If you are looking for great success in the SaaS industry, then having a Customer Support and Customer Success team is inevitable. It is because each has its dedicated role to play in customer service.
Defining SaaS Customer Support & Customer Success
Customer Support and Customer Success come within the sphere of customer service. Here is how they differ although the primary purpose is serving customers.
Role: SaaS Customer Support
- The team supports customers when they encounter problems while using your product or service.
- Respond promptly to customers’ queries when they contact the support team for assistance.
Role: SaaS Customer Success
- The team reaches out to customers on their own and helps them achieve success in their business through your product or service.
- The goal of the customer success team is determined by the intended outcomes from the use of your product or service by the customer.
While the customer support team provides the necessary solutions to customers, the customer success team tells them how to make the most of your product/service in driving their ROI and success.
Therefore, both the teams should work in agreement undeviatingly toward the goal of providing exceptional SaaS customer service.
For instance, if the customer service team discovers a bottleneck in the product from complaints registered by numerous subscribers, they can forward it to the customer success team. The customer success team can opt to remedy the issue altogether by informing the technical/design team.
Why is Customer Support Important for Saas?
Customer support is the best way to bond with the customer and build long-lasting relationships. Here is why your customer support resources are important to your business.
- Promotes Loyalty
Customer service at a personalized level helps customers feel respected and cared for. Statistics show that “68% of customers leave when they get an impression that you don’t care about their needs. On the contrary, they are willing to pay about 25% more if you offer a quality customer support model.”
Customers would stick to your brand if they recognize you as a brand that pays attention to customer needs. Here, you also improve the likeliness of customers making purchases of add-ons or other features.
- Reduces Churn
Effective customer support significantly impacts customer churn rate.
SaaS businesses trying to make it big in the market after launching great products are likely to suffer a setback in acquiring/retaining customers if the customer service is sub-par.
Great customer support in SaaS also gives you an upper edge over your competitors in the market.
According to statistics, “60% of customers stop doing business with a brand after one poor service experience.”
This means that if you provide exceptional customer service, you’ll not only keep your current customers, but you’ll also gain new ones from your competitors.
Major Components of SaaS Customer Support Strategy
Define precise strategies for every point across the customer journey and make sure your strategy is in line with the customer’s expectations.
The pointers mentioned below can help you stay true to your SaaS customer support strategy.
It’s worth noting that only customer service automation software can effectively help you implement these strategies. Yes, as there is nothing better than top-notch technology when it comes to streamlining and automating business operations.
1. Trained Customer Service Agents
It is very important to ensure that your customer service agents are well-trained to handle your customer support queries. Also, be wary of the fact that training is not a one-time thing but rather an ongoing practice.
Upskilling the agents helps them improve their current level of support. Do this periodically or as and when the situation demands to keep up the service standards.
Kapture offers Learning Management Solutions, for managing agent training by letting you upload courses, administer tests, and track results.
You can update courses, provide agents access to the learning material and pull out assessment reports and identify top performers.
The courses needn’t always be in text document format. Upload training materials in video/audio courses to make the learning experience engaging for the agents.
2. Self-Help Contents
Self-Help for SaaS customer service turns out to be particularly effective in reducing your service ticket volumes. Most of the common queries can be answered through self-help solutions where customers can search, find and fix issues without having to contact agents. This way you may receive only fewer tickets on common queries and have more time to devote to sophisticated service requests that require more attention.
Kapture offers self-service solutions such as AI chatbots, self-help portals, FAQ pages, and interactive discussion forums, all of which are linked to a centralized knowledge repository called a knowledge base.
Customers can chat with the bots and get answers to their queries round the clock.
Likewise, customers can find answers to their queries by searching and navigating through self-help articles available on FAQ pages, forums, and help portals.
And what is more important is the content you put up in the self-help articles. Find out the frequently searched topics using analytics to determine the topics to be addressed in the articles.
The content on a particular query should be comprehensive enough so that your customers do not have to contact you for further help.
Many times, the most searched topics can shed light on why certain issues reoccur. If you go down to the root of the problem, you may discover an unnoticed bug or other issues that need your attention.
“Eighty-nine percent of US customers expect companies to have an online self-service support portal.”
Image: Self-help powered by Kapture
3. Make your Support Link Easy to Locate
You have done it all; built a self-help portal or FAQ page. But when you put it out there on your website, did you happen to assume that your customers are going to locate it effortlessly?
This may seem like a no big deal, but it is not. The success of your self-help portal or FAQ page lies in how effectively it is being put to use by customers. It has to be displayed on the website such that it is visible and catches the sight of the website viewers at one glance.
The same applies to your contact information- phone numbers, address, and social media reach-out links.
4. Be Mobile Responsive
Having a mobile-friendly customer support page is very essential because when customers use mobile devices to access your help page, they expect it to be readable and easily navigable. Failing to deliver a positive mobile experience can cause customers to abandon your service. The competition online is fierce.
Being able to access customer databases or update tasks while on the go is also beneficial to service agents since it allows them to assist customers anytime and anywhere.
