Adding a platinum level support tier. What do you include in yours?

ClaireHernandez

We provide support for an on-premise software platform that is used by a variety of sectors and our customer range in size from SMB's to Tier 1 organizations.

We currently have a standard and premium offer with the primary difference being 24x7x365 availability for premium customers.

I'm revamping the existing two levels and adding a third tier that I anticipate being used by the institutions whose businesses use our product in mission critical functions. I want to add services to the third tier that could include a named support engineer, upgrade support etc etc.

I'd love to hear what's included in your support levels and the distribution of levels by your base. Ours hovers around 60% standard, 40% premium. I'm not sure what to expect for the new tier.

Thank you for your help and I'm happy to share what I end up with if anyone is interested.

[Deleted User]

@Claire Hernandez its great to hear you are adding a third tier of support. I can understand how you would want to see others current distributions to help predict how yours might be impacted by adding the third level. I have worked for other companies that have a very similar support tier for customers that rely heavily on the service for critical functions. I don't remember the exact distribution in percentage but I would imagine it would be mostly your premium numbers upgrading to that tier.

We have many great support exchange members like @Jaime Farinos and @Sumit Bhat that might be able to provide some great insight.

Meanwhile I was able to find some content centered around Creating Premium Service Offers and Building Compelling Premium Support Offers that are worth a look.

Jaime Farinos

24x7 is expected in anything beyond standard. The key differentiators are around:

SLAs: initial reaction time --> these are becoming quite standard, and the most premium offerings are striving to get the shortest possible reaction times for P1s, e.g. 15 minutes is turning into a new trend.

But in my opinion, the best advantages come from the ones below:

Additional services: assigning a TAM, providing context sensitive support staff (staff that are familiar with the environment of the customer), named support expert on demand, additional support services during special events (Black Friday, Weekend Upgrades, special sales weekends)

And even beyond:

Micro on demand services: performance optimization, go-live checks, migration checks, etc.

I hope this helps,

Jaime

SumitBhat

@Claire Hernandez we provide the following with our platinum services

• Customer Dedicated Support Representative
• Better Response and Synopsis Time ( This is a differentiator from our standard offering and SLA's are twice as fast as compared to our standard)
• Unlimited Free Online Training Courses ( This is also only available in our platinum offerings )
• Live Remote Assistance ad hoc
• Controlled Release Access ( Customers get access to Beta and early releases as well)

In addition to this one of the value proposition to make your platinum offering more attractive is to build in proactive insights such as trend analysis based on the problems/incidents reported and also offer preventive health checks based on these regular touchpoint calls with the dedicated support rep. to make customer successful.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Sumit

ClaireHernandez

Thank you, @Jaime Farinos and @Eddie Aguilar This is exactly the kind of information I'm looking for. If it's ok with you, can I ping you via DM if I have more questions? I promise not to bombard you :-)

[Deleted User]

https://exchange.tsia.com/discussion/comment/871#Comment_871

@Claire Hernandez Absolutely :)!