Product and service review websites like Comparitech strive to help improve the B2B software purchasing process by offering unbiased vendor analyses. Some product review websites utilize a crowd-sourced data collection model that relies on user-submitted reviews and scoring across various categories. That data is then averaged to create a score for those software vendors on multiple categories.
Alternatively, Comparitech takes a more hands-on approach to product and software reviews. We research the top products and vendors that solve specific business needs and create detailed, human-written reviews for each product we list.
This approach already makes us distinct from most software directory websites. Our custom SupportScore furthers that approach by offering the most comprehensive answer to a critical buyer need: Customer Service and Product Support.
By analyzing several external data signals commonly associated with effective software and product support, Comparitech’s SupportScore helps offer guidance to B2B software buyers who need to enter into discovery calls, demos, and contract negotiations with more informed data at hand.
Top 5 B2B Buyer Needs and Comparitech’s SupportScore Advantage
During the research process, B2B buyers have several critical needs that potential vendors must meet or answer before customers agree to sign a contract. While many buyer needs will be specific to niche problems they’re trying to solve, there are 5 key areas that are true for almost every buyer, regardless of the problem and software category:
- Security and Compliance: Will the software meet data protection and regulatory compliance requirements?
- Scalability and Performance: Can the software grow with the company by flexibly allowing for more users over time?
- Integration Capabilities: Does the software offer seamless connection with existing systems?
- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Return on Investment (ROI): What is the total cost of ownership, and will the company receive an acceptable ROI from using that vendor?
Customer Experience and Product Support: Easily accessible customer service and customer success teams that provide a strong level of support for quick issue resolution.
In most cases, B2B buyers must rely on vendors to tell them the truth or hope that aggregated customer feedback and scores on directory sites are accurate.
- Unfortunately, many software sales representatives will omit information or lie about the product or company’s capabilities to land a sale.
- If you don’t ask enough questions in the vetting process, you may find out later that the product was far more limited than you’d hoped.
Comparitech’s SupportScore was designed to provide far more robust and trustworthy data signaling around that last area that is far too often overlooked: Customer Experience and Product Support.
While this data is marginally available on product directory sites that aggregate user-submitted reviews and scores, these scores are not always accurate and typically lack context.
Additionally, many of these sites openly allow companies to incentivize reviewers, resulting in significant selection bias as this ultimately and artificially increases the number of positive reviews, skewing all of the scores.
Comparitech SupportScore: How It Works and Its Advantages
Comparitech’s SupportScore offers a key differentiator by delivering a stronger, unbiased, and data-backed approach to help offer guidance around whether a B2B buyer will experience the customer and product support they need from a software vendor.
Instead of relying on user-generated scores that can be unfairly biased toward a company, Comparitech’s SupportScore analyzes key external signal data from 5 areas that are strongly associated with having an impact on customer experience and product support:
Number of employees
Companies with more employees are more likely to have staff dedicated to customer and product support. This will include, but is not limited to, customer product implementation and enablement specialists, customer success teams, product development teams focused on adding new features, and dedicated product support teams who focus on identifying and fixing bugs and other issues. While having more employees is not a guarantee that a company will have prioritized hiring in these areas, they’re more likely to, making it a key signal.
Annual revenue or investor funding
Companies that are generating revenue or attracting investor funding are far more likely to have the cash available to hire team members focused on product and customer support. They’ll also have the resources needed to take other corporate actions that improve their product for customers, such as strategic mergers and acquisitions and marketing to attract more customers and grow revenue. Revenue and/or funding influences all aspects of the business, especially product and customer support, making it a key signal.
Existence of customer support and/or customer success employees
The existence of customer support and customer success staff is an indicator that the company has not only the money to support dedicated support teams but also has prioritized this as a company policy instead of just relying on self-service documentation. If a software provider has staff working in these roles, whether presently or actively hiring for those roles, it’s a key signal.
Self-service support documentation
Companies that have self-service support documentation show that they’re organized enough to help support their product and knowledgeable enough about implementation and support to put together this type of documentation for customers. There are some caveats, as some vendors will use this type of documentation in place, having larger and more dedicated customer success teams. Still, it shows that they have the experience, resources, and talent available to create technical guides and support documents, making it a key signal.
Employee job satisfaction
Decades of research on how employee job satisfaction impacts performance points to one answer: Happy employees create better outcomes for the business in terms of productivity, customer satisfaction, and customer retention. Higher employee retention rates are a natural outflow of positive job satisfaction, making existing staff more knowledgeable and helpful to customers and making them happier and more willing to provide exceptional support.
As Glassdoor researchers and economists Andrew Chamberlian and Daniel Zhao explained in a 2019 Harvard Business Review article:
“We found that each one-star improvement in a company’s Glassdoor rating corresponds to a 1.3-point out of 100 improvement in customer satisfaction scores — a statistically significant impact, which was more than twice as large in industries where employees interact closely and frequently with customers.
This finding is nearly identical to another recent study on the same topic, using similar data. Taken together, this growing body of research offers a powerful lesson to CEOs: If you want to build a customer-first strategy, building high employee morale is a necessary (though not sufficient) precondition.”
Consequently, our calculation utilizes Glassdoor review scores to generate a score in this category. However, because Glassdoor reviews can be biased, and there’s notable inconsistency in data quality that varies from company to company (e.g., a company with two reviews will not have as robust a dataset as one with 100 reviews), we consider this a key signal that’s weighted much lower within our SupportScore calculation.
How to Read and Interpret Our SupportScores
Comparitech assesses each B2B software vendor on the likelihood that it will be able to effectively provide high-quality product implementation, as well as ongoing customer support and product support.
While user experiences may vary, this analysis factors in the five key signals mentioned above that can influence a vendor’s ability to support its products and customers. Each vendor is different, so we recommend you utilize this data in your conversations with each vendor you have shortlisted.
These data points are calculated on a 0-100 scale, with variable weights based on category importance, and then averaged to produce an overall vendor score. Click on each image to see each vendor’s scores.
What you’ll see in the SupportScore
Each SupportScore is created through independent research and verified by Comparitech’s editors. That data is then used to generate a chart that helps buyers visualize how a company scores on that metric.
Each category’s is scored on a 0-100 scale. The final support score is then given as a weighted average of those scores. The weighted average is given due to some categories likely having a greater overall impact on a B2B software vendor’s ability to provide adequate customer and product support.
What you won’t see
Comparitech does not use vendor SupportScores to determine whether a product is good or bad. In fact, none of the products we review are given a score regarding their usefulness. This is for two important reasons:
1. Products are never one-size-fits-all. A software that works for your company may not work for everyone company. Taking that into account, Comparitech only looks at the product’s capabilities without making a judgement call. While we do select an Editor’s Choice of all the products on our list, that’s typically due to it meeting most of the criteria we look at.
2. Products can change and improve rapidly. Most software companies regularly work to improve their products. As such, the information we provide today may change before we have an opportunity to update it. That being the case, we don’t make declarative statements on any product.
How to Use Our SupportScore
The best way to use Comparitech’s SupportScore is data for vendor discussions and negotiations. Our SupportScore and reviews in general are designed to help you not only find the right vendors, but come with research in hand that you can use when you engage with vendors in discovery calls, demos, and contract negotiations. The more information you have as a buyer, the better the outcome will be on your selection and buying process.
Utilize our SupportScore to help keep vendors honest about their customer experience and product support capabilities. Any good vendor should have qualifiable answers that help you understand how each key signal we’ve identified may positively or negatively impact its ability to provide you with the level of service you want.
