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Simple to set up. Easy to use. Powerful integrations.
Get startedCustomer service is the heartbeat of your software business and SaaS customer support is the key to offering exceptional service that leaves your customers feeling valued and respected. Excellence in customer service increases customer loyalty, builds sales, and enhances your reputation. SaaS customer support involves a bit of effort and expense at the start. A SaaS application is easy to set up and operate because there’s no mess of tangled wires or a central server for your company to manage. It’s a system that’s easy on your budget and quick to implement.
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How to Define SaaS Customer Support
The competitiveness of the marketplace requires companies to embrace a spirit of post-sale proactiveness. The end of a sale signifies the beginning of an extended relationship with your customers. While they will certainly enjoy and appreciate your product or service, your customers define success as great service after the sale.
The definition of SaaS customer support is providing continued customer service to your customers after the sale or developing an expert support team to meet post-sale needs. Customer support takes the form of incoming support for customer inquiries and problem-solving. It also responds to your customers’ need for continued education on your product or service and how they can best use it to help them solve their problems and reach their goals.
Your customer support team stands as your customers’ first point of contact after a sale. Their interactions with customers reflect the integrity and appeal of your brand.
For the purpose of ensuring quality of service, it’s important to use reliable technology and ensure that your customer support agents respond to clients consistently. SaaS customer support is the foundation of your customer success model. The employees you choose should have a good understanding that their role demands striving for an excellent customer experience.
Implementing Successful SaaS Customer Support
Implementing a successful SaaS customer support team entails a more thoughtful process than just merely setting up an email string or placing an ad for a few people to answer the phone. Think through the steps of defining your customer service philosophy, training your team to abide by it and provide premier customer service, and using the right communication channels.
Your Customer Support Philosophy
Your company’s values provide the basis for developing your customer service philosophy. Your whole customer team needs to be on the same page with it. A good strategy that some companies prefer is to allow their customer support teams to weigh in on the philosophy because they will automatically embody it.
Once you’ve carved your customer support philosophy in stone, it will naturally yield a set of KPI’s that you can use to measure your team’s performance. Determine whether you will use surveys, reviews, sales, or some other measure of performance and also share them with your team.
Your customer philosophy should also reflect the quality of service that you want your team to provide. This requires benchmarking your response times, number of complaints and praises, hours of availability against your competition, and your company goals. Your team should be trained on how to handle calls and what to do if they can’t help someone. Scripts are a nice training tool, but don’t forget that customers want that personal touch. Customers prefer to speak with customer support agents that use their name and respond genuinely. Tone, form of speech, and attitude all count.
Building Your Team
Build your team to support all the hours that your business is open. Be mindful that if your customer support hours only support normal Monday through Friday normal business hours, some customers may not be able to take advantage of your assistance because they’re working the same hours. If you sell your products and services to customers in vastly different time zones, they could be sleeping during your normal service hours. Set agent hours to cover the period of time when your customers will likely call in to promote retention.
Many companies address this issue by giving call agents a flexible schedule. This is a benefit for many employees as it gives them time to tend to personal issues where the businesses they patronize are only open during normal business hours.
Consider the number of customer support agents that you’ll need to ensure that your calls are picked up in a reasonable amount of time. When setting up your SaaS customer support system, consider the number of call agents you employ, how many agents have specialized expertise, and the volume of calls that will be coming in.
Customer Communication Channels
Finally, you probably use multiple channels to communicate with your customers such as email, chat, and forums. Sometimes, your customers need to have a two-way conversation with a real human being. That’s where your customer support team gives your company a huge advantage.
A cloud-based phone system works to support your call agent team members by synchronizing the information
and making it accessible to everyone on the team to facilitate strong collaboration. The features allow you to set the availability status, route and redirect calls, access contact information and the call history, and give you analytics to assess your KPIs.
If your business needs change, your cloud-based phone system makes it easy for you to scale your SaaS customer support team up or down.
The Importance of Customer Support
Customer service has always been important for businesses. In recent times, competition has been stronger than ever. As the following statistics demonstrate excellence in customer support is the difference between companies that thrive and companies that merely survive.
84% of customers are tired of being treated like a number and want to be treated like a person.
59% of customers indicated that they wanted customer service agents to engage with them based on their past interactions.
70% of customers expressed a desire to have seamless handoffs and for customer service agents to know the context of their call and past interactions.
Exceptional customer service is a reflection of your brand, mission, and values and it has a strong bearing on your reputation. In addition, it’s costlier to acquire new customers than it is to retain them. According to Harvard Business Review, it can cost your business between 5 and 25 times more than retaining an existing customer, depending on which industry or study you’re researching. A cloud-based phone system along with SaaS customer support will help you to decrease churn—customers that buy and then leave you rather quickly.
Hubspot reports that companies that retain just 5% of their customers net an increase in profit of 25%. Repeat customers are likely to spend even more with your brand—as much as 67% more on average.
A skilled customer support team that has the right tools at their disposal helps your company in the following additional ways:
Increased sales
Stronger customer retention
Opportunities for cross-selling and upselling
Suggestions for innovations
Improvements in products and services
Better decision-making
Cultivates loyalty
Helps recoup customer acquisition costs
Provides case studies
Delivers testimonials, stellar reviews, and 5-star ratings
Your customers do the bulk of their business online and on the phone. The only way they can assess your company is based on what they see about your brand, namely on your social media presence, ads, content, and the experience they have when speaking with your customer support agents. Promptness, friendliness, and a sense of being honest and genuine count for a lot.
Is Your Team Providing 5-Star SaaS Customer Support?
If your customers aren’t regularly giving you 5-star reviews, there’s room for improvement. Gold-star customer service shows your customers that you care about them and value their loyalty.
Customers hate to wait on hold. Learn what your response time is and if it’s not what you expect, figure out what takes to improve it. Train your support agents to be personal. With a cloud-based phone system by Aircall, your call agents can pull up your customers’ call history while they’re delivering their initial greeting. Call agents will be able to refer to them by their names and they’ll already have the context from prior calls. Often, call agents receive the fallout from angry customers. By listening and being willing to go the extra mile to address their concerns, they have the opportunity to turn a dissatisfied customer into a lifelong customer.
Aircall is your answer to realizing excellence in customer support which will help you reach your business goals of greater retention, higher profits, and scalability. Aircall also offers open API to make it easy to integrate with other applications seamlessly. Overall, Aircall provides the tools you need to provide the best in customer service and stay ahead of your competition.
Published on August 10, 2020.
