2017
Customer Support Salary Study

Chapter 1

What are Customer Support Professionals Earning in 2017?

The average reported salary for support professionals in 2017 is $57,686. At first glance it appears support salaries have taken a dip compared to prior years’ averages, but that’s not the case. As always, there’s more to the story.

Salaries aren’t actually trending down — in fact, most individual salaries either stayed the same or went up. If the people who filled out the 2017 survey had also filled out the 2016 survey, they’d show a $2,935 average salary increase year over year. So what’s up with the lower overall average?

Why the shift in participants?

In past years, the majority of responses came largely from the Support Driven community, which includes a number of higher-paid professionals (many of whom are in the SaaS industry, where salaries tend to be higher — more on that later in the report). But as we broadened the call for participation this year and received a wider range of responses, we’re seeing a bigger picture of the industry at large.

Chapter 2

Do Support Salaries Differ by Industry?

In 2017, we added the question “In which industry is your business?” to the survey.

The industry that saw the highest wages for customer support professionals in 2017 was Software as a Service , with an average salary of $63,651. Marketing had the lowest average salary of $42,128, although there were only 15 respondents in that industry.

Chapter 3

Is the Gender Pay Gap Closing?

In 2017, the average pay for women in customer support is $55,503; men’s average pay is $58,663. This is only a slightly lower discrepancy than last year (and in comparison to other industries in general): Women make 94.6% of what men earn in support in 2017, compared to 94.4% in 2016.

Similar to last year’s report, women earn slightly more than men at entry level, but fall behind with more years of experience (5+ years).

Chapter 4

What do Support Pros Earn by Job Title?

We expanded the options in this year’s survey to get a better idea of what people earn by job title. In 2016, we offered the following options: “I help customers,” “I lead a team but I’m not head of support,” and “I’m in charge of the entire support operation.” The updated job title options for 2017 are: Agent/Representative, Lead, Manager, Director, VP or Other.

The previous year’s version may have been a better approach, because for this year’s survey, the interpretations for the “Other” category were quite varied (from “Associate” to “Chief Happiness Officer” and everything in between).

Job titles by gender

Similar to the gender breakdown by years of experience, we see more women in agent/representative and manager roles, while more men report working in lead, director and VP roles. This seems consistent with recent research suggesting that the pay gap widens as women are promoted.

Chapter 5

Do Technical Skills Mean Higher Salaries?

Responses to the question “Are you providing technical support?” told a different story this year than they did in 2016. The majority of the survey respondents, in every salary range, identified as technical.

However, there wasn’t as much salary variation between support professionals who assist customers in a technical capacity and those who do not. On average, customer support professionals who provide technical support reported slightly higher salaries on average in 2017 than those who do not :

Salary depending on technical ability, however, may again be impacted by differences in title. For example, technical professionals make more in all roles except as VPs. Which makes sense: Professionals who are higher up the chain may be more involved in areas such as project management, personnel development and so on, and have less need for technical abilities.

Reported technical skills by gender

Similar to 2016, more women reported being “kinda” technical or not at all, while more men answered “yes” to providing technical support.

The ambiguity of self-reporting is a little tricky — what does “technical” mean? How technical is “kinda technical”? Research shows that women tend to downplay their technical abilities, while men may exaggerate theirs. It’s true you’ll find more men than women in technical fields, but between a man and a woman doing the same work, would a man identify as technical while a woman identifies as kinda technical?

We asked those identifying as “kinda technical” to explain in their own words, and we saw interpretations ranging from “setting up teams with the printer” to “some reporting and data analysis” to “knowledge of HTML, CSS and JS is required since we look into the page source code.” There was too much variation to draw any meaningful conclusions from the data this year, but the information it is useful in helping us frame the question better in future surveys, and perhaps define what “technical” means.

Chapter 6

Are Remote Jobs Still on the Rise?

Remote work continues to be on the rise in customer support, and it pays. The average salary for full-time remote workers is $62,604, compared to $53,344 for people who do not work remotely at all.

This occurs across other industries in the U.S. and around the world. Gallup’s 2017 workforce survey, for example, reports that 31% of Americans work remotely 80-100% of the time (four-five days per week), up six percentage points from 2012-2016. And that’s good news for customer support salaries: Support professionals who work remotely have the highest average salaries .

However, the breakdown by salary range shows that beginning at the $100,000 mark, salaries for co-located and remote support workers begins to even out. At the highest bracket, co-located support pros earn more — a trend that has not changed much since 2016.

SaaS companies are still the most “remote”

By far, more customer support professionals are working remotely for SaaS companies than other industries, indicating that they still account for the rise in customer support salaries.

Remote workers report higher job satisfaction

People who work remotely 100% of the time were likelier to report that they were not looking for a new job: 66% of remote workers are happy where they are, compared to 43% of respondents who go into an office every day. That’s in line with studies that show employees who are permitted to work remotely show higher job satisfaction (as well as higher performance).

While it’s not for everyone, the increasing popularity of remote work and decent support salaries are great news for any support professionals who enjoy the freedom of working from wherever they choose. If you’re looking for remote work opportunities, here are some places to start:

Chapter 7

Does Working Remotely Increase Your Spending Power?

Salary ranges for people living in low, medium, and high cost of living areas is fairly consistent with 2016, and the takeaway for support pros should still be the same: Living in low- to mid-range cost of living areas and working for companies based in high-cost, high-salary areas will maximize your spending power.