Creating Exceptional SaaS Customer Support

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Statistics show that 96% of customers believe that customer support is a significant brand loyalty factor. Moreover, 70% of them have already chosen a company with spotless customer service.

In the competitive SaaS ecosystem, where the number of your competitors is constantly growing, providing exceptional customer support is the only way to attract new customers and retain existing ones.

Here are a few powerful SaaS customer support tactics you should use.

Make Support Tabs Easily Findable

When do SaaS users look for support? Usually when they start doing something using your platform and then face a certain problem. Whether they’ve encountered a bug or they don’t know how to use a certain feature, they want to reach out to you as soon as possible.

That’s why you should always make sure the “Support” tab is prominent on your site. You could even bundle all your contact and support resources under one support tab to increase user experiences.

Slack, for example, takes self-service to a new level, by providing the auto-suggest feature in their self-service bar. This way, a user can find the right answer to their question faster, especially if they’re not sure what they’re looking for.

Create a Comprehensive FAQ Page

When they have a question about your product or they want to get a quick answer to their question, most of your users will visit your FAQ page. Stats back me up on that. Zendesk found that over 67% of users prefer self-service support over interacting with a customer service representative.

Precisely because of that, you need to create an in-depth FAQ page featuring all frequent questions your customers ask and optimize it properly. This means including keywords your customers use to make your content easily findable. Pay attention to what kind of content users clicked on after performing a search. Most importantly, check whether your content matches these search phrases to make your answers more valuable and relevant.

BlueFish is an example of a site with a solid FAQ page. Like you can see on the image below, their “Frequently Asked Questions” section is broken up into smaller sections around the same topics. For example, if you want to learn more about cPanel hosting, you can search it in their “Professional Services” tab. The “Submit Ticket” and “Contact Us” tabs are also visible from the FAQ page, as well as their live chat and the knowledge base you can search by keyword.

It’s also important to assess the relevance of your self-service articles. Evernote does this regularly, by asking a visitor whether the article was helpful or not. This form of feedback will make your knowledge base more valuable, accurate, and user-friendly.

Know why You’re Receiving Support Requests

Your goal is to listen to your customers’ demands and adapt your tool according to them.
For example, if lots of your customers complain about annoying bugs when using your tool, you should analyze its performance as fast as possible and get rid of these specific problems.

You may also notice that lots of customers ask you about a missing feature. If this feature really makes sense for your tool and it keeps showing up in your support requests, then consider upgrading your tool and adding the feature to it. This will show your customers that you really listen to their requests and inspire them to stick around longer.

Finally, some of your customers will reach out to you, complaining about your overly complex product features. If your users find your tool too difficult to use, that’s not good. If a user needs to read your guide or FAQ page every time they use a certain feature, they will soon leave you for your competitors. Your customer requests are an ideal opportunity to identify such features and optimize them fast to maximize user experience and minimize customer support requests.

Centralize your Support Requests

In the hyperconnected era we live in, customers use multiple platforms and channels to communicate with brands. These interactions go in all directions, from email and live chat to social networks. Most importantly, they expect you to provide exceptional and timely feedback, irrespective of the channel they use.

Shopify is a perfect example of a SaaS brand with a solid, multi-channel customer support strategy. Under their “Support” tab, they offer 24/7 customer support, as well as links to forums, help center, API documentation, and so forth. They also provide customer support on social. They’ve created separate support handles on Twitter so their account managers can track support inquiries and provide relevant feedback in real time.

However, managing mountains of support requests across multiple platforms can be overwhelming. This may lead to many unanswered messages, dissatisfied customer support representatives, and many similar problems. Precisely because of that, you should focus on centralizing your support conversation under one platform. This is where tools like Help Scout can help, as they let you integrate multiple conversation channels under one platform.

Your Customer Support should Focus on Customer Retention

The number of your competitors in the SaaS landscape is exploding, so attracting new customers is not enough. You should focus on bringing continuous value to your customers and increasing their brand loyalty. Most importantly, aside from helping your active customers, why not reach out to inactive ones and inspire them to start using your product again?

Trello is a perfect example of how this is done. They send automated emails to users that haven’t used their app for a while, informing a user about the main pros of using their platform. Above all, they provide a link to useful guides, in case a user needs a quick refresher on how Trello is used. Not to mention the large, authentic “Go To My Boards” call-to-action that grabs people’s attention immediately and motivates them to click.

Back to You

With a proper plan, managing SaaS customer support can be easy.
First, remember that your customer support efforts should change as your customers’ demands alter. To maximize its effectiveness, you should constantly test and improve it.

Second, make your support options easy to find. Make your “Help” button visible on each page on your website and use the right font size. Create a comprehensive FAQ page that includes the answers to customers’ most frequent questions.

Third, include internal links, guiding your visitors from one page to another. For example, your FAQ page should lead a customer to your live chat, knowledge base, or “Submit Ticket.”

Finally, provide multi-channel customer support to appeal to the different needs of your users. Most importantly, remember that customer services are all about keeping your customers happy and inspiring their loyalty over time.

How do you provide SaaS customer support?

Nate Vickery, Msc
Nate Vickery is a business technology expert and a futurist mostly engaged in finding and implementation of the latest technology trends into SMB and startups management and marketing processes. Nate is also the editor-in-chief at business oriented blog- Bizzmarkblog.com.

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