9 Best Practices to Improve Customer Support as a SaaS

Importance of customer support in SaaS businesses

For SaaS businesses, customer service quality is a crucial factor in determining whether users are satisfied with their products and are likely to renew their subscriptions. Even the best SaaS products out there have minor issues and lags that may lead to users reaching out to customer support because of disruption to daily operations.

As a SaaS company, here are some of the benefits you can enjoy by investing in your customer service quality:

1.  Increased customer loyalty

Better support translates into better service quality, making your users want to stay loyal to your SaaS product for a longer time. SaaS products often play important roles in streamlining important business functions for users, making customer support quality crucial in winning over your customer’s loyalty. Moreover, this also means higher Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and lower churn rate, leading to more profitability in the long run.

By providing adequate support to your users, you can keep them interested in your brand for a longer time, and even prompt them to leave a positive review or feedback for your brand. Consider also that your customer support can be the decisive factor for a potential lead to choose your product over your competitor’s. 

2. Improved user experience

By leveling up your customer support, you can also guide your users’ product experience and prevent or overcome any issues that might cause them to get frustrated. As a result, you can deliver consistently great customer experience through your product, and ensure that they can unlock its fullest potential.

Remember, 8 out of 10 customers are likely to pay more for a product if they deliver a good user experience. With an improved user experience, you can also assure your customers that they are valuable to your brand and that their requirements and needs are understood.

3. Higher customer retention

SaaS businesses, more than any other type of business, have to rely heavily on retaining customers and the recurring monthly and annual revenue they get from customers. SaaS businesses must keep improving their product, roll out consistent updates, and even invest extensively in marketing and customer engagement so existing users feel motivated to renew their subscriptions. 

That said, acquiring new users for your product may require you to spend a lot of time and money, making it easier to instead focus on boosting your customer retention rate. Higher customer retention can also boost your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), an important metric measuring your business performance.

4. Better brand image

The quality of customer support and service you deliver to users is one of the first things they are likely to notice about your brand. When it comes to choosing a SaaS tool to use, users depend on user reviews and feedback to inform their decisions. Unlike other businesses, SaaS companies must rely on customer reviews to convince potential users, as it is the only way they can get a sneak peek into the usability, pros, and cons of the product without actually using it.

Your users would also be actively looking for their experience with customer support and this could be an important factor in tipping the scale in your favor or your competitors’. Finally, how effectively your staff can showcase the mission and values of your brand can contribute to your brand reputation.

9 best practices to improve customer support as a SaaS

Now that you know how important customer support can be for your SaaS businesses,  let us look at some of the best practices you can consider implementing. To ensure that your customer support is as effective as the rest of your business functions, here are some of the best practices you should follow: 

1. Opt for a proactive approach

Your customer wants just as much as you to keep the support interactions to a minimum. While most businesses try too hard to reduce support queries, SaaS businesses must consider taking a proactive approach. Implement a customer-first strategy, and try to anticipate the needs of your users before they become major issues.

SaaS companies like Salesforce answering frequently asked questions on their website illustrate how they proactively manage customer support. Additionally, create email marketing campaigns that focus on sending out emails informing users about bugs in your SaaS product and your actions to fix them. SaaS businesses can improve their performance across the board by proactively communicating with users, and elevating their user experience, which is ultimately a decisive factor during subscription renewals.

2. Create a strong onboarding experience

A great customer support experience should start right from the moment a user registers and uses your product for the first time. Imagine having an app and getting your target users to install it. However, when users are using the app for the first time, the onboarding either takes too long or involves complicated steps. These users are likely to abandon your app almost immediately.

Right from developing a clear and frictionless onboarding process, to sending out well-designed welcome emails including critical resources, you must strive to start on the right note with each user. You can also leverage the onboarding process to provide welcome videos and product tours so that your users can get well acquainted with your product.

By providing the right resources, and using content smartly, you can ensure that your onboarding process works as a customer service channel for your brand.

3. Record and monitor your metrics

Customer support is an important process for your SaaS business, especially since it reflects your ability to meet your customers’ satisfaction through your product. You must record and monitor the key customer support metrics to ensure consistent improvements in customer service quality and satisfaction levels.

