Value of digital support portal as a component of services offer
I'm looking for an industry standard way to establish the value of a digital support (support portal) as a component of a broader services offer. Since offer as a whole, including support delivery, replacement parts, access to software, digital support portal, etc., is sold as a package, how can the value of each component be determined?
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@Jaime Farinos @Samir Bhargava, any insights for Dale?
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Hi Dale - One thing I have learned is that Support offering, and delivery is very specific to the business (what is the business offering and how is it delivered) and industry in which business operates in. I am not aware of any industry standard way to value each component in a support offering (except to ask directly in a survey) but can give you some insight from the businesses I have been mainly involved with.
In our case (industrial software company) the value prop for support lies in two main things — Technical Support and Software Maintenance. One making sure Customers continue to get expected value from the on-going operations, and the other making sure they keep up to date so the value increases with changes in business conditions and/or infrastructure.
The support portal plays a very useful role in both of them. In our case, the three main areas customers visit are:
- Case Management — for seeking support, tracking progress and getting a resolution (value: ease of access)
- Knowledge Management — for access to knowledge base for self service (value: case deflection)
- Product Downloads — for downloads of latest version and releases (value: bug fixes and enhancements)
Of course, support portal can also maintain and provide access to a lot of other important and required documentation and information making it easier for customers to use the product and hopefully, expand their footprint of your offerings.
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Thank you Samir! Those are 3 of the five "value use cases" for support that we're using for the value model. The other two are (1) Getting access to "How to" instructions for managing our products (HW products), and (2) checking support level and status (active, almost expired, expired). We have identified these, and the ones you listed, as the top five reasons customers purchase basic support.
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