CHAPTER 11 Supporting Your Product
There are, of course, some people who are impossible to please. As long
as they are a rarity rather than the norm, it is likely the problem is with
them — not you or your product. My advice is to remain objective at all
times, treating the difficult customer in the same way as any other custom-
er, and working to solve their problem.Support Pricing Models
In the previous section I mentioned that we provide free and unlimited
support at Perch. Support always incurs a cost in terms of your or your em-
ployees’ time. How you recoup that cost will depend on the pricing model
you decide on. You will find models that range from free support included
with purchase, support subscriptions, and per incident models, where you
pay each time you place a support request.
We are often asked why we decided on offering free and unlimited
support, rather than a paid support subscription or per incident support.
An important reason for not choosing a pay per incident model or a sub-
scription is that we feel that we should not benefit from people needing
support. Not every support request is related to a failing in the product or
documentation, but by offering free support we place the onus on us to
make sure people have a great experience.
As I have already shown, the customer who expects us to help build
their website one ticket at a time is very rare. Making people pay for support
essentially penalizes everyone, because a few people need a lot of help.
We also wanted our product to fit easily into the sales process for
the average Web design job. Typically, designers quote on a project basis,
including any costs for scripts and services used. If they then needed help
and had to pay for that help, they might not be able to pass that cost back to
their client.
We have always wanted our pricing to be fair and easy to understand.
So when we decided on the price of Perch, we had to work out how much
we needed to make to be able to afford to support it as well as develop it.
With a new product that was obviously a bit of a guess, but if you want to