Customer Support Best Practices for SaaS

Make your SaaS business stand out by focusing on your customers. Here’s how:

1. Hire Right

Having the right customer service team is everything. Employees are for sure the backbone of an organization. Your service staff communicates directly with customers with needs, so it must go well.

Pick individuals with a positive attitude who are personable, skilled, and have empathy. Be sure they also fit in with your company culture. Your customers will thank you by becoming loyal to your brand. The best customer service agents can win over the most difficult customers to retain them.

When you find the best staff, don’t forget to treat them well and ensure they feel supported, valued, and have job satisfaction. Dedicated employees put in the work to ensure customer happiness. Invest in your staff, and they will invest in your company’s success.

2. Be Available

There’s no denying that users need support at all times of the day and night in the SaaS world. To provide excellent customer service, you must be available when needed. If not, you’ll end up with a lot of frustrated customers.

Customers don’t want to wait for service. This is especially true for SaaS customers with questions or issues when using the product. Disrupting someone's ability to work is a huge annoyance, and any delays in product availability will raise your churn rate.

Offering around-the-clock customer service means providing the support customers need when they need it. Your SaaS company's availability to provide support shows customers that you truly value them. It goes a long way and keeps them happy.

3. Be Effective

Delivering effective customer service for your SaaS company relies on a few things. Your customer service agents need to be knowledgeable about your products, how they work and solving customers’ issues effectively. Ensure your team has the proper training and can satisfy customers’ needs and accurately answer any questions that come up.

Effectiveness also includes utilizing up-to-date technology and software and maintaining it in working order. Your staff can be the best of the best but fall short of providing excellent customer service without the right tools and software.

4. Be Proactive

Your SaaS company might have the best product with all the great features, but things will still, from time to time, cause customers issues. Part of providing great customer service is being proactive. Discover potential issues and solve them before they become a problem for your users.

Conduct user testing often, especially when you roll out a new product or feature. Be sure it runs smoothly and is easy for everyone; even the most tech-challenged people can use it with ease. You want your customers to operate your product without requiring help from you.

Providing a knowledge base with frequently asked questions and answers helps customers solve issues or get product info on their own fast, without needing to reach out for help. Most customers prefer a self-service option to figure things out on their own. So, think up all the questions that might get asked and provide the answers in one place on your site.

Another part of being proactive is giving customers a heads-up when your systems will be down for maintenance. Letting your customers know the exact day and time your site will be unusable will help your customers prepare. Even if it’s down just for a few minutes, it’s best to let your customers know ahead of time.

5. Offer Multi-channel Service

Yes, customers want service fast. But they also want support through the channel they choose. The days of customers solely picking up the phone to call a company for service are out. Customers utilize several channels to contact a company, including phone, email, SMS, online chat, and social media.

Online chat is becoming a common way customers communicate with a company since it’s fast and easy. Many SaaS companies are implementing live chat to provide customer support quickly. Online chat is also an excellent sales tool as prospects have questions, and chat representatives will provide the answers they need to make their buying decision.

Many SaaS companies outsource their customer service to a provider that offers 24/7 support through multiple channels. It’s an effective strategy to deliver excellent customer service without taking up a lot of time and resources.

6. Deliver Personalized Communication

Customers don’t want to feel like a number. They want to feel special and valued, and you do that by providing personalized customer service. It might sound like a lot, but it will come naturally after some training with the right staff.

It’s best to keep all of the customers' information in one place, including their purchase history. With that, your customer service agents will have the right data to communicate with them and build strong relationships.

7. Monitor Service Delivered

How would you know how well your support team is pleasing your customers if you don’t track and monitor them? A good guess is negligent. You must work to ensure your customers leave happy and satisfied.

Sending surveys to your customers after an interaction with your team will help you get the valuable feedback needed to see how well each agent is performing.

The surveys should be short and super easy for your customers to complete, so they do it. If it’s difficult, they’ll most likely skip it, and you will miss out on receiving the critical information.

What you do with the feedback is what’s most important. Lower-performing agents might need additional training.

You can assess higher-performing agents to determine what they’re doing right and have other agents implement the successful actions. With the survey data, you may find processes to be changed to ensure customer satisfaction.

Why is Providing Excellent Customer Service Critical for SaaS Companies?

Customer retention is important for most businesses. For SaaS companies retaining customers is the difference between the life and death – of the organization. Typically SaaS businesses operate on subscriptions, so they rely on their customers month after month.

After forking out a lot of dough to acquire a customer, it just makes sense to work hard to retain them. The longer they stay, the higher ROI from your marketing efforts it took to sign them up. The goal of a SaaS company is to increase the number of users continuously but to do that successfully; you must retain the ones you have.

Providing great customer support is an excellent opportunity to upsell and cross-sell to bring in more revenue from each customer. The longer they stay and the more they spend, the higher your revenue per user (RPU).

Another reason why providing exceptional support is critical is because customers talk about the service, whether it be good or bad. You want your customers raving about your awesome product and service to refer others and increase your revenue organically.

Customers will also go online and write reviews for millions to see. You want to ensure others see positive feedback to persuade them to sign up for your services too! Essentially, providing exceptional customer support is a form of marketing.

Conclusion

For SaaS businesses, the constant goal is to increase their users. You do that successfully by retaining your customers while hunting for new ones. To keep SaaS customers happy, you must deliver excellent support.

Great customer support is personalized, efficient, and fast. Being proactive in solving issues before they arise is vital to maintaining a smoothly working order.

Ensure you have the right staff and they have all the training and knowledge to provide the support your customers need. With a bit of effort and strategic planning, you can attain total (or close to it) customer happiness.

Are you ready to set up your customer support team for your SaaS business? If so, contact Awesome CX today as we know the way.

Sources:

How Employee Satisfaction Affects Customer Satisfaction | Forbes

When The Best Customer Service Is Self-Service: 5 Customer Experience Design Best Practices | Forbes

The Secret Ratio That Proves Why Customer Reviews Are So Important | Inc.com