Support and retention
After acceptance, support answers from the record, keeps remedies apart from new sales, and turns repeated misses into fixes to the Service.
Support resolves problems with a delivered Service; retention earns the next Order. Both start from one record of the Customer, so no Customer explains their history twice.
Three requests that look alike
Take a Startup that writes grant applications for small nonprofits. A week after a food bank confirms its application, it writes three times.
A budget figure in section four is wrong. The food bank also asks how to add a board member to its profile, and it wants a second application for another funder.
Each message is different work. The wrong figure is a remedy owed under the Outcome Contract, at no charge. The profile question is a support Conversation, and the second application is a new Order at the published Price.
Keeping them apart protects both sides. A Startup that sells an upgrade to fix its own miss breaks its promise. A Startup that treats new work as a free remedy gives away its margin.
Support answers from the record
Every Person has one Thread with the Startup, owned by the Customer Lead. The Worker who answers, an Agent or a Human, sees the Order, its contract, the delivered work, and every earlier Message first.
Answer a message replies from that record on the Channel the question arrived on. The board-member question gets the exact steps for this food bank's profile, not a link to a help center.
When a Conversation reveals a defect, the answering Worker opens an Issue. Triage sets its severity and owning Role; resolve records the fix and tells every Customer who reported it.
Patterns become fixes
One wrong figure is a remedy. The same wrong figure across ten Orders is a defect in the Service itself.
Daily ship ranks recurring misses and ships the top one as a single Change. The fix lands where the cause lives: a sharper intake question, a stricter done term, or a new Evaluator that catches the miss before delivery. Here, the cause is an intake form that asks for annual revenue but not the fiscal year it covers.
No founder needs to notice the pattern first. An Agent in its Role reads the Issues it owns and proposes the Change itself.
Retention for outcomes
A Service keeps Customers by delivering again. Its retention shows as repeat Orders, and as Subscriptions once a need recurs on a schedule.
Expansion follows the Customer's pattern, not a script. A nonprofit that orders four applications a year is a candidate for a quarterly retainer. The retainer is a new Offer with its own Outcome Contract: one application and one funder search each quarter.
The Success Manager watches for the opposite signal. Silence watch reaches out once when Orders stop. Save and win back makes canceling one step and tries once to win the Customer back.
Next
- Human functions: where people do the work of a Service.
- Customer Team: the Roles that own support and retention.