Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, September 3, 2006:
Great Customer Service Should Always Come at a Premium
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.
A nice customer service story which demonstrates a great point to small ISV’s out there. You should pretty much always charge a premium for great customer service. In fact, it’s worth letting customers go away and come back as long as you can really live up to your end. I’ve already made dozens of decent size sales where people tried HelpSpot, then tried another help desk tool and finally came back to HelpSpot because they couldn’t get their questions answered, get timely support and so on.
This is a really important consideration when working out your maintenance pricing. If you’re providing top notch customer support make sure you’re charging for it. Don’t be tempted to simply match the competition or under cut them. People like to pay for the best as long as you really are.
Discussion
... which begs the question....
How to structure pricing for support.
We have tried a one-size-fits all approach in the past, with mixed resutls. We recently moves into a tiered support plan (online-only support (thru helpspot), online + phone support, and online + phone + free upgrades/updates). We also made the more expensive plans a higher priority grade (mainly for added-value appearance), and, very explicitly described our guarantees (or SLA), which we ALWAYS try to exceed.
What we can not figure out is how much to charge. For any given price point, some say we are too high, and some say we are too cheap.
Anybody have the magic formula?
Created by Anthony Dunleavy on 09.05.2006 6:15 pm
I'm looking for the formula as well!
Picking the exact price is definitely black magic territory. I tend to think that if more than a handful of customers are saying you're too cheap then you are.
People rarely say HelpSpot is too cheap on support so I think I'm about right for now. It's definitely one of those moving targets that you need to evaluate each year to see if you're still on point.
That said I'll probably be indirectly raising the price later this year by removing the 1 full year of free support. That was really an introductory offer which has stayed on too long. Nobody else out there does it. There won't be any effect on existing customers though, just people who buy after the change. I'll probably take it down to either 3 or 6 months of support included.
Created by Ian on 09.05.2006 7:13 pm