Simply put, a customer support team acts as a voice of a business. If you really think about it, whenever customers interact with your business, you want to ensure that they’re met with the best possible support.
Having stellar customer support will not only provide additional value to your customers but can also do wonders for your business. Namely, monitoring customer behavior and behavioral patterns is just one of the advantages of having good customer support.
What’s more, according to this study, 67% of customers stated that poor or negative experience with customer support is the main reason they canceled their subscription. Knowing that, it becomes quite obvious how customer support can affect your business – both positively and negatively.
So, by ensuring that you offer nothing less but excellence to your customers, they will get a sense of security and which will further strengthen their loyalty towards your business.
Table of Contents
What is SaaS Customer Support?
SaaS customer support is really just like any other type of customer support. Its main goal is to provide assistance to your customers, answer any potential questions and cater to their needs. But in order to fully understand it, we must explore SaaS customer support a bit further.
How is SaaS customer support categorized?
SaaS customer support is just one of the elements of SaaS customer service, next to SaaS customer success. Both of these teams really share a common goal and that’s to provide help and solutions to your customers. That being said, however, these two elements have slightly different approaches:
- SaaS customer support team – provides any type of assistance to customers in need
- SaaS customer success team – reaches customers and helps them achieve their goals
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Why Does SaaS Customer Support Matter?
No matter just how appealing your business or offer may be to your customers, they simply won’t choose to do business with you if they feel ignored. What this means is that a brand that actively ignores its audience can never hope to reach the same level of success as a brand that’s actively working on interacting with their customer base.
So, it’s safe to say that a brand that offers great customer support offers so much more than just its products to its audience.
In fact, research shows that satisfied customers are willing to spend as much as 25% more with a brand that shows them support and caters to their needs.
Additionally, quality customer support can also really reduce the number of customers that choose to cancel or put a pause on their subscription, for instance.
What this all means is that the better customer support you offer, the more satisfied customers you can expect to have. And we don’t really need to emphasize that the more satisfied customers you have, the better it will be for your overall revenue.
How to Implement SaaS Customer Support?
Now that you know what SaaS customer support is and how it can affect your business, let’s take a look at how you can successfully implement it into your operations.
Some of the best practices when it comes to customer support include:
- Identifying the right channels of communication with your customers
- Setting up a strategy that needs to be based on your customers’ expectations
- Assembling and educating a team of professionals
- Keeping your cases well-managed and organized
- Tracking customer conversation and follow-up metrics
- Making everything easier by automating the support process
After all that’s been said, let’s now explore the most important aspects of SaaS customer support.
Skilled and knowledgeable team
One of the most common mistakes companies make is trying to “save up” on hiring the necessary people to take charge of this process. It’s of the utmost importance that you assemble a team of skilled and knowledgeable professionals as your customer support representatives.
Just like you would hire a custom web page design agency to create your business website, you also want to make sure you hire the right people as your customer support representatives.
Simply put, you can really expect to be able to deliver the best service unless you hire the right people.
Naturally, you can always choose to train and further educate your team to ensure that they continue to learn and grow. In the end, it will become more than obvious that this is an investment that’s worth making.
So, look for people:
- That have excellent problem-solving skills
- Are good listeners
- Are professional and patient
- Are skillful and knowledgeable
After you’ve assembled your team, you can also choose to divide it into different categories. For instance:
- Assign specific people to work with specific issues
- Let new employees and trainees handle more general issues
That way, you can ensure that both the more experienced employees, as well as those that are just learning, can easily handle anything that comes their way.
Strategic approach
In order to ensure that you have the best possible approach to implementing SaaS customer support, you need to develop a strategic approach. That’s why you need to make sure you rely on using only the best SaaS customer support tools to your advantage and measure and track your success.
Since dealing with various entries can sometimes get a bit overwhelming, you need to make sure you use proper tools that will help your team analyze and prioritize them. With numerous different options on the market, you can easily choose the one that fits your needs best.
Additionally, in order to ensure that your current strategies are driving the desired results, you need to measure and track them. That way, you can easily spot if there’s any room or need for improvement and act accordingly.
Keep in mind that the faster your team manages to resolve any potential issues – the better.
Improve messaging
Nowadays, there are numerous channels of communication available to all of us. That’s why businesses need to be aware of the fact that their customers expect to be able to reach out to them through any (or rather all) of these channels.
For instance, social media plays a huge role here as almost everyone in the world is using it.
That being said, however, you want to make sure you tailor your messaging style to fit each of these platforms. As an example, the type of replies that would work for Twitter (short and simple) won’t really work as well on Facebook.
Another important thing to keep in mind is that social media is used by real people. So, when answering them, make sure you use simple language and steer clear of the language that feels too professional and the one that heavily relies on using only the industry slang.
Ask for and listen to feedback
As mentioned previously, fostering healthy communication and engagement with your audience is extremely important. That’s why, in order to improve your customer support, you shouldn’t shy away from asking your customers for feedback.
Simply ask them which areas of your business – and your customer support – they would like to see improve and how.
By asking your customers for feedback and actually making an effort to truly hear it, you can easily improve your overall operations.
Additionally, try to be as specific as possible when asking for feedback, since a simple question like “Are you satisfied with the customer service?” and only “Yes/No” answers won’t provide you with sufficient insight.
Moreover, you should particularly pay attention to feedback that mentions your competitors, as this will enable you to learn more about the things they do better than you (according to your customers). Needless to say, use that feedback to only further improve and strengthen both your business and your customer support.
Make sure you’re easy to reach
When they experience any type of issue, the last thing customers want is to have to search long and hard for the way to contact your customer support. That’s why you need to ensure that all of your business contacts – and especially customer support – are easily visible and noticeable on your website.
Moreover, if you’re present on social media, make sure your profiles contain this information and choose to include the contact to your customer support in your emails.
To put it simply, the easier you make it for your customers to contact you, the happier they will be.
Final Thoughts
Your customer support representatives will work as the literal voice of your company. They are the most crucial element of successful communication between your business and your customers.
So, make sure you hire the right people in your team and even invest in further training and educating them. This will only yield positive results for your business in the long run.
Furthermore, make sure you openly ask your customers how they would improve not just your offer but your customer support as well, and actually listen to what they have to say. You will quickly notice that by actually listening to them, you will only encourage them to interact with your business further.
