A buyer reaches contract stage with a licence cost agreed. Then the support options appear. Standard is included, business is fifteen percent of licence and enterprise is twenty-five percent.
Nobody mentioned this during the evaluation, and the budget that was approved does not include another quarter on top.
A worked example
Say an annual licence of 60,000.
Standard support, included. Email only, business hours, response within one working day, no named contact.
Business support at 15 percent, so 9,000. Extended hours, four hour response on high severity, a shared team and a quarterly review.
Enterprise support at 25 percent, so 15,000. Cover around the clock for critical issues, one hour response on the highest severity, a named account contact, escalation path and an annual review with the product team.
The difference between standard and enterprise is 15,000 a year, which is a quarter added to the licence. Against a system that stops a warehouse when it fails, that is cheap. Against an internal tool used by twelve people, it is not.
Publish the tiers with real numbers
Response times by severity, hours covered, channels, named contact and escalation. Buyers cannot evaluate a tier described as premium.
Be precise about response versus resolution
Almost every commitment is on response, not on fixing anything. Saying so plainly is more honest than allowing a buyer to assume otherwise and discover it during an outage.
Define severity properly
What counts as critical, high, medium and low, with examples. Disputes about support happen almost entirely over severity classification.
State the hours in the customer's terms
Around the clock, business hours in which region, and what happens at weekends and holidays. A global buyer needs to know whose working day applies.
Explain what escalation means
Who it reaches, how it is triggered and how quickly. An escalation path that exists on paper and cannot be invoked is worth nothing.
Be clear about what support does not cover
Configuration, training, custom development and anything beyond the product as supplied. Buyers expect support to include help using it, which is the cost described in the cost of answering the same how-to question daily.
Say what happens when a commitment is missed
An SLA without a consequence is a target. Setting out what a buyer receives when a response time is missed, whether that is a service credit, an escalation or simply a report, tells a security reviewer whether the commitment is real, and it is the question procurement asks after the technical team has finished.
Publish it during evaluation, not at contract
A support cost appearing at the end damages trust at exactly the wrong moment. Buyers who know early build it into the approved budget.
Explain what a named contact actually does
Onboarding, reviews, escalation and knowing the account. Vague descriptions of a dedicated manager are the least believed part of any enterprise proposal.
Implementation sits alongside
It is covered in implementation and training questions before enterprise signoff.
Security review runs in parallel
It is covered in security questionnaire requests before an enterprise demo.
Good documentation reduces the tier you need
Publishing answers reduces support volume, which is the argument in proactive support answering questions before customers ask.
Getting started
Publish your tiers with response times, severity definitions and what is excluded, then answer support questions during the evaluation at any hour. SpideyChat for software companies answers from your published pages, our plans are on the pricing page, and the chatbot ROI calculator works through the numbers.