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🎙️ The $5M Safety Net: How to Build Premier Support That Pays for Itself

🎙️ The $5M Safety Net: How to Build Premier Support That Pays for Itself

Live Chat with Jen Podcast Episode 9: Your Inside Look at Exceptional Customer Support Teams

Jen Weaver
April 15, 2025

CS leaders are responsible for making support work at scale—but your top-tier customers need more than what your queue-based model can give.

To skip the summary below and go straight to the source:

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🦸‍♂️ This podcast is sponsored by Supportman.io - Intercom AI quality review in Slack.

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"Human-only support."

I saw this in an ad for a B2B software service. Is support without AI agents "premium?" Every support team implementing AI agents is now offering a kind of tiered support - but how do you implement true premium support successfully?

In this episode of Live Chat with Jen Weaver, veteran support leader Miles Goldstein walks through how he built premium support programs from scratch—programs that protect revenue, reduce churn, and deepen customer trust.

He nailed premium support at multiple B2B SaaS companies, and he’s here to hand you the exact framework.

Here’s how Miles builds scalable premium support programs with buy-in across sales, CS, and product:

1️⃣ Confirm the Market Need

Start by identifying your top revenue customers. Would they pay for deeper support? What do they value most—faster response, named contacts, deeper product knowledge? Talk to them.

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“Normal support is an investigative chore. And with someone you're not familiar with, you've got to know—is it turned on? Is it plugged in? Are you seeing the green light? … Customers who spend a lot on your product or your service don't want to encounter that.”

2️⃣ Choose Your Staffing Model

Pick your approach:

Dedicated: One engineer per account = deep trust, low scale
Designated: A named pool = more coverage, less intimacy

Then hire accordingly. Look for soft skills first—you can teach the tech.

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"I’d rather teach tech than teach empathy.”

3️⃣ Update Your Systems

Make sure your help desk and CRM can:

Flag premier accounts
Route tickets to specific owners
Handle after-hours coverage
Trigger proactive alerts (Slack, email, etc.)

Without these workflows, your engineers will drown in manual triage.

4️⃣ Launch a Trial

Start with 3–5 high-value customers. Partner with CSMs and Sales. Set expectations. Prove value. Use this as a proof-of-concept before scaling.

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“At the end of the day, for as proactive and whatever as Premier Support tries to be, it comes back to break-fix, right? If it's broken, come to support. If it's strategic, go to the CSM. And those are overly simplistic views of things—but useful ones.”

The Impact:

Miles’ last team had 98% CSAT—compared to the company’s average in the high 80s. That’s the power of relationship-driven support.

Better yet? Once sales saw what premium support could do, they started asking for it. It became a retention driver, a revenue lever, and a competitive differentiator.

💬 We’d love to hear your thoughts! Reply to this email or drop us a comment on LinkedIn.

See you next time,

Jen Weaver
Host of Live Chat with Jen Weaver

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