SaaS Customer Support 101: How to Get Your Customers to Fall in Love with Your Product.

Ever met an Apple fan? Their faith in the company is unshakable.

Why is that? I mean sure the gadgets are good, but there are other products in the market that do exactly the same things and cost considerably less.?

So what makes Apple so special that they enjoy 92% brand loyalty from their customers?

The answer is user experience – their gadget ecosystem and ownership prestige have a huge part to play in it, but that doesn’t set them apart from the crowd…

…it’s their customer support.?

What is SaaS Customer Support?

It’s your opportunity to set word-of-mouth marketing alight. If you’re a B2B SaaS company, customer support can be your competitive advantage in a crowded market. Customers who feel heard and taken care of are willing to pay up to 30% more instead of switching to a cheaper alternative. Imagine what your churn rate and revenue would look like if your customers would rather give you 30% more than switch to the competition?

Happy customers are forgiving to tech failures, switch to higher subscriptions faster and don’t churn easily.

This is why it should be a prime focus for all founders.

How to Create an Amazing SaaS Customer Support Strategy

Dan has run a lot of businesses, together, we've coached even more, and almost all of them have a reputation of stellar customer support in the industry.?

Looking back at the processes followed in any of those, these two things stand out:

1. Documenting the lessons we learned from support, and adding them into a growing knowledge base.
2. Using automation, snippets, text expanders and the above knowledge base to speed up the time taken to resolve customer complaints.

Here are the 5 key components behind my Customer Support growth-hacking strategy:

Step 1: figure out how your current customer support process is doing. If you want to save some time creating an audit sheet, you can use my Customer Support Builder?. It’ll help you figure out the right next steps. I’m particularly proud of this one honestly.

But here are some key areas every SaaS should optimize:

1. Focus on Customer Outcomes?

Any time a customer reaches out to you with a problem, it’ll be for one of two reasons:

1. Their product experience isn’t consistent with the promise that made them buy your product. (Technical issues or something not working the way it’s supposed to).
2. They’re trying to achieve an outcome that will make their lives easier but they’re facing roadblocks.

Now, with technical issues, it all boils down to how fast they feel heard, understood and placated. Technology fails…it happens, they’ll understand if you know how to handle them with humility.

You need to sit down with your team, map out all the outcomes and all the possible issues they can run into and build ready-to-deploy play books for when these issues happen.

Another thing to be aware of? You can’t possibly foresee all the potential issues…so you’ll need a response playbook for when an unforeseen error occurs + you need to ensure your feedback loops are set up to trigger a chain reaction that alerts the team to build out a new playbook for the new error.

Map those primary outcomes, make sure your customer gets to them with minimal hiccups and your churn rate will thank you for it.

2. Invest in Your Customer Support Team

We need to build training processes that support your support team. Sounds funny, right?

But the world of SaaS evolves