Self-serve support versus a named success manager

The three levels of support

MMP support usually comes as some mix of three things.

The first two together are what people mean by self-serve support. The plan is built so that you can start, set up and fix most problems without talking to anyone, the same idea as a self-serve signup.

When self-serve support is enough

Self-serve support is enough when your setup is ordinary and someone on the team can read technical documentation. In practice that means:

• one app on iOS, Android or both, built with a common framework;
• a handful of large ad channels, each with a standard connection;
• standard events such as install, sign-up and purchase;
• no previous MMP to move away from.

For a team like this, paying for a named person would buy little.

When a named success manager earns the cost

A named contact is worth paying for when mistakes are expensive or the setup is unusual. Four situations come up most.

1. Migration. Moving from another MMP means running two SDKs, moving live links and matching numbers. A migration timeline has many steps where an experienced person prevents a lost week.
2. Many networks. Each extra ad network adds its own settings. Someone who has configured them before is faster than documentation.
3. Several apps or regions. Shared dashboards, permissions and agencies need planning that a ticket queue cannot give.
4. Nobody technical on the marketing side. If the developer's time is scarce, a named person fills the gap between marketing questions and SDK answers.

How support follows the plan

Support level usually follows price. An entry plan is cheap partly because nobody is assigned to it. Airbridge is one example of the pattern: its help centre and developer documentation are open on all plans, ticket-based support is included in Core, and a dedicated CSM with migration support is a Growth Plan item.^[1]

Read the support row as carefully as the feature rows. "Support included" can mean any of the three levels. Look for the words that tell them apart: "help centre", "ticket", "chat", "dedicated", "assigned", "response time".

What to do next

Ask each vendor three questions and keep the answers in writing. Who answers a ticket on this plan, and how fast? Is anyone assigned to my account, and from which plan? What help do I get during setup or migration, and is it included in the price?

Then weigh the answers against your own setup using the four situations above. If none applies, pick on plan contents and let support be a tiebreaker. If one applies, treat a named contact as a requirement and compare it like any other item on the list of capabilities outside an entry plan.