The SaaS Customer Support that You Need to Drive More Satisfaction
With SaaS, there is a 25% increase in customer satisfaction, and 86% of end-users say SaaS applications help them succeed more than desktop alternatives.
SaaS is all about automation, so your support should have a certain degree of support automation to keep the margins higher. You want effective support automation without the perception of automated support so your customers feel safe.
Excellent customer service starts when customers first hear from you in the marketing stage. It is then amplified after they sign up, and becomes persistently helpful as the user stays with the service.
In order to create the right support system, you must first consider everything that is needed for SaaS customer support:
- Self-Service
- Easy to Find
- Fast Support
- Quality over Quantity
- Get Feedback
- Reporting
As a small business, it is extra important to make sure you have all your ducks in a row. It’s different for everyone, but these 7 items are key to successful SaaS support.
You want to help your customers help themselves for two reasons:
- If you’re under $30,000 in monthly revenue rate (MMR), you want to keep your overhead costs for support to a minimum while you continue to grow in marketing and sales.
- As you scale to more users, you need to serve more. Self-service allows you to follow your growth trajectory while simultaneously serving those users.
Pro Tip: This key makes sure that customers can get help at any time on their own terms. Startups have limited resources, but self-service helps keep costs low.
There are a lot of different ways to do self-service, so it doesn’t have to be limiting. Make sure that customers have access to all the knowledge that they need while also providing a back-up form of support where they can contact a representative.
Focus on convenience. A knowledge base on a separate page is not convenient for SaaS products when users are interacting with your service.
A customer, for example:
- Is highly likely to convert to a paid user if they have access to answers instantly on the pricing page.
- Is highly likely to drop out of onboarding if they don’t have access to immediate help.
Being easy to find is subjective, but we recommend an icon on the bottom right of your website.
Most users are trained to look for support icons, so not having one can be a trust factor issue. If they don’t trust that you are going to provide them with support, they will not want to trust you at all.
Customers want their needs met as soon as possible. If they are there looking, they expect to be helped right away. Quick responses to questions show customers that you are efficient.
Efficiency builds trust with your users — if they know your customer support is reliable, they will consider your company reliable, too.
Here are some components that lead to fast support:
- Ability to access support on any page (like a support icon on the bottom right)
- Ability to search for answers, manuals, and tutorials.
- Ability to fallback on a human (like a contact form, phone number, or live chat).
Pro Tip: Failure to offer fast access to answers will result in lower MMR or increase the churn of your SaaS offering.
Speed is convenient. Don’t slowly unlock the way for customers, give them what they need before you lose their business. Get a jump start on this with ChipBot.
Quality content is just as important as the quantity of your content. A lot of sites focus too much on having all the answers but don’t focus enough on having good answers.
Customers respond better to short, quality answers.
For example, ChipBot provides knowledge, not empty words, by including short, concise answers. Having a lot of content doesn’t matter, but having quality answers makes all the difference.
No one wants to comb through long answers or pages full of multiple questions and answers — we recommend a search function, like ChipBot ’s, where only the necessary information is presented.
This kind of answer also leads to more feedback from your customers, which in turn allows you to create more quality answers.
Feedback, what your customers are saying about your website and product, is really important to the success of your company.
With feedback, you can find out what your customers are actually thinking, instead of just guessing by their behavior.
For example, you can place a CTA for an NPS score midway through an article posted on your blog. If the user clicks that it is helpful, then you know to create more like it. If not, poll your customers to find out why, and do something different next time.
Make sure your SaaS has feedback capabilities so that you can understand customer needs and meet them. You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for all the customers interested in your product, so their needs should be met.
If you want to make a difference in updating your marketing and product to better fit customer needs, feedback is the key.
Reporting and feedback go hand in hand.
- Data events like user feedback or user search are used to store raw data
- Reporting is important to find insights from that raw data
Without reporting, a SaaS company can be lost on how to improve monetizing their traffic or how to improve their monthly active user metric.
The unique aspect of support analytics versus traffic analytics (Google Analytics, Mixpanel, etc…) is that support analytics give an unfiltered window on who your potential customer is.
Unlike Google Analytics, support data can tell you the answers to questions like:
- Who’s your ideal customer? Who isn’t?
- What questions lead to free trial signups?
- What questions lead to paid signups?
- What questions lead to users abandoning your product?
Some questions may be repeated by a number of different customers, and tracking how and where that happens allows you to create a better system overall.
Seeing where customers are having problems also helps refine your validation — if you have a new idea and the data says customers don’t like parts of it, you have feedback to take back to the product team to improve it.
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