# Priority support as a revenue line

Priority support turns a servicing desk from a cost centre into a revenue line, by selling the travellers who most want a human a faster route to one.

Every servicing contact your agency handles costs money and earns nothing. The
traveller who calls three times about the same booking costs roughly three
times as much as the one who calls once, and neither of them pays a cent more
than the other. That is the arithmetic of a support desk, and it is why support
is the first thing squeezed when a quarter goes badly.

Priority support is a paid support tier sold after booking. The traveller who
most wants a human gets a faster route to one, and the desk that answers is
funded by the travellers who value it rather than absorbed across every booking
you take. It needs no supplier, which makes it the easiest post-booking product
to trial.

## A cost centre that customers keep asking to pay for

Most cost centres are invisible to the customer. This one is not. Travellers
ask for it by name, usually at the worst possible moment, and a meaningful
share of them would happily pay to skip the wait if anyone offered them the
choice.

The interesting move is not making support cheaper. It is changing which side
of the ledger it sits on. Once part of the desk is funded by the people who use
it most, the conversation inside your business changes shape. Staffing a busy
fortnight stops being a cost you have to defend and becomes a line with revenue
attached to it.

| The desk | Funded from fare margin | Funded by a paid tier |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Who pays for the call | Every traveller, including the ones who never call | The traveller who chose to |
| Who gets through first | Whoever happens to dial at a quiet hour | The traveller who asked for it |
| Staffing the peak weeks | A cost to be argued for | A line with revenue behind it |
| What the caller expects | Whatever they have inferred | Written down and paid for |

## Tiering is the whole design

There are only two decisions that matter, and both are yours rather than ours.

The first is what the standard tier keeps. It has to stay a service a
reasonable person is satisfied with. A paid tier stacked on top of a broken
free one is not a product, it is a toll, and travellers describe it that way
in reviews.

The second is what the paid tier adds. In practice it is some combination of a
faster pick-up, a longer window of hours, a named route back to the same person
rather than starting again, and a wider mandate for the agent on the other end.
The last one is underrated. Much of what frustrates a traveller is not the wait
but being handed to someone who cannot decide anything either.

**Insight:** Sell the response, not the result. Nobody can sell a fare rule they do not own,
and a paid tier that implies otherwise turns your best-intentioned travellers
into your angriest ones.

## What the traveller gets, stated honestly

A faster human, and one with more room to act. That is genuinely worth money to
someone whose connection has just fallen over, and it is worth nothing to
someone booking a flexible domestic hop for next Tuesday. Both of those facts
are useful. They tell you who the tier is for and stop you from pushing it at
everyone.

Being precise here also protects the price. A tier that promises speed and
delivers it can hold its value for years. A tier that gestures at better
outcomes gets tested against an airline's rules within a week, loses, and never
recovers.

## The easiest product in the catalogue to trial

Every other post-booking product carries a dependency. Something has to be
sourced, priced, contracted, or written back to a reservation. This one carries
none of that. The thing being sold is your own team's time, which you have
already hired, already trained, and are already paying for whether or not
anyone buys it.

That makes it an unusually clean experiment. Put it in the post-booking cart,
watch whether your travellers buy anything at all in that window, and you have
learned something real about your audience before you take on a product with a
third party behind it. If the answer is yes, [seat selection](/platform/seat-selection)
and [extra bags](/platform/extra-bags) are the obvious next lines, and the
[wider catalogue](/platform/catalogue) shows the shape of the rest.

If the answer is no, you have found that out for the price of a configuration
change rather than a contract, which is a result worth having too.

## Work out what your desk is already costing you

Bring your servicing contact volumes and we will map where a paid tier would sit and what it would need to promise.

[Talk to us](mailto:hello@departcart.com)

## Frequently asked questions

### Does a paid tier make the free tier worse?

Only if you let it. The standard tier has to remain a real service that a reasonable person is content with, otherwise you are not selling speed, you are selling relief from a problem you created. The paid tier should be better, not the only one that works.

### What should the paid tier actually promise?

Response, not result. Promise how quickly a human picks up and how far that human can go on your behalf. Never promise an outcome that belongs to an airline, because a fare rule is not yours to waive and a traveller who was told otherwise will hold you to it.

### Do we need a supplier or a contract to trial this?

No, and that is the point. What is being sold is your own team's time, which you already staff and already pay for. There is no content feed to source, no third party in the transaction, and nothing to write back to the reservation.

### Where does the offer appear?

In the same post-booking cart as everything else, on a page you already send travellers to after the booking is confirmed. One payment covers whatever they have chosen, in the currency you sell in.

### How do we size the tier before we launch it?

Look at what your desk already tells you. Count the servicing contacts per hundred bookings, and note which routes and which trip types generate them. The travellers who contact you twice are the ones who would have paid not to wait, and that is your first estimate.