Thursday, May 11, 2023

Would you ever charge for your support?

How much is your support worth?

Many support pros have an instinctive aversion to charging for customer service. I've felt it too, that emotional reaction to taking something which feels like genuine helpfulness and making it explicitly transactional. Particularly if some customers are treated better than others just because they pay.

In reality, if your customer is paying your company anything at all then the support you provide is already built into that cost (or at least it should be). It's just not a separate line item and so is invisible to both the customer and the support team.

But it's not invisible to your finance department. They'll have a model somewhere showing the exact cost of providing support and how that impacts on the profit margin of every customer. In his new article, Neil Smith talks through that calculation and makes an argument for offering paid support.

You may agree or disagree, and certainly for some businesses and some customer bases, paid support is not feasible. The implications of charging customers for support go beyond the direct financial impact. A customer who pays explicitly for service might have higher expectations for what support will do for them. Or they may feel more confident about the company in general, knowing they have someone they can reach out to.

Customers who do not pay for service may still understandably expect to receive help with their purchase. And the value of human service will be very different to some customers than to others.

Tiered support offerings might let each customer choose their appropriate level but might also result in customers with lowest-tier support payments making highest-tier support demands.

It is healthy and helpful to be open to new ways of structuring and delivering customer service and to make a considered decision. If you've been through a transition to paid support (successful or otherwise), I'd love to hear your stories.

Mat Patterson
Help Scout

Paid SaaS Support: How To Offer It and Why It Matters

Transitioning to a paid, profit-making support model can be tricky, but with a little thought and some simple calculations, you can directly prove your value to the business and enjoy increased influence and impact.