Who are arguably the most vital customers your company or product has? Your “new” users. If they don’t feel supported and cared for, it’s not likely that they’ll stick around and spend money on your product. Currently at Automattic, we’re focusing our live chat support efforts on our new users, defined as those users whose accounts are less than 14 days old. We find that those users tend have some questions that we can help them with and achieve a “quick win” to help them get their site set up quickly and move on to using their website for what they intend, rather than getting bogged down in building it.
I think this applies to more than just WordPress.com, it can apply to any product or service. Focus on your new users and the word about your product will spread organically because of the support and level of service you offer to your new users, whether they’ve spent money on your product yet or not. Many products offer “priority” support to paying users. While this is all well and good, maybe we should also consider providing priority support to our new users. If they feel like they can’t get in touch with you for help solving their problem, they’re not going to stick around for long. By doing this, the hope is that these new users will be converted to paying users more quickly. People will pay for things they perceive as important to them, and for things that they feel supported in.