Here’s the problem

We could sum up all the cookie-cutter advice we’ve received in one simple sentence: if we’re selling a tool as inexpensive as Pause, it needs to be self-serve. We literally cannot afford to spend time on support.

And to that, we have one question: How else do you learn from your customers asynchronously? Hear us out. 

Here’s how we approached it

When most people think of support, they imagine having to do things for their customers that their product can’t. Yeah, it would be too expensive—even unaffordable—to offer that kind of support for a tool that only costs a dollar per user.

But what if you look at support from another angle? What if you see it as assistance for your product, not the customer? What if you use support as the product’s training wheels until it’s sophisticated enough to find its own balance?

That’s how we see support at Pause. We:

Look at support as a research tool

In the initial stages of building, you don’t know what does and doesn’t work and can’t knock on your customers’ door repeatedly, saying, “and one more completely generic question!” So how does using support as a research tool help?

When users reach out to you for support, it arms you with data about how your tool is being used. And that enables you to ask sharper questions that give you a better sense of direction than preliminary user research in a simulated environment can’t. 

This is pretty unconventional. Most product teams steer clear of offering support for inexpensive tools, but we see it as a way to conduct better research and improve our product by miles.

Leverage support as an unconventional marketing tool

Imagine you’ve got this Gloriously Amazing Feature (as a matter of fact, we have plenty of those). But you don’t see much traction. So you bite our nails and wonder: why hasn’t my customer discovered this Gloriously Amazing Feature that’s so obvious? Or worse, have they found it but don’t think it’s important? Maybe they don’t quite understand how it might help?

Support is the best way to get answers to all of these conundrums, and then some. Even better, you’re able to walk customers through some of our best features so they can hit the ground running. Finally, you’re able to communicate the value of your product to your customers without hounding them. 

Sure, it’s not traditional marketing. When you think of that, what probably comes to mind is “ways to acquire new customers”. Except that’s changing with the whole product-led growth movement. Now, promoting the true value of a product is a priority instead. And it’s a good time to get on that train. 

Use support as a retention tool 

Customers stay when their problems are solved, else they walk out the door. And support solves that, sure. But having a thin slice, $1/user tool means doing a better job at making it problem-free. So you wouldn’t need support in the first place, right?

Wrong. Dead wrong. 

For a lean piece of software like Pause, the job of support is not to resolve customer queries (and there will be a handful of those). It’s to bring those customers back to the tool who dropped off because the gap between their first tour of Pause, and the first time they used it to take time off, was too long.

With the help of Intercom, we gently nudge them back into the fray through emails and encourage them to take a break if they haven’t in a while.