Eliminated The Basic Plan
by Itay HaritanFinding myself spending too much time responding to support tickets.
A quick look at the analytics ensured what I had in mind already - most of the tickets are from the users on the basic plan ($4.95/m), and all could be solved if they would follow the instructions in the app.
I know it also means we should improve Onboarding, and we're planning that (it's on the backlog for a while 😅), but the time spent on clients paying so little is not something I want to keep doing.
From now the cheapest plan is the Premium ($9.95). I will share how it affected our revenue in a month.
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One thing that helped us a lot is publicizing the answers to these sorts of questions directly for users to see. Once you write the answer once, push it somewhere (we use our KB or github troubleshooting guide). Then just immediately refer the user there.
You want to still get these reports in, so that you know they are problems and you need to fundamentally fix the UX that causes these issues. Sometimes it is just faster to fix the UX and avoid the problem.
Your plans should match the value you deliver not the cost to provide them. If your cost is too high, then you need to reevaluate how you are pricing. If these things are a problem for the Basic plan, then they are definitely a problem on the higher plans, you just aren't seeing the metrics for that. Fixing these problems will provide the moth customer lifetime value.
This is exactly how we steal customers from the competitors of our products Authress & Standup & Prosper. We just provide better support, more streamlined UI, and better overall experience.
If you don't fix these problems, you'll lose customers because your brand will suffer, it will be known as confusing and bad. Make your onboarding simpler.
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For me, it has always been the same: the customers that pay the least (or get the product free) are the ones who require most support and have most complaints.
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OMG...almost always the case. Why most bigger companies charge more.
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Are all the tickets on arbitrary topics or do they follow a theme? Because if everyone is running into the same (or similar) issue, you might be onto something. Perhaps it would be worth investing in that particular area so that everyone will have a better user experience.
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There are always things to improve in the onboarding, but most of those tickets are about very obvious topics that could be solved by easily following the installation guide.
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