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Every security vendor promises great support. Dedicated Customer Success Manager. Fast response times. Proactive guidance. It’s in the pitch deck and on the pricing page, somewhere between “seamless onboarding” and “24/7 availability.”
And for the first few months, it’s usually true. Someone knows your name. The check-ins are regular. Requests get handled.
Then your CSM rotates. The ticket queue replaces the direct line. Feature requests disappear into a backlog you’ll never see. The quarterly business reviews become a formality — if they happen at all. And you realize that “dedicated support” meant “dedicated until renewal.”
This is the pattern security teams describe again and again when they talk about the vendor they had before Torq.
Five Years on a Legacy SOAR Platform and a Support Model That Quietly Eroded
A five-person cybersecurity team at a global commercial real estate firm spent nearly five years on a legacy SOAR platform. The product worked okay. Support did too — at first.
“[Their support] started decent but became less responsive year over year,” the Director of Cybersecurity Engineering and Operations recalled. “We got pushed to the general help desk. No regular check-ins. No proactive guidance.”
The Lead Cybersecurity Engineer who ran the platform daily put it more bluntly: “You’re kind of a number with them.”
This wasn’t a dramatic support failure. Nobody filed a ticket that went unanswered for weeks. The issue was subtler and more corrosive: the vendor had lost its investment in the team’s success. No working sessions to optimize their environment. No one flagging new features that could solve existing pain points. No one reviewing their workflows and saying, “Here’s a better way to do this.”
The platform didn’t evolve, and neither did the relationship.
For a lean team that needed every edge it could get, that passivity was a liability.
A Support Model Built Around Capability, Not Dependency
When the team migrated to Torq, the difference wasn’t incremental; it was structural.
Implementation was a partnership, not a handoff. The team’s implementation partner at Torq didn’t build the platform for the customer and hand over the keys. He reviewed the Lead Cybersecurity Engineer’s work, suggested improvements, and made sure the team owned the knowledge. By the time migration was complete, the team had deep platform expertise in-house — from day one.
That’s a deliberate choice. Building everything for a customer is faster, but it creates dependency. Dependency is how the last vendor relationship went sideways. Torq’s model builds capability, not reliance.
The relationships are direct and personal. The team works with a dedicated CSM and a technical Sales Engineer they can reach directly — not through a ticketing portal or a dispatcher. Response times are under an hour. When the Lead Cybersecurity Engineer has a question, he calls someone at Torq who knows his environment. That person picks up.
“I feel like I have an extension of myself [at Torq] that I can reach out to whenever I need to.” – Lead Cybersecurity Engineer
The learning goes both ways. The Lead Cybersecurity Engineer and his Torq SE hold regular working sessions to exchange knowledge. The engineer shows the SE creative solutions he’s built. The SE shows the engineer platform capabilities he hasn’t explored yet. Both sides look forward to these sessions.
Proactive, not reactive. Torq’s team monitors platform health, flags opportunities, and brings new features to the customer’s attention with specific context on how they apply to their environment. That’s the difference between a support team and a success team.
1,000+ Hours Saved: The Support Behind the Numbers
Support quality rarely makes the top three criteria in a vendor evaluation. It should.
Every security automation platform is only as good as the team operating it. And the team operating it is only as effective as the support behind it. When a five-person security team is building, maintaining, and expanding an AIS program across an entire enterprise portfolio, the difference between “submit a ticket and wait” and “call your SE and solve it in an hour” is the difference between shipping new workflows every month and shipping none.
This team saved nearly 1,000 analyst hours and $120,000 in Q1 2026 alone. They’re targeting $600,000 savings for the year. Those numbers reflect the platform, yes — but they also reflect a support relationship that accelerates the team instead of slowing it down.
The Lead Cybersecurity Engineer built custom integrations to tools that weren’t natively supported. With his previous vendor, that would have meant a professional services engagement — a separate contract, a separate timeline, a separate team unfamiliar with his environment. With Torq, he used the integration builder, got stuck on one piece, called his SE, and had it resolved the same day.
Every integration this team builds themselves is a professional services engagement that they don’t pay for. Every workflow they ship without waiting in a support queue is time returned to the operation. The ROI of good support doesn’t show up as a line item. It shows up in everything else moving faster.
From Customer Workaround to Platform Feature
The Lead Cybersecurity Engineer is now collaborating with Torq to build his homegrown ROI tracking methodology into the platform for other customers to use. That’s not a support interaction. That’s co-development. It started when the Torq team saw what he built, recognized its value, and asked, “Can we make this a feature?”
That doesn’t happen when your vendor treats support as a cost center.
The Director of Cybersecurity Engineering and Operations framed the contrast in terms any buyer should hear before signing a vendor contract: “There’s a desire from Torq that we get the most out of this tool as possible. With our old vendor, you’re one of many products — not even customers.”
That distinction — between being a product user and being a customer — is the entire gap.
Five Questions That Reveal a Vendor’s Real Support Model
If you’re evaluating security automation platforms, these questions will reveal more about support quality than any reference call:
- Who is my day-to-day contact, and how do I reach them? If the answer involves a ticketing portal as the primary channel, that tells you everything. Direct access to a named human who knows your environment should be the baseline, not a premium feature.
- What does onboarding look like — do you build for me, or with me? A vendor should do both, depending on what you need. Some teams want us to ship the deployment fast so they can start running cases on day one. Others want to learn the platform alongside the build so they own every workflow from the start. We do both, often in the same engagement — fast deployment for the high-volume use cases, hands-on enablement for the workflows your team will iterate on long-term. Either way, you walk away owning what you run.
- How will the relationship evolve after implementation? Regular working sessions, proactive feature guidance, and platform health monitoring should be standard, not require an escalation.
- What happens when I need something outside your integration library? This is where support models diverge sharply. Some vendors route you to professional services with a separate SOW. Others give you the tools to build it yourself and the support to unblock you when you get stuck.
- Can you show me what support looks like for a team my size? Lean teams need more support, not less. If the vendor’s model scales by reducing access, you’ll feel it within six months.
“A Thousand Times Better”
When asked to compare Torq’s support to the vendor they replaced, the Lead Cybersecurity Engineer didn’t hedge: “Torq support has been a thousand times better. And I’m not overemphasizing — I actually mean a thousand times.”
Most vendors will tell you they care about customer success. Torq is built so you don’t have to take their word for it.
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