Not everybody has the precise expertise and angle to ship glorious SaaS customer support. At a minimal, a superb assist agent ought to possess emotional intelligence, empathy, and artistic communication expertise.
From there, you possibly can rent for particular units of expertise required to work together with your product and inside the context of your assist group. Which will embrace domain-specific studying, expertise with explicit instruments, and even authorized necessities based mostly on location.
Outline what the perfect candidate seems like to your group, after which rent with that in thoughts. With out a tremendous group of individuals offering your assist expertise, all of your methods and instruments will not make a distinction.
As soon as you have employed a unbelievable group, determine how one can measure their success. Not solely will this show to the remainder of your organization that assist is effective, nevertheless it additionally offers your group members the instruments to enhance their work and construct their assist careers.
8 SaaS buyer assist greatest practices
Whereas the fundamental rules of assist are easy (reply to clients, be type and useful, and remedy their issues), delivering nice assist requires methods that are not all the time apparent.
Listed below are 8 SaaS buyer assist greatest practices that you could be not have thought of, however they will make your life (and your clients’ lives) extra manageable.
1. Prioritize documentation
One of many first assist instruments you need to construct is a radical data base. Any time you spend creating documentation will repay ten-fold afterward.
Not solely do 70% of consumers say they like to reply their questions utilizing a self service choice, however encouraging clients to go looking your data base will scale back your incoming ticket quantity.
Onboarding new staff is far simpler if you happen to’ve written down the data they want. With out documentation, your staff retailer all the pieces of their heads. When brokers go away, take a sick day, or are merely busy, your group will battle to reply buyer questions successfully.
Having documented product data is essential to offering a terrific buyer expertise, particularly as your organization grows.
2. Construct a detailed relationship between assist and product
It may be tempting to rent a couple of entry-level staff and put them to work responding to clients. However making a silo between assist and the remainder of the corporate will trigger an entire host of issues down the highway.
Buyer assist spends essentially the most time speaking on to clients. They know what clients need, what they battle with, and the way they impart. Constructing a robust connection between assist and the remainder of the corporate will assist maintain your concentrate on the client as you develop.
To develop this cross-functional communication bridge, carry buyer assist members into your SaaS product group’s conferences, flow into assist conversations inside the firm, spotlight buyer satisfaction survey responses in Slack, and construct connections between staff in numerous departments.
3. Measure your progress
What does “good” assist imply to you and your clients? With out measuring the outcomes, you will not know if you happen to’re delivering nice assist that makes a distinction to your enterprise.
First, you will have to measure the efficiency of your assist group (even when that is only one particular person). The most crucial buyer assist metrics to keep watch over are:
Variety of tickets: Is the quantity going up, down, or staying the identical?
Common response time: Are you persistently responding rapidly to buyer requests?
Buyer satisfaction: Do clients point out that they’re blissful together with your service?
It is also important to grasp how your buyer assist efforts are impacting your development. When the Assist Scout assist group centered on support-driven development methods, they discovered that 70% of the individuals who chatted with them whereas on trial ended up as paying clients.
To measure this quantity for your self, contemplate analyzing the variety of clients who improve from trial to paid clients in addition to the variety of clients who churn after speaking to buyer assist.
The proper assist desk software program makes it straightforward to trace key metrics and use that information to constantly enhance your group’s efficiency and your buyer expertise.
4. Make steering straightforward to search out
Since assist is a driver for SaaS buyer retention and development, it is essential to make it straightforward to search out. As an alternative of hiding your “Contact Us” type down inside the footer of your web site, embrace reside chat bins, doc searches, and hyperlinks to documentation all through your product.
Make it straightforward to your clients to search out out the place they should go to get assist — possibly even going as far as to supply in-context assist the place you possibly can, like what’s obtainable in Assist Scout’s Beacon.
5. Select the right channels to your group and your clients
Many corporations assume that the sooner the channel, the higher will probably be to your clients. Essentially, although, that’s simply not true.
Take time to grasp which channels your clients are utilizing to contact you and if they’re hungry for a special contact technique. You need to be capable to look, as an example, for the variety of instances “telephone assist” has been talked about inside a ticket in your assist desk.
In case your clients aren’t asking for a selected channel, you most likely need not provide it except there’s an actual alternative to supply considerably higher assist.
It is higher to do a couple of issues excellently than many issues poorly. Your clients might be extra impressed by a superb response (even when it isn’t over their most popular channel) than they might have been ready for a very long time to get a poor reply in a channel they like.
Selecting a instrument for multichannel assist
When you determine which channels to concentrate on you’ll want to select a instrument that can assist you handle incoming requests. Whereas in some circumstances it might make extra sense to make use of a channel-specific instrument, more often than not discovering a assist desk that can allow you to handle your entire incoming and outgoing conversations from a single platform would be the proper transfer.
For example, Assist Scout helps:
Along with the channels above, Assist Scout integrates with different communication software program to assist carry your entire channels into one place.
6. Supply assist proactively quite than reactively
For many assist groups, reactive responses are their bread and butter. A buyer sends an e mail, and your assist group responds. In SaaS buyer assist, although, there’s a ton of worth in offering proactive assist earlier than your buyer ever turns into upset or misplaced.
Over 67% of customers favor self-service assist over contacting your group and ready for a solution.
