The cost of supporting clients is a huge overhead for WordPress professionals.
Support starts out difficult and gets harder as the business grows. “Quick” phone calls run far too long. Your team members tackle support tickets instead of projects. You sporadically put out fires because it’s easier to fix something now than it is to show someone else how to do it.
To top it off, you’re not billing as much as you should.
It’s a vicious cycle that’s hard to escape. What happens when the client needs help again? If you’re dealing with a team rather than a single person, what happens when the client adds new staff? What happens when you’ve moved on to other projects and don’t have the ability to be as responsive with support? What are the expectations?
We put ourselves here.
We love to boast about how WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world. It powers millions of sites. It’s used by big brands and small businesses alike. “Easy” is a huge selling point – no hassle! The vast community is another – tons of social proof! It’s a great narrative to sell our services.
And yes, WordPress is awesome, and yes, it’s easier to use than most of the other tools out there. But WordPress has a learning curve, however small. And sometimes stuff happens, despite the large community of developers and users. Themes and plugins break. Sites get hacked. Servers go down. It’s the reality of life on the web.
But that stuff disrupts the flow of our everything-is-fantastic sales pitch. So we don’t talk about it as much as we should.
We need to talk about these things.
You’ve probably got a line somewhere in your proposal boilerplate covering user training. Maybe you’re offering an hour or two to show your client how to use what you’ve built. Maybe you’ve got some coverage for a number of hours of follow-up emails and calls before you start the clock on billable time. And maybe, just maybe, you’ve got support tiers available for clients to buy X number of hours in bulk or subscribe to a recurring support plan at X price per month.
That’s a helpdesk model: sell time to clients in exchange for solving problems. No training, no education – just fix it.
A model that encourages clients to repeatedly call in with simple questions? It doesn’t translate well to the type of work most of us are delivering. Designers, developers, marketers, writers – these are the bread-and-butter roles of our WordPress ecosystem. Not IT services.
Let’s provide more training.
Support and training are two different beasts. Support relies on your direct involvement to solve a problem. Training, on the other hand, gives clients the skills to solve their own problems. We’re still an available resource if needed, but the simple stuff — writing a blog post, adding a user, embedding an image in a page — won’t require a phone call or remote desktop session.
Pull training out of your appendixes. Put it front-and-center. Beef it up. Set expectations. Acknowledge the learning curve and describe the training you’ll provide to mitigate that learning curve. Be clear and fair with your support terms. Make it a value-add.
Don’t itemize it separately, though – clients that need training shoot themselves in the foot if they try to haggle out of it. You’ll both suffer.
It’s not all bubblegum and roses. But it’s worth it.
Effective training requires more up-front investment than a single 60 minute crash-course or a PDF hand-off. It requires structure and planning, using different techniques to appeal to different learning styles. (Haven’t run classes or workshops before? Be prepared for some learning of your own!)
That up-front investment is rewarding and worth every cent. Better-quality training, supplemented with better-quality resources, means that you won’t spend as much time dealing with small problems down the road. The support issues you do tackle should end up being bigger, billable tasks that are worth your time.
Another benefit is that training can open up doors for new opportunities. If the growing popularity of WordPress workshops, meetups, and WordCamps have shown us anything, it’s that there is a massive demand from people looking to learn WordPress.
Could you start a WordPress class in your city? What about 1-on-1 training? Are there other things you can teach that would complement, or would be complemented by, WordPress?
Be creative. Start teaching. Build a better business. Give your clients more value. To make things even easier for you, try out our training plugin (now in beta). Interactive tutorials walk your users through tasks so you don’t have to.
To summarize…
- Support is a frustrating overhead cost of many WordPress professionals.
- Our current support models exacerbate the problem.
- We can reduce overhead by teaching clients, rather than just supporting them.
- Teaching creates opportunities – people want to learn!
- Download our plugin to lighten the support load even more.
- Do a better job of training and support will be less frustrating.