5. Use a Knowledge Management System
A knowledge management system lets you store information in multiple formats– documents, images, and videos. A practicable knowledge management system lets you manage the knowledge base via the self-help features such as a FAQ page or intelligent chatbot. Customers now have the choice to view the information in the format they like, in addition to receiving customized help topics.
Maintain thorough documentation of policies, practices, and guidelines in the knowledge base to help the customer support team when they are in need of information.
Kapture’s virtual agent feature can assist the customer support team through an ‘Agent Assistant Window’ which is part of the help desk inbox. The virtual agent answers query contextually and can pull out articles from the knowledge base to help them.
The ease of information access enables new or substitute staff to work smoothly with no pressure at all.
6. Measure your Progress
Measuring your progress involves tracking different KPIs and improving upon them. Among several relevant KPIs, first response time is one such metric that can significantly boost your customer satisfaction level.
The powerful reporting and analytics tool of Kapture’s help desk generates customizable reports in line with your requirement in terms of view format and level of detail. It is easy to share the reports with stakeholders or have them delivered to your inbox at predefined times.
7. Take Feedback
It is vital to collect feedback from customers at all touchpoints to improve your customer support in SaaS.
Feedback collected after the use of a ‘self-help’ feature, for instance, tells you the usefulness of the content or article. You can send out a pop-up question asking, ‘Was the article helpful?’ and a 5-star rating option. From several customer feedbacks, you will learn which of your articles are incomplete, need improvement, or are outdated.
Kapture’s help desk solutions come with inbuilt and customizable survey forms which can be scheduled to be sent automatically to customers at various stages in the customer journey.
8. Deliver Omnichannel Support
It is needless to say there is umpteen number of communication channels. Email, chat, SMS, call, and social media are every customer’s favorite channels. They may try to reach you through a call with a request, the next moment they may just message you on your social media page on the same or different matter. In cases like this, how do you keep messages from a particular customer in one place?
And how do you handle the thousands of messages pouring in from different channels?
Omnichannel help desk management solutions by Kapture direct customer inquiries streaming in through different channels into a unified dashboard making it convenient for the agents in the following ways,
- Track down customer requests easily: The customer support agents will be notified whenever tickets get logged from customers through any channel.
- Reply to the email, call, chat, social media, or SMS message from the help desk inbox: The help desk solution smoothly integrates with the different channels such that the agents do not have to keep switching to any of these applications for replying to the messages.
- Merge duplicate tickets into one: When a customer contacts you through different channels and logs multiple requests, you can merge the multiple tickets into a single(primary) ticket wherein only the primary ticket remains open.
You also have options to add notes to a ticket where you can explain the reason for choosing to merge the tickets. This comes in handy for other agents too when they wish to look at the ticket.
As you can see, not only does the omnichannel capability make it convenient for customers to contact you but also makes managing tickets orderly. You can now get going with your duty smoothly unaffected by chaos or mix-up of tasks.
While framing strategies determine the preferred channels of customer communication and promote active engagement across those channels.
9. Automate your Support System
Automating your support system has numerous benefits in that it significantly brings your workflow efficiency up a higher notch by taking care of your routine business tasks end-to-end.
Image: Kapture’s help desk interface
Automation takes care, for instance, of routing the logged support requests to the service agents based on predefined parameters such as
- Agent availability (applying the Round Robin Scheduling for instance)
- Agent’s skill or proficiency level
- Zone/Region
- The subject matter of the ticket
Such systematic and logical assignment of tickets to agents guarantees that the support requests are evenly distributed among the staff.
The team’s task, the individual agent’s task, pending tickets, and tickets approaching SLA breach are right there on the helpdesk dashboard. The supervisors can zoom in on any of this information and carry out microanalysis of them such as the what, why, and how, by pulling out detailed reports.
This kind of streamlined mode of operation is something that is totally impossible to achieve in the absence of state-of-the-art and technology-laden solutions. What makes us say this?
Manually tracking and assigning tickets to agents, managing multiple applications, switching screens often, struggling to compile reports, manual data entry errors, and frequent SLA violations are needlessly time-consuming and unorderly. And among the siloed data spread across countless applications, can you easily spot those game-changing insights?
10. Right Customer Service Tools
As mentioned all along in the blog, it is pretty evident that the use of the right technology makes a difference to the level and quality of support you offer.
Intelligent help desk solutions can transform the way you do business by allowing you to manage data updates online, automate operations and improve reporting accuracy. These cutting-edge solutions truly have become a necessity for every business to stay competitive.
Image: Kapture integrates seamlessly with third-party applications
Kapture: A One-Stop Solution in Delivering Exceptional Customer Support
Automating tasks, offering Artificial Intelligence-aided personalized services, remote working, data analysis, and integration to third-party applications are certainly the must-haves for successful customer support in the SaaS business.
Through Kapture’s cloud-based help desk solutions, we aim to empower you in delivering value to your customers through a streamlined, and automated customer service process.
