How to Provide Support for Free Users Efficiently and Effectively
For most companies, the largest segment of users are those who are on a trial or using the free version. In fact, as your company grows, your free user count will likely grow even faster than your paying customers do. But, every support interaction costs a company something, so as your customer base grows, how can you handle support for a group that doesn’t pay you anything for your product?
Outside of the fact that it’s important to treat all customers with care, it’s good to offer quality support to free customers because it’s three to 14 times easier to sell to an existing customer than to acquire a new one. You’ve got a 60% to 70% chance of selling to an existing user, but your likelihood of selling to a brand new prospect averages between 5% and 20%. So, while it can be painful to spend money that you aren’t making back immediately, the fact of the matter is that you will see returns, eventually, if you stay the course.
There are a few ways to make it easier though, so both you and your company can get the best of both worlds.
Tech-Touch vs High-touch
Implementing tooling that makes high volume customer support a little bit easier can be a game changer. The main issue with supporting free or trial users is that they aren’t yet paying you anything, so as their numbers grow it actually becomes a financial burden on your company to provide them with support. Perhaps you’ve grown used to offering support over high-touch channels (like phone or chat) to most of your customers, but that can prove difficult to continue as you grow. You’ll either have too many customers to support, or it will grow too expensive to be financially viable.
Tech-touch, also known as self-service or low-touch support is an excellent way to provide your customers with support while keeping the cost down. Anything that is automated, recorded or doesn’t require one of your employees to be supervising it serves as tech-touch support, rather than the high-touch support that you may provide for paying customers. This could be, amongst many other things, something like:
- Proactive automated emails
- User onboarding with a guided in-product tool
- Documentation in your help center
- Webinars
When you use something like this, you provide your customers with a means to get help while not having to pay for the additional resources that would be needed if it were to be done by a human. This allows you to focus your team’s energy on higher value customers while still providing help and assistance to everyone.
Onboarding
According to Andrew Chen, you’ll lose 75% of your new users within the first week if you don’t offer onboarding. While having a team that helps customers directly is wonderful, it’s expensive, time-consuming, and sometimes extremely difficult, depending on the customer. Instead of having in-person onboarding for everyone, consider having a customer success team that offers slightly more high-touch onboarding for your higher paying customers, and then automated machine onboarding for the others.
Guiding your customers through your website or service with tooltips, hotspots or other prompts is a great way to give them an onboarding experience without devoting one of your team members to it entirely. It also serves a double purpose: if you guide customers through what they’re supposed to be doing and seeing, you’ll end up deflecting tickets. When you show and guide customers, they don’t need to ask how to do it: they already know. This means you get fewer tickets to the inbox and happier customers who feel confident about using your product.
Webinars & Documentation
Forrester says that 67% of app users prefer self-help support over contacting your support staff. That is a large percentage of customers who are looking for documentation, or other pieces of information that they can use to help themselves prior to reaching out to you. But, what if your documentation is difficult to navigate or even find?
Spend some of your support team’s time and energy on your documentation and other self-serve resources. For example, having a webinar library that is easy to search and find can be an amazing additional resource in tandem with your documentation. Or, for example, placing videos or gifs in your documentation for visual learners. Creating documentation that all kinds of people can use helps you assist more people in a scalable way. After all, for every person that is able to watch a video or read a doc to find the answer to their question, that is one extra ticket that your team doesn’t have to spend energy or time on.
Saved Replies
For the conversations that still do come your way, you can use resources such as saved replies or canned responses to get back to them. While it’s always good to give a human response to your customers, there are going to be some things, like feature request emails, for example, that can be at least partially automated. Find a few cases of tickets, or parts of conversations that your agents write over and over again every day, and create macros and a library of saved replies for them to be able to pick from. Ensure that you prompt them to modify as needed: there’s nothing worse than having a robotic response from a support agent that is so vague that you wonder if they even read your email. Ask your agents to add their own touches, flourishes, or sentences, where it makes sense to personalize so that the customers knows that their issue was actually heard.
SLAs & Priorities
While it might not be necessary for smaller companies, as you start to grow and scale your team, considering prioritization and SLAs can be a good idea. SLAs, or service level agreements, are commitments that you make to your customers regarding response time across the range of issues they might have. For example, your SLA for a critical situation for a high-paying customer would be shorter than the one you have for an everyday situation for a customer that doesn’t pay you at all. While some companies choose to expose these to customers (and they can be a valuable selling point for enterprise teams), some people keep them internal-only so as to help support team members know how to prioritize incoming tickets.
While scaling support for free users, you’ll likely put them lower on your SLA and priorities list, as they are not spending any money to merit the pressure to respond to them. If you choose to not do an SLA or prioritization strategy, everyone will receive the same level of support! That might be great for encouraging upgrades and referrals, but consider the cost of supporting every user equally. It’s an expensive strategy to adopt.
Conclusion
In an ideal world, every company would have the resources to staff a team to support all of their customers with the same level of energy, but that’s not possible. So, while it might be nice to treat everyone the same, for business it’s not practical or scalable. Putting SLAs and prioritizations in place can help your agents get a better understanding of who they should help first and why. Working on good documentation, onboarding, and a library of webinars can help customers resolve their issues before they come to you. This gives the customer an experience they’d prefer over having to wait for a response. If they do still end up needing human assistance, setting your agents up with a bunch of saved replies will allow them to respond quickly and efficiently before getting back to other tickets that may need more of their attention.
