Deeper insights into support
Time and time again support is looked at as a cost center. Yet, with the customer success movement and phenomenal support software, that view is waning and data suggests you may just have a profit center brewing amongst your support and success teams.
To answer Nick’s question we looked at the data from over six hundred thousand consumers and nearly five thousand companies. Here’s what we found.
No obligation ask: Click to share on LinkedIn and thank Nick for prompting this research (you can edit before sharing).
Good support drives willingness to pay
First up, to get a direct answer out of the way, good support absolutely increases the willingness to pay and retention amongst customers.
We coded respondents perception of a company’s support before measuring their willingness to pay. Those customers who perceived a company’s support positively had between a 12% and 36% higher willingness to pay than the median. Those on the negative perception side had 8 to 16% lower willingness to pay. Neutral respondents were willing to pay about 5-10% less than the median. This indicates that bad support isn’t taking away from willingness to pay as much as good support is driving willingness to pay - padding our profit center argument.
Retention also impacted by support
We see a similar relationship on the retention side, as those folks on the positive perception of support have roughly 6 to 15% better net retention and those customers with poor perceptions of support seeing about 8 to 11% worse retention.
Premium support is becoming more important to buyers
Digging further, premium support has traditionally scored highly as an add-on - meaning it’s not being valued by everyone, but those individuals who value premium support are willing to pay a good amount for it. Over time though, we’re seeing this view change, where support is still a powerful add-on, but is quickly creeping into being an actual differentiable or core feature - one where the majority of folks actually want premium support and are either just expecting it or are still willing to pay for it.
As more and more features get built and the function aspect of software becomes less differentiable, these formerly intangible pieces of your product - design, brand, and even support - will continue to become more and more important.
That's all for this week. We look forward to bringing you more data and insights about the subscription economy next week.
