Introducing paid support: messaging
Never mind controlling the narrative—just understand it
We’ve been talking for the last few weeks about converting your company’s technical support offering to a paid tier, or a series. First we talked about the prerequisites for doing so, then we went through the preparations for introducing paid support, including building different paid tiers and messaging to your own team in advance of the change. There’s just one thing left to do: tell the customer about it. That’s what we’re going to tackle this week. First, the good news: most of this isn’t your responsibility, or your team’s responsibility! Sales should be taking the lead on introducing paid support during the sales process, and Customer Success (CS) will be breaking the news to existing customers. But you’re still going to need to be involved in this process, to make sure the right things are being said and the right expectations are being set. That’s the bad news.
Messaging to new customers
Before your company’s Sales team rolls out paid support as a new contractual line item, it’s critical to ensure they’re ready to speak, accurately, about the various options and what they might mean in a real scenario. You should be coordinating with Sales leadership to ensure that, for each different paid support tier, your company’s BDRs (business development representatives) and AEs (account executives) can speak clearly and crisply about:
What customers can expect for support responsiveness
What, if any, SLA (service level agreement) is offered
What additional benefits are available, such as quarterly business reviews, ticket reviews, or product training
When Sales starts talking about paid support plans, there are two groups of customers to consider:
Completely new customers. These are the easy (well, easier) ones to handle: BDRs and AEs just introduce the new support options with relevant details, and are prepared to answer questions about these tiers like any other product feature.
Customers that are already in the sales process. These ones are trickier because the Sales team has already been talking up the excellent support your team provides which was, until now, included in the purchase of the product. This is where a bit of finesse is required. Once again, this isn’t your team’s problem to solve—it’s a Sales messaging issue—but you should be aware of how they’re choosing to address it. Perhaps they’ll offer to grandfather in a paid support option for a year, perhaps they’ll offer a discount, but be sure that you are kept in the loop to avoid surprises down the road.
Messaging to existing customers
Unlike the new customer situation above, existing customers are all going to require some careful communication. And also unlike new customers, these are folks who your team is already interacting with on a daily basis. While CS holds the ‘official’ responsibility for communicating the upcoming changes in support options, your team can’t expect to hide behind them. Your customer engineers may well be fielding pointed questions from annoyed customers while on a troubleshooting call or via support messages, and you need to make sure your team is both fully up to speed on what’s happening and why it’s happening to make sure they’re telling the same story that CS is taking pains to share with the customer via more formal channels.
Similarly to how Sales needs to carefully craft the messaging to prospective customers who may feel they’ve fallen victim to a bait-and-switch, CS is responsible for figuring out the transition plan for existing customers. Will they get a higher support tier grandfathered in until their next contract renewal? Will they receive a discount if they upgrade now? While none of this is strictly your responsibility to determine, it’s very important that you understand the decisions that CS and Sales make here so your team can be prepared to explain them to customers who ask. You can probably expect questions like:
So does this mean I’ll be getting slower responses to my tickets if I don’t pay up?
Why are you doing this?
And if your company didn’t take my advice from two weeks ago to make sure that your support was worth paying for before charging for it, you may well hear: This support isn’t good enough to pay for, and now you’re going to charge me for it?
This customer has probably already been sharing the very same feedback to the CSM (customer success manager), but the more irritated they are, the more likely it is that your support engineers will be hearing it from them too. If your engineers receive questions like this via support emails or chat messages, they should coordinate with the relevant CSM before responding. Ideally the CSM will respond instead of the support engineer, though that’s not always possible. But if customers start in with questions like this in a live troubleshooting call, your customer engineers won’t have the luxury of deflecting the questions—they’ll be on the spot and you need to make sure they’re prepared to answer those kinds of questions before they come up. Once CS leadership has determined how it’s going to handle the announcement of the new support tiers to existing customers, make sure your teams take some time for joint training. Lay out the plan to both teams, explain the thought process behind it, and leave plenty of time for questions.
Even though the process of communicating the new reality of paid support tiers is not your responsibility, that doesn’t mean that you and your team can just sit back. Make sure that you understand what Sales is telling prospects, involve yourself with crafting the CS messaging strategy to new customers, and make sure your team is fully prepared to field probing questions from customers to minimize the possibility of miscommunications.
Thanks for reading Andy's Support Notes 💻💥📝!