For a SaaS business, some of the common customer support metrics that you should measure are: First Response Time (FRT), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSS), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and Average Resolution Rate among others. 

Considering the highly competitive nature of the SaaS industry, monitoring and improving on these metrics can help ensure that potential users choose your product over other similar ones.

4. Seek customer feedback

Since the support process is centred around satisfying customers and resolving their queries, no one can give you better insights about the process than your users. 

Seek feedback from your users through surveys, feedback forms, and questionnaires on different kinds of channels. You can use emails or even deliver surveys while the customer is using your product for quick responses.

The data you collect from these instruments will give you a better understanding of the common pain points, expectations, and the best parts of your customer support processes. 

5. Prioritize documentation

Building a knowledge base can go a long way in complementing your customer support processes. With that in mind, building a knowledge base is one of the first things you want to do, while ensuring that you can expect at least ten-fold returns in the future. If your customer is stuck somewhere while using your product, you are equipping them to troubleshoot the issue without having to get involved.

For example, you can utilize Oracle Content Management to create a knowledge base consisting of how-to blogs and tutorials that can guide users with some of their common queries with your SaaS product.

By encouraging your users to check out your knowledge base for solutions to their queries, you can decrease the incoming ticket volume, and even grant them a self-service option so they don’t have to wait for a response. This documentation can also double up as training material for onboarding new employees and is required for your processes to work smoothly.

6. Strengthen the relationship between product & support

Hiring a large team to handle customer inquiries may seem practical, but it may create a disconnect between your product and customer support. Teams operating in silos struggle to build sustainable processes. Instead, fostering collaboration between support and product teams ensures a sharper focus on user needs.

For example, CPQ for Salesforce connects SaaS sales and product teams, enabling sales professionals to deliver custom quotes tailored to user requirements. This alignment enhances the user experience and strengthens internal collaboration.

To achieve similar results, involve your support team in product strategy meetings and encourage cross-departmental collaboration. This approach improves customer support quality and drives overall success.

7. Choose proper communication channels for customers and team

While several companies try to implement faster communication channels all the time, it may not necessarily bode well for them. Instead, SaaS companies must try to figure out the popular channels among their customers. Figure out the channels they frequently use to get in touch, and then strengthen your performance on these channels. 

For most SaaS businesses, the appropriate channels to communicate with customers are emails and a professional network like LinkedIn. Some may even prefer Slack to integrate the product deeper into their operations and processes.

Consider implementing channels your customers want you to serve them on, and avoiding channels they don’t need unless it will improve your engagement levels. After all, it is better to get your customer support on the limited channels preferred by your customers right, rather than focusing on multiple channels without having enough resources for it.

8. Automate routine queries and tasks

More often than not, you will find your customer support team trying to deal with the same actions and queries repeatedly. As your sales volume grows, so will your support tickets, and having your team handle all of that on a limited bandwidth is only counterproductive.

Instead, consider automating solutions for some of these queries and actions so that skilled team members can focus on other customer support areas. A lot of companies use tools like Zapier to automate replies to common queries, thus saving your team a lot of time and effort.

This is a screenshot from a self-generated query using Zapier’s chatbot.

9. Work on reducing response times

The more support options you provide to your users, the easier it gets for them to approach you with queries. However, when dealing with more channels, you may need to leverage additional strategies to keep your response times in check. Remember that in a SaaS environment where your users’ business operations may rely on your product, any downtime or lags can lead to disruption of productivity and workflows.

Consider adding extra support hours or even integrating a chatbot on your website to expedite query resolution. You can also consider outsourcing some of your customer support processes if you are dealing with a huge ticket volume, and try to reduce ticket backlogs as much as possible.

Concluding remarks

Your customer support processes can help you navigate even the most competitive scenario in the SaaS industry. The quality of your customer support can determine whether your SaaS business can effectively retain and serve users. However, applying a few of the aforementioned best practices can help you weather any customer support challenges that come your way and help you scale the process, as your business grows.