A few years back, a mid-sized company we know was two days from launching their annual review cycle. Their performance management vendor had pushed a platform update the week before, and it broke their custom templates. When they called support, they got a chatbot. When they submitted a ticket, they got an auto-reply promising a 48-hour response window. Two days before go-live.
They ended up running that review cycle on spreadsheets. Their managers hated it. Their HR director lost a month of credibility she'd spent a year building. And the vendor? They closed the ticket five days later with a link to a help article.
That story isn't unusual. It's the norm.
Your HR software vendor should be your partner during review season—not a ticket queue and a help article.Customer service in HR tech has become an afterthought for most vendors, and the data shows it.
58% of consumers say they will switch providers for better customer service. That's not a stat about dissatisfaction with the product itself. That's about the experience of being a customer after the sale.
For B2B SaaS companies serving small and mid-sized businesses, monthly churn rates run between 3% and 5%. Over a year, that means a significant portion of the customer base turns over. And the most common reasons for churn are exactly what you'd expect: unresolved issues, slow response times, and a general feeling that nobody on the vendor side actually cares whether the product works for you.
84% of B2B software buyers say the quality of customer support directly influences their renewal decisions. Not the feature list. Not the price. The support.
Most HR tech companies are funded by venture capital. That means their growth model prioritizes new customer acquisition over existing customer retention. Support is a cost center, so they minimize it. They invest in sales teams, not service teams.
The result is predictable. You get great attention during the sales process and near silence after you sign. When you do reach someone, they're working from a script, not from knowledge of your account, your org structure, or your review timeline.
Over 20% of voluntary SaaS churn is linked directly to poor onboarding. That's not a support failure months down the line. That's losing customers in the first weeks because nobody took the time to get them set up correctly.
And the financial impact is staggering. Customer churn costs U.S. businesses $136 billion annually. For vendors, that's lost revenue. For customers, that's lost time, lost data, and the painful process of starting over with a new tool.
Here's where we made a deliberate choice at Upward365, and it's one that goes against the standard playbook.
We don't treat customer service as a cost to minimize. We treat it as the product. The software is half of what we deliver. The other half is making sure it actually works for your team, in your org, on your timeline.
That means real people who know your account. Same-day resolution for issues, not a 48-hour ticket queue. Onboarding that's built around your specific review cycles, your manager population, and your HR team's bandwidth.
After 15 years in this industry, we've learned that the single biggest driver of customer retention is manager adoption. When managers use the tool consistently, the whole system works: reviews get completed, feedback flows, engagement data becomes meaningful. When managers don't adopt it, the tool becomes shelfware, no matter how good the features are.
So we invest in helping managers succeed. That costs more than a chatbot and a knowledge base. But it's the reason our customers stay.
The best HR tech platform is useless without someone to help you when it counts—here's what real vendor support looks like.Here's the part of the conversation most vendors avoid: switching HR tech platforms is expensive and painful.
It costs 5 to 25 times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. The same ratio applies on the buyer's side. Every time you switch tools, you're re-doing the implementation, re-training your managers, re-building your templates and review cycles, and re-earning adoption.
Most SMBs don't have the bandwidth for that. They need a platform they can count on and a vendor they can call.
That's the long view we took when building Upward365. We'd rather keep every customer for years than constantly backfill churn with new logos. And the way you do that is by showing up when it matters. Not with a chatbot. Not with a 48-hour SLA. With a person who knows your name and your next review cycle.
If you're evaluating HR tech vendors right now, here's a straightforward test for service quality:
Ask who your point of contact will be after the sale. If the answer is "our support team," dig deeper. Ask for a name.
Ask what the average resolution time is. If they can't tell you, or if they hedge with "it depends," that tells you everything.
Ask what happens if something breaks during review season. If the answer involves a ticket queue, you're not a priority. You're a number.
The best performance management platform in the world is useless if nobody's there to help you when it counts.
We built Upward365 around service because we've seen what happens when vendors don't. Schedule a conversation with our team and see the difference for yourself.