Consumer Support Needs Drive Purchasing Decisions

Today’s consumers use more complex technology products more often than ever before, and that trend is likely to continue. Managing these complex products and environments can be a daunting task to average consumers. These consumers depend on vendor support to get full value from the products and services they buy. Good support has become a key component of branding for leading consumer technology companies.

The SSPA 2005 Support Demand Consumer Series survey indicates that 53% of consumers believe support is important enough to be a top three criterion for their purchasing decisions. Another 26% use it as a criterion, but not in the top three. The more dynamic and new a product category is, the more important support is to consumers. For example, support is seen as more important for laptops than for desktops. If a product class is perceived to be failure-prone, but necessary, support becomes even more important.

The price of a product is not a determinant of consumer expectations for support quality of the product purchased. Vendors who sell low-ticket items or focus on price as a key differentiator, face the same consumer expectations for high quality technical support as those vendors that sell high-priced products. In fact, 75% of the survey participants expect the same level of support regardless of the price of the product being purchased.

Given the high importance and expectations of support, you might think consumers would use independent research and industry ratings to evaluate the quality of support of different vendors. That is not the case. The top three attributes considered while evaluating the quality of support are past personal experience, price, and the terms of extended warranty and 24x7 support offerings.

The SSPA 2005 Support Demand Series is a joint research effort by the Service & Support Professionals Association (SSPA) and Tech Strategy Partners (TSP). To find out more about the series, contact John South, SSPA Director of Membership Development, jsouth@thesspa.com or 858-674-5491.