The company, which provides an all-in-one social CRM and customer support Cloud solution, has unveiled version 2.0 of its SaaS software along with the new ‘Customer Wow’ pay-as-you-so pricing model.

All customers have the option of beginning with one free Full-Time Agent license to the full-featured Assistly software. If they want they can later expand their access to the product in an "easy and cost-effective" manner.

"Customers told us, 'we want a simple way to start and a simple way to grow,' so we rolled out our fair and simple pricing," said Alex Bard, CEO of Assistly. "We give everybody a full-featured version of our software and then let them expand their use affordably, $1 per hour for part-time users and $49 per month for full time users. We let companies of any size provide awesome support to their customers immediately."

In addition to the pricing model, Assistly is also introducing a rewards programme that enables customers to earn bonus flex hours as rewards. Assistly Wow Rewards makes it “easy to involve more people in providing support and lowering the overall cost of doing so” says the vendor.

In a blog post, founder of ThinkJar Esteban Kolsky outlined why he is impressed by the new pricing model compared to the traditional per-seat licenses or enterprise licenses offered by other vendors.

"This new pricing model is very flexible and allows organisations to more fully embrace the Cloud; instead of paying a license so that a user can access the system, the organisation buys a credit (in the case of Assistly it’s an hour of access) and then use that credit for any activity and any user to access the system.  If they need more access, they pay for more credit," he explained.  

Highlighting its differences to other value-based pricing offerings, Kolsky added: "This is value-based from the clients’ perspective, not the vendor’s perspective. This is something that non true-cloud models have a hard time doing since they don’t have the flexibility and integration capabilities to deploy. Vendors are focused on licensing their product, not providing a service and charge accordingly: licenses are not offered in exchange for value – they are offered in exchange for access to the system.  

"In this case, the value of accessing the system for an hour, or 20 minutes – or even 5 minutes, to complete a transaction is more important than the fact that they accessed the system: the software is truly offered as a service that anyone who is authorised (whether it’s an employee, a partner, or even a customer in a collaborative model) can access. The true service-only nature of the offer is what makes the difference."