<story><title>Why cheap customers cost more</title><url>http://sachagreif.com/why-cheap-customers-cost-more/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>patio11</author><text>For Appointment Reminder, approximate per-account customer support incidents per month.  I&apos;ve taken the liberty of scaling them to X, where X represents the number for the highest publicly available account plan.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Personal ($9): 7X
  Professional ($29): 4X
  Small Business ($79): 3X
  Office ($199): X
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
The character of the questions is also different at the various plan levels.  Most common question for Office: &quot;What&apos;s the timeframe on integrating this with ...&quot; followed by &quot;Our $TITLE would like a report saying $NEEDS, can you make that happen?&quot;  Most common question for Personal: &quot;How do I schedule appointments?&quot; followed by &quot;The system is working exactly the way it says it does on the screen.  Can you please tell me why that is happening?  I thought it would work in a way completely opposite to the way described on the screen.  It would be convenient if you could fix that.  No, I didn&apos;t read the &apos;If you want this to work in the opposite fashion...&apos; text on the screen to change that setting, I have more important things to do than worry about computers.&quot;&lt;p&gt;Your mileage may vary.  If I were doing the math based on phone calls waking me up in the middle of the night, the numbers get skewed due to one pathological customer in the $29 bucket, who has literally called me more than every other customer combined.&lt;p&gt;P.S. I have fairly exact privileged information regarding this question at a handful of companies and anecdotal evidence from dozens of my software buddies.  It is our universal experience that the support load for cheap/free customers crushes the support load for the higher plans, both on an absolute and per-customer basis.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>speleding</author><text>I noticed a similar pattern in my business (I run an appointment scheduling web site). An additional insight was that when you provide a quick reply to the &quot;dummies&quot; they will start asking even more questions instead of trying to find stuff out themselves.&lt;p&gt;Here&apos;s what works for me: on the second &quot;silly&quot; support request they send I put them in a &quot;cool down&quot; queue that gets answered a day later. If they keep asking simple questions they move into the two day wait queue. (Obviously, this only works if your support is by email.)&lt;p&gt;I worked as a consultant for a company once where they would go even one step further and would actively encourage customers that used too much customer support to switch to another provider. The trick is doing this in such a way that the customer does not realize he&apos;s being told to leave lest you get a bad reputation. I&apos;m not going to divulge all my trade secrets here, but I&apos;ve found a way to do something similar for my business, perhaps you can think of one for yours too.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why cheap customers cost more</title><url>http://sachagreif.com/why-cheap-customers-cost-more/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>patio11</author><text>For Appointment Reminder, approximate per-account customer support incidents per month.  I&apos;ve taken the liberty of scaling them to X, where X represents the number for the highest publicly available account plan.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Personal ($9): 7X
  Professional ($29): 4X
  Small Business ($79): 3X
  Office ($199): X
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
The character of the questions is also different at the various plan levels.  Most common question for Office: &quot;What&apos;s the timeframe on integrating this with ...&quot; followed by &quot;Our $TITLE would like a report saying $NEEDS, can you make that happen?&quot;  Most common question for Personal: &quot;How do I schedule appointments?&quot; followed by &quot;The system is working exactly the way it says it does on the screen.  Can you please tell me why that is happening?  I thought it would work in a way completely opposite to the way described on the screen.  It would be convenient if you could fix that.  No, I didn&apos;t read the &apos;If you want this to work in the opposite fashion...&apos; text on the screen to change that setting, I have more important things to do than worry about computers.&quot;&lt;p&gt;Your mileage may vary.  If I were doing the math based on phone calls waking me up in the middle of the night, the numbers get skewed due to one pathological customer in the $29 bucket, who has literally called me more than every other customer combined.&lt;p&gt;P.S. I have fairly exact privileged information regarding this question at a handful of companies and anecdotal evidence from dozens of my software buddies.  It is our universal experience that the support load for cheap/free customers crushes the support load for the higher plans, both on an absolute and per-customer basis.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>monkeymace</author><text>In writing a comment on Sacha&apos;s blog, I came to the idea of deciding to offer a simple response to support incidents coming from the lowest paying tier. I wonder if anyone has done this and if you think it would work, or be a smart move?&lt;p&gt;Create a canned automatic response to someone submitting a request/support email that goes something like this.&lt;p&gt;&quot;We have worked really hard to make this app/service as easy and intuitive to use as possible. On top of that we decided to price it very low to make it even easier and affordable for people to take advantage of. 80% of our paying customers never contact us for help or support. We honestly just don&apos;t have the time or resources available to explain how to use our service. If our help section and FAQs can&apos;t fix your problem, then you probably shouldn&apos;t be using this app, or we&apos;re gonna have to ask you to pay for support.&lt;p&gt;Option 1: Click here and we will immediately cancel your account and refund you.&lt;p&gt;Option 2: Click here to upgrade your account for support&lt;p&gt;Option 3: Figure it out!&lt;p&gt;Have a Nice Day!&quot;&lt;p&gt;Or something like that. Perhaps it can written to be more friendly or in a more suitable tone. But you get the idea.</text></comment>