking things properly, the canned responses often feel too generic and need heavy customization anyway, and our VA is now getting totally overwhelmed herself. We're still feeling very reactive and disorganized, constantly playing catch-up instead of getting ahead. It's just not enough to truly improve things. So, I'm really looking for some practical advice, specific tools, or proven strategies that can genuinely improve our operational efficiency in customer support. How are you guys scaling your support without completely losing your minds or breaking the bank? Any tips on leveraging automation more effectively, designing better processes from the ground up, or even exploring different outsourcing models that actually work would be amazing. Help a brother out please, before we drown in support tickets!