How to make SaaS customer support outstanding

In a SaaS company, providing great support is the key to your growth and success.

SaaS customer support plays a part in reputation, brand image, loyalty, and customer satisfaction. It’s more than just understanding the functionality of the product, solving bugs, and handling technical issues. It’s about being alongside customers throughout their journey and ensuring they have a positive experience — starting before the sale is even made.

When to involve SaaS customer support

When you think of customer support, your mind probably goes to a live agent helping solve bugs. But SaaS companies that understand the importance of the customer experience involve customer support throughout the customer journey.

SaaS customer support starts with helping prospects

When SaaS prospects visit your website, they generally start out on the self-service path. They check out your website, but then they start to have questions. Many will go to the FAQ page to find answers to basic questions, and if you’ve done a good job they will be satisfied.

But what if prospects don’t find an answer to their question? That’s when live service becomes a necessity.

To ensure prospects have access to instant contact, it’s useful to have live chat, phone, and visual engagement options available. Human-to-human contact reduces customer frustration and enables your business to deliver a good customer experience.

Live engagement also helps you learn more about your prospects, including discovering their business needs and problems. The more you know about your prospects, the easier it becomes to develop a demo that meets their specific needs. 

SaaS customer support can improve your onboarding experience

Once a prospect is ready to move from a trial to a buying phase, you need to be prepared to offer live support. During the onboarding process, walk them through all the steps from signup to activation to training. This can help decrease the drop off rate and ensure a friction-free experience. This extra effort upfront can have long-term benefits, including:

• Better engagement
• Reduced churn
• Decrease in future support calls
• Customer empowerment

Want to supercharge your onboarding? Glance visual engagement solutions can help in supporting clients through cobrowse, screen sharing, and agent video. With Glance solutions, SaaS customer support employees can see exactly where customers are and what they’re doing.

Read: Supercharge Customer Experience With Cobrowse

4 ways to take SaaS customer support from average to outstanding

The work for SaaS customer service employees doesn’t end with onboarding. Churn rate is a constant threat.

The first step in assuring your customers will remain with you is to monitor what your users are doing and learn where they’re failing and succeeding in the application. There are software solutions that can help with behavioral analysis. The knowledge you can gain from this type of software gives you the opportunity to uncover key problems without waiting for the customer to complain or get frustrated.

Regardless of your proactive improvements, however, situations in which customers need live assistance will inevitably arise. Here are four areas you can take advantage of to take SaaS customer support from average to outstanding.

1. SaaS customer support – assistance

There are three main reasons for a client to contact a SaaS customer support team member with an issue:

• Bugs
• Missing features
• Confusing features

Don’t think of these as problems — these are opportunities. You could have an opportunity to discover a glitch. You almost always have an opportunity to impress the client by solving their issue. And there can even be an opportunity to upsell if another solution could help your client achieve their goals.
Read: How to improve SaaS customer success management today

Take, for instance, the example of a bug. Every bug found gives your IT team the opportunity to solve the issue and ensure no other customers experience that problem.

In the example of a missing feature, depending on how many people request the feature, you can get new ideas for how the product can be developed. Ultimately, this will result in more than one happy customer.

Regarding confusing features, hearing from customers provides you with the opportunity to improve communication and make product expectations clear.

2. SaaS customer support – usage

If a customer isn’t using your software, don’t let them fly under the radar. 

A 2012 study by Totango found a “near-perfect correlation between non-use and cancellations: cancellations of software subscriptions were almost always preceded by a period of non-use.”

It’s essential to discover why the customer isn’t using the product, and SaaS customer support should be reaching out to investigate. Sometimes they just need a nudge. Or they may have an unreported issue you can help them resolve. 

When talking to customers that appear to be breaking away, make them an offer that encourages them to give you a second chance. This will give you the opportunity to understand the source problem and find a solution.

3. SaaS customer support – education

SaaS customer support teams should be available to educate customers. Educate them about new features, how to use the current solution to its maximum potential, and how to grow usage of the solution within their company.

In addition to live support, you can facilitate education through:

• Blog posts / How-to articles
• Emails
• Webinars
• Videos
• Training courses
• User conferences (virtual or in-person)

All of these combined will help your customers get the most out of the product and show them added value.

4. SaaS customer support – centralization

No matter the size of your SaaS company, it’s important that customers understand their questions will be handled by your customer support team, regardless of the means of contact.

In other words, SaaS companies have social networks, websites with live engagement options, emails, and more. Ideally, you should centralize all communications from customers so that your SaaS customer support team can answer questions in the shortest possible time to a customer via the customer’s preferred channel. Tools such as Intercom and Zendesk allow you to concentrate communication all in one place, making a more seamless process for your customer support team and a more consistent experience for your customers.

Great customer service is the key

Outstanding SaaS customer support is key to running a successful business. While companies choose solutions partially based around features, studies have shown that many will pay more to have great customer service. Great customer support will increase revenue, customer loyalty, and your business reputation, making it vital to any SaaS company.

Improving the SaaS customer’s digital experience

Personal online support can make all the difference for SaaS customers. Download your free copy of our eBook, Personal meets Digital: Guided Experiences for SaaS,  to learn how to stand out among your competitors through meaningful digital interactions that can be a game-changer for your SaaS customer support efforts.

Here at Glance, we help facilitate a more personal customer experience at moments that matter most. Solutions like cobrowse, website chat, and customer service video can elevate your SaaS customer’s digital experience to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Request a demo today to see how Glance can transform your SaaS customer experience.

This post was originally written by Sara Sayegh-Moccand, updated by the Glance team in June 2022 to reflect current best practices.