Customers decide the fate of your SaaS business. To make that business outstanding, it is important to invest in providing the best SaaS customer service. It means always being there for your customers, from the point they are trying out your SaaS product to the time they may face a challenge using it.
SaaS customer support is therefore a means to create a bond with customers that will keep them hooked on your SaaS brand and business.
In this blog, we’ll explore SaaS customer support, from its definition to the best practices you can adopt to run a cohesive support system in your business.
SaaS customer support is the process of assisting customers to get the most out of SaaS products. The following are some of the important elements that contribute to an effective system.
When customers encounter more complex challenges, they turn to support for solutions, making the support team the bridge between your company and customers. Their interactions directly impact your business’s success.
To keep your team at the top of their game, regularly improve their technical skills and enhance their understanding of product features and operations with training.
Training can also equip them with soft skills, such as for active listening, problem-solving, and communication.
Filling in the gaps in their skills and knowledge boosts their confidence and competency, strengthening client relationships with your SaaS brand.
SaaS companies can elevate their customer support experiences by documenting, organizing, storing, and sharing information on their products using a knowledge base platform.
An internal knowledge base makes it easier for the support team to resolve issues with easy access to all the required information. Customers can find answers more independently with external knowledge bases.
Knowledge bases can contain:
SaaS businesses strive to expand and cater to a wide range of clients. As their customer base grows, the likelihood of the number of SaaS customer service requests increasing is high.
It becomes necessary to adjust your SaaS customer service to still be able to meet demands without compromising on quality.
This can be achieved by:
Having the right tools for SaaS customer support makes your team more productive. Teams can enhance productivity by:
This leads to positive support experiences for both the support team and customers.
In order to improve customer support, companies need to track the proper customer service for SaaS metrics to highlight areas of strength and weakness. Insights from these metrics can be used to adjust where necessary.
Following are some of the metrics you can use to measure the quality of your customer support.
A Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) lets a company know how satisfied customers are with both their purchases and the company in general.
The CSAT is rated on a scale of 1–5. A score of 5 indicates a highly satisfied customer, while a score of 1 indicates an unhappy customer.
Customer effort score is a metric used to measure how much effort it takes for customers to use products or services they have purchased from your company.
A high effort score indicates there may be some obstacles you can help clear or additional guidance you can provide.
This is a metric used to measure the time taken to resolve support tickets to the customers’ satisfaction.
A PwC survey indicated that close to 80% of U.S. customers value speed as one of the most important factors in driving a positive customer experience.
A metric that measures the amount of time it takes for support agents to provide the first response to a support ticket.
First contact resolution is used to measure the percentage of tickets solved by a support agent with one reply.
Practicing quality SaaS customer service is necessary in a highly competitive business world. The end goal is to resolve customer’s concerns in a timely manner, leading to satisfaction and customer trust.
Following are some best practices for customer service to implement.
Empowering employees with a knowledge base enables them handle tasks independently.
Offering an external knowledge base to customers helps cut costs and relieve your support team, as they can find answers to questions and simple issues themselves.
This improves team productivity and results in higher customer satisfaction rates.
Effective SaaS customer support requires more than just hiring talented individuals. It involves ongoing training of support agents in both technical skills and soft skills to improve how they interact with customers.
Additionally, tools like artificial intelligence can help by giving accurate reply suggestions to customer questions and summarizing long ticket threads.
As previously described, a knowledge base makes it easier to share and find product and company information.
Putting customers at the center of a SaaS customer support system means focusing on their satisfaction.
When the customers feel valued and appreciated through positive SaaS customer service, it makes the SaaS business more profitable in the long run.
Additionally, it improves brand perception, meaning more customers will be willing to work with your company because of the established customer-first reputation.
The integration of artificial intelligence in SaaS customer support makes customer service simpler.
For example, AI can analyze sentiment in customer communications to determine the appropriate tone for a reply, summarize ticket details, and generate responses for simpler questions.
It reduces the workload of support teams, making them more effective.
Automation efficiently handles repetitive tasks, saving time that would otherwise be spent on lengthy processes.
For instance, automated ticket assignment feature assigns tickets to the most suitable agent based on their urgency and nature.
Providing 24/7 SaaS customer support requires round-the-clock availability to ensure customers’ issues are resolved as quickly as possible.
By offering 24/7 service in your SaaS customer support, customers in every time zone will be assured of assistance when things go wrong, particularly of concern for software needed for essential services.
For smaller companies who struggle to provide live support after local business hours, having a knowledge base and a customer self-service portal allows customers to solve at least some of their issues independently.
Proactive customer service is the process of identifying a problem and offering solutions before your customers are significantly affected.
This can be achieved by:
When offering SaaS customer service, you should always be aware of how you perform in different aspects of the support operation.
Consider using the reporting and analytics tools often found in SaaS help desk software to keep track of performance . For instance, you can monitor:
This makes it possible to identify areas that require improvement and drives informed decision-making, thus making the support experience better for the customers.
Customer onboarding is about providing necessary help to new users, enabling them to get started with a product with ease.
To make the SaaS onboarding process smoother:
Support teams require adequate information on a product to handle customer concerns as they arise.
Technical information to be relayed to the customers normally comes from the product team. The use of collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams and Slack for customer service ensures teams can easily communicate and share files, making support faster and smoother.
The product team also has to involve the support team in their product development process and internal meetings. The support team has a much better idea of customer needs and preferences from direct communication.
The two teams can gain valuable information from each other, which can be used to enhance the company’s offerings and customer service.
Providing the best possible customer support in your SaaS business leads to:
BoldDesk is a SaaS customer service tool that has features and functionalities to help your support team resolve customer concerns in a fast and accurate manner. It lets you provide outstanding customer service at an affordable price.
The following are the features that make BoldDesk one of the best SaaS customer support tools:
Growth for any SaaS company starts with how customers interact and engage with them and their products.
Offering positive SaaS customer service is therefore a chance to leave a great impression that spreads a positive reputation.
BoldDesk has all the features a company needs to streamline its customer support operations and build stronger customer connections.
Book a live demo or start a 15-day free trial today to experience first-hand how BoldDesk’s features can serve your support team. Leave a comment below if you have any questions.
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