Customer support plays a key role in SaaS businesses as it has impacts the customer lifetime value. And for SaaS companies, higher the lifetime value of the customer, higher the revenue would be. What this means is - if you need to increase the customer lifetime value, you need to invest in customer support to reduce the churn. Let us have a look at some of the best practices for customer support in SaaS.
One of the key fundamentals of great customer support is the ease of customers being able to connect with the support team. Imagine a customer who is looking for a solution to their problem and does not know how to reach your support team. A simple litmus test to your customer support set up would be the answer to whether your customers have to scroll to the footer of your website and search for support menus. To counter this situation, SaaS companies can start offering in-app customer support (support within their applications) which usually involves an integration with a live chat tool.
SaaS companies typically operate on a subscription model and customer retention is critical. We know what it costs to acquire a customer, and makes more sense to give as much importance to retaining them. The longer the customer stays with your organization, the higher your revenue per user (RPU). For example, if a customer stays with your organization for 18 months than for 6 months, it means the revenue is 3 times per user without any addition to your customer acquisition cost.
Set up customer success teams to take care of your customers proactively. Proactively focus on effectively supporting customers when they are signing up for your product, during onboarding and consistently being helpful to them throughout their customer life-cycle. In fact, it opens up opportunities for you to upsell and cross-sell to them.
Customer support is a game of inches and one bad experience can result in customer churn. You don’t want a customer having a billing issue talking to a sales person. You need to set up intelligent systems to route customer conversations to the right support representatives based on what the customer is looking and on the expertise of the support agent. Similarly, you also need to set up thresholds for the number of conversation a particular support agent is handling at any given point in time and distribute the conversations to other agents.
Whether it is about rolling out new features or understanding how your customers are using your product features, taking feedback from the customer on a regular basis can help your organization evolve in several areas. For instance, feedback helps you make changes to the product UI, improve the value proposition of the product based on what’s important to them, and so on. While your customers may be from different industries and have varied use cases, you also need to be able to identify the ones you can execute on and the ones which won’t be feasible.
It is much easier for the customer to start a conversation with your support team instantly instead of over an email or phone. In fact, you can proactively prompt conversations in a relevant manner, based on the context of the customer (the page they might be on, the keywords searched by them and more). And hence, it makes a lot of sense to offer live chat support.
There are times when your customers might be looking for some product information or even an issue that they would want to fix themselves. And you don’t always want your customers to be dependent on your support representatives to resolve issues. It is a best practice to offer self-service options with a strong knowledge base and FAQs. If you are already offering live chat support, you can activate chatbots, suggest the right FAQ and knowledge base docs based on the customer’s context.
What next?
Onboarding a new user is one of the earliest touchpoints in customer experience, and an integral part of customer support. It is a nurturing process of getting your new user acquainted to your product.
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