There has been a growing conversation about the role and practice of Customer Support in the SaaS sector over the past year as pressure to increase retention has increased. While AI has been a hot topic as a supposed “game-changer,” Jason Lemkin commented recently about the simplest competitive differentiator that SaaS companies can add: better Support. He defines this as providing phone support, answering chat in almost real time, and responding to emails in 5 minutes or less. Can your company afford to meet that challenge? Can you afford not to? To gather data about the first question, I’ve developed a short 20-question research form for Support execs (and CXO’s) to use in assessing their company’s Support operation. Click here to start. As with all of the research of the Customer Success Association, we will never provide any identifiable information about respondents to anyone, only aggregate data is used for reporting.
https://www.customersuccessassociation.com/the-saas-support-project-2025-research-survey/
The Reality of Customer Support
All software requires support. There is no escaping this basic reality. You are going to pay for supporting your product. The only question is, where do you start to address your product support burden, and how much you’re going to pay. The questions of the research form will help you to assess the effectiveness of your current support operation, and will also suggest possible improvements. If you want to discuss your answers afterward, be sure to enter your name and email address in the form, and then book an Office Hours session here.
In its essence, a Customer Support contact center is a knowledge inventory operation. There are access channels, various kinds of servicing actions, and knowledge repositories. Some of these knowledge resources are human, others are automated, but all require maintenance themselves to assure effectiveness. That hasn’t changed.
The Process of the Support center covers the usage of the various channels and repositories, the workflow/operation of the staff, and includes such aspects as the hours of operation, categories and volumes of service requests received, and the resolution of open items. Various metrics are used to measure the process and to evaluate its effectiveness.
Will Support become a competitive advantage for your company, as Jason Lemkin suggests is possible? The path to the answer starts with completing the research form, and then acting on your answers. If you have questions, let’s talk.
The SaaS & Support Project 2009-2010
The first look at SaaS Support was done in 2009-2010. Intended to explore the differences in the profession of Support between the traditional perpetual-license on-premise model and the rapidly developing subscription cloud-based strategy, the results showed that while some aspects remained the same, others had changed dramatically. The findings are covered in a Briefing paper available in The Customer Success Library here.
