Does your support meet your high standards?

While many different factors play a role in a SaaS company’s success, customer support is one of the most important. The customer support team is responsible for ensuring that paying customers are both satisfied with their investment and are able to maximize their use of the product. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for users to succeed with your product.

Ensure best in class support

At the same time, customer support can be the most time-consuming (and expensive) activity in your business. Nevertheless, it is critical that you equip your frontline staff with the right tools & skills to make your product shine, and not only when it comes to sales presentations. In other words, the way you provide support can make or break your business.

The basics

Just make sure you get these right:

1. Make support easily accessible

If a user needs support, they might already be feeling frustrated since your app is not as intuitive or maybe even too complex to be 100% intuitive. That’s why it’s important to make sure that they get the right support tools immediately.

2. All requests in one place

Mail, call, chat, ticketing. You can add multiple routes to access your support resources, but you need to make sure that everything is in one spot so that you have access to transparency on all activities. Get the right tools and make it work for you.

3. Make your knowledge base work

Your knowledge base might be the first point of contact for users needing support. Make sure you:

• get the right FAQs answered
• make it easy for users to search for topics (e.g. keywords, tagging)
• make your knowledge base easy to understand - sometimes a short video can explain much more than just text
• review your knowledge base regularly and make sure it mirrors the product. Don't make users even more frustrated because information is outdated or irrelevant.

Tools are not everything

There are a lot of tools out there that can help you to handle your support efficiently, but since you want to outperform and provide the best user experience, there are other factors that matter.

1. Go that extra mile

Getting started? Want to grow? Make things that don't scale. Although you already might be familiar with this phrase, make sure you apply it.

Getting inside your customers’ heads, identifying the key users/ambassadors of your product that are highly involved at a company and making users extremely happy by going the extra mile that they don´t expect, makes the difference.

That is why it’s so important to build a loyal customer base and generate referrals.

2. Embrace feedback

Listen to feedback and appreciate the effort it took when you do receive feedback because:

• It tells you what your customer is experiencing.
• It tells you what your customer is thinking.
• It tells you what your customer really wants.

Besides direct feedback, find multiple ways to collect information using surveys, webinars, key user roundtables, etc.

3. Be “the” product specialist

If a highly involved user says that your support team is incapable, there are two potential outcomes:

• Ask her if she is looking for a new job opportunity at your company to fix the issue
• A frustrated user will not praise/support your product in the near future.

So, make sure you have access to all the information (or at least know who to ask) and be the advocate of your product.

Summary

Customer support is not just the responsibility of a single, dedicated team, it’s the responsibility of the entire company. An overall customer-focused culture is essential to be successful as a SaaS company. Remember: “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.”