Be aware of the forms of questions your clients are asking, and contemplate writing up easy-to-find documentation or in-context assist inside the type of product guides, tooltips, or searchable documentation.
In fact, if a web page is tremendous complicated or tons of individuals are reaching out a couple of particular difficulty, fixing the product is the very best answer. Nonetheless, glorious documentation generally is a good bridge if a repair will not be imminent.
Not solely does this present a greater expertise to your clients, nevertheless it additionally frees up your assist group to work on extra difficult points.
7. Ask for and take heed to buyer suggestions
The most effective individuals to inform you how you might be doing together with your customer support are your precise clients. Give them loads of alternatives to inform you what you might be or aren’t doing nicely.
For example, embrace hyperlinks on the backside of your entire assist emails that immediate the client to say whether or not the response was glorious or may have been higher.
You need to use surveys to gauge your clients’ satisfaction (Buyer Satisfaction Rating), how a lot effort they should put into getting assist (Buyer Effort Rating), and even whether or not they would advocate your product to a good friend (Internet Promoter Rating).
Supply these surveys typically and inside the context of buyer interplay, and you may achieve tons of wonderful insights on how one can enhance each your product and your assist technique.
8. Automate routine behaviors
In the event you discover your group members repeatedly performing the identical particular actions, it might be time to automate them.
For example, if you might be manually dealing with refunds every single day, it might make sense to automate the method to avoid wasting effort and time.
The identical applies to many day-to-day actions on a assist group, and saved replies or instruments like TextExpander and Zapier could be huge savers of effort and time. Many customer support software program platforms provide automation options you possibly can benefit from.
Examples of SaaS corporations with nice buyer assist
Firms that ship nice assist do not simply profit from blissful clients — their concentrate on the client expertise turns into a novel promoting level. Clients pays as much as 25% extra to work with an organization recognized for its excellent service.
The businesses listed under have grow to be well-known for his or her assist and certain get pleasure from a lot of their success due to it.
Zapier helps a variety of customers — from novices who’re simply attempting automation for the primary time to energy customers working superior scripts throughout many alternative integrations.
Why is their assist so good? They provide quite a lot of methods for purchasers to get assist, together with neighborhood assist. Plus, they’re large advocates of all arms assist, which helps each worker really feel related to their clients.
SkySlope is a real-estate dealer software program firm that noticed a file excessive buyer satisfaction score of 97.5% in 2019.
Why is their assist so good? Clients say their assist group’s endurance is notable. SkySlope’s assist group prioritizes taking the required time to supply full resolutions:
“We try to supply as a lot time and sources wanted to satisfy the requests of our clients. On the similar time, we’re dedicated to offering an outstanding, pleasant, and constructive expertise for everybody.”
Buffer has mastered its tone and magnificence, which ought to come as no shock on condition that they’re a social media firm.
Nonetheless, it isn’t simply their glorious on-line banter that units them aside. Buffer makes it extraordinarily easy to discover a answer regardless of the place you might be inside the product. They provide easy-to-find assist on each single web page inside their app.
Clients can discover solutions with out leaving the web page they’re on as a substitute of looking for after which navigating to their assist docs. Even higher: When the client does discover the data they want, they’re already inside the product, prepared to select up the place they left off.
Why is their assist so good? Buffer helps clients assist themselves with out ever having to go away their product. Life is best if you don’t must e mail assist.
Headspace does a unbelievable job at onboarding and retaining new clients, virtually fully as a result of their onboarding e mail technique quite than the stickiness of the product itself.
Their first e mail contains tons of tips on how one can get began and why their product could also be beneficial for you, whereas the remainder of the e-mail marketing campaign is designed particularly with conventional consumer patterns in thoughts.
For example, when the consumer inevitably drops off in utilization, Headspace has a intelligent guided e mail with the consumer’s persona in thoughts.
Why is their assist so good? Headspace has taken the time to get to know its clients and has written compelling and useful steering.
Grovo is not a family identify like a few of the different SaaS merchandise on this listing, however they’ve certainly differentiated themselves relating to assist. The microlearning firm has performed a superb job at making a useful and comforting chatbot — not two phrases usually related to bots.
Utilizing their very own product, they’ve created a chatbot that mechanically prompts customers with questions they could ask based mostly on the web page they’re on.
Many individuals immediately shut down once they notice they’re talking to a bot quite than a “actual human,” however when the bot suggests the questions, it takes all the work out of the interplay and helps clients discover the solutions they want.
Why is their assist so good? Preemptively volunteering a buyer’s potential questions is next-level proactivity.
SaaS buyer assist provides extra worth than you assume
Buyer assist looks like a essential evil for many corporations — you might have clients, and you must assist them, proper? However when performed appropriately, it has the potential to be vastly impactful to your backside line, retention, product velocity, and even product adoption.
An important assist expertise can clean a buyer’s path by means of the shopping for cycle. And if you happen to present glorious assist to a buyer when they’re contemplating a competitor, it might be the differentiator between sticking together with your product or going elsewhere.
Begin by growing your technique. From there, choose the precise instruments to get you the place you need to go, and employees the group that can get you there. Be sure that your group is giving your buyer what they need most, and observe your metrics and your progress.
There are tons of nice corporations doing glorious SaaS buyer assist, so take inspiration wherever you possibly can, and implement a few of their greatest practices into your individual assist technique.