The assistance and service provided to customers before, during, and after purchasing and using a product or service.
Customer Service
In our reference library
Customer support is the assistance a vendor provides before, during, and after purchase, and its quality directly affects the value buyers extract from software. Support quality matters most during deployment, migration, and incidents, when answers arrive under time pressure. Buyers should evaluate response times, available channels, escalation paths, and whether support includes the customizations and integrations the organization uses, since many vendors restrict help for non-standard setups. Contract terms define obligations: response SLAs, support hours, and included expertise should match the operation's criticality. Support quality is also visible in documentation, community activity, and product feedback loops, which indicate how quickly vendor teams resolve underlying issues. Vendors with strong support reduce the total cost of ownership by cutting time-to-resolution and enabling self-service. Organizations should treat support experience, not just uptime, as part of their risk assessment for critical software.