When teams ask me how to choose a support platform, the first thing I tell them is: don’t judge a vendor on feature checklists alone. The real decision-maker is the total cost of ownership (TCO) — and the only reliable way to estimate that is by running a vendor trial designed specifically to surface migration, customisation, and training costs. I’ve run dozens of trials for SaaS support stacks, and the difference between a trial that validates a platform and one that gives you false confidence usually comes down to the questions you ask before, during, and after the pilot.
Define the TCO questions before engaging vendors
Start with clarity. A trial’s objective isn’t simply “see if the software works.” It’s to answer: How much will it cost to get our current workflows, data, and team up and running to a production standard? That means interrogating three cost domains from day one:
- Migration — data export/import, ETL, historical ticket continuity, and downtime risk.
- Customisation — workflows, integrations, UI/UX tailoring, automations, and any professional services required.
- Training & adoption — initial onboarding, ongoing coaching, admin training, and change management efforts.
Turn each domain into concrete questions for the vendor and for your internal stakeholders. For example: What formats can you import from? Who owns data mapping? What integration points are prebuilt versus needing middleware? How many admin-hours are typical to reach our configuration state?
Design the trial as a realistic, time-boxed experiment
A common mistake is running “sandbox” pilots that never mirror production complexity. I now insist that every trial includes a slice of real-world complexity: a representative dataset, one or two critical integrations, and end-user scenarios that drive the most effort in production.
- Time-box it — 4–8 weeks is often enough; shorter trials miss migration pain, longer trials waste resources.
- Scope it — pick 10–20% of your volumes or one business-critical queue (billing, escalations) to mirror real load and complexity.
- Use real data — anonymised historical tickets expose import issues, field mismatches, and search performance problems.
- Include integrations — CRM, billing, product telemetry, and SSO should be part of the pilot if they’ll exist in production.
Measure what matters: metrics to capture during the pilot
Collect both quantitative and qualitative data. I recommend tracking these metrics during your trial to approximate TCO:
- Migration metrics: hours spent on mapping, number of manual corrections, data loss incidents, and time to fully restore searchable history.
- Customisation metrics: developer/integration hours, number of custom fields/actions, vendor professional services hours, and time to implement key workflows.
- Training & adoption metrics: hours of admin training, number of agents trained, time-to-first-response for newly trained agents, support tickets opened about the product, and self-service usage.
- Operational impact: any change in average handle time, first contact resolution, backlog growth during migration, and agent satisfaction (NPS or internal survey).
Record vendor commitments (SLA, response times for professional services, documentation quality) as qualitative inputs that affect hidden costs later.
Build a simple TCO model and populate it during the trial
I always create a one-page TCO template that sums expected costs over a 3-year window. Below is a compact table you can copy into a spreadsheet; populate it with values observed during the trial and vendor quotes.
| Cost category | Trial observed / vendor quoted | Estimated hours / units | Unit cost | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Migration: data mapping & import | e.g. 40 manual corrections | e.g. 80 hours | £/hour | |||
| Customisation: workflows & dev | e.g. 3 integrations needed | e.g. 120 hours | £/hour | |||
| Vendor professional services | vendor estimate | days | £/day | |||
| Training & change management | e.g. 2 trainers x 3 days | e.g. 48 hours | £/hour or fixed | |||
| Subscription & licensing | vendor quote | seats / modules | £/seat/month | |||
| Ongoing admin & maintenance | observed | hours/month | £/hour |
Populate each cell with both trial-observed effort and vendor-provided estimates. I then run a sensitivity analysis — what if migration takes 25% longer? What if we need twice the vendor professional services? Those scenarios reveal hidden risk and help procurement negotiate fixed-price migration blocks or capped professional services.
Test vendor promises, not just demos
Demos are polished. Trials reveal gaps. Ask the vendor to commit to trial success criteria in writing: data import timeline, list of integrations they’ll enable, and time to respond to support requests during the pilot. If a vendor offers to do a “free migration” in the demo, make sure that offer applies to the pilot scope and ask for a written statement of the deliverables included.
I also validate the vendor’s ecosystem: community support quality, available third-party implementors (systems integrators), and partner marketplace. Platforms like Zendesk, Salesforce, Freshdesk, and HubSpot all have rich partner ecosystems — but the quality and pricing of partners varies widely regionally.
Include internal stakeholders and a governance cadence
Trials fail when they’re run in isolation by a single team. Bring product, engineering, security, operations, and a few agents into the pilot. Assign a trial owner (not the vendor) who runs a weekly governance checkpoint and tracks the trial checklist. I use a simple RACI: who’s responsible for migration tasks, who must sign off on data validation, and who approves go/no-go for production.
Negotiate with evidence
When negotiation time arrives, bring your trial artefacts: the migration logs, customisation time sheets, training feedback, and the populated TCO model. Use those to negotiate caps on professional services, staged payment terms tied to migration milestones, and a realistic timeline for ramping to full production. Don’t accept vague “success” guarantees; ask for service credits or fixed-fee packages for migration work where possible.
What to watch out for — common traps
- Undisclosed ecosystem costs: connectors, middleware (MuleSoft, Workato), or third-party apps can add substantial recurring spend.
- Underestimated admin load: platforms that look low-touch often require a named admin spending several days per week once customised.
- Training tail: initial training is only the start. Factor in ongoing coaching, refresher sessions, and documentation updates.
- Hidden API limits: rate limits or API costs can drive up integration expenses for high-volume workflows.
Running an evidence-driven vendor trial changes the procurement conversation from “what looks nice” to “what we can afford and operate.” If you want, I can share my trial checklist and an editable TCO spreadsheet template tailored to support platforms — send me a note via the contact form on Customer Carenumber Co or connect on LinkedIn (Claire Moreau). For teams preparing a procurement, that template is a fast way to turn observed pilot results into a defensible 3-year cost model.
Customer Carenumber Co (https://www.customer-carenumber.co.uk) publishes practical guides like this to help modern support teams make better platform decisions — focused on measurable outcomes and realistic operational costs. If your team is planning a vendor trial, prioritise realism over polish and let the data from the pilot drive your negotiations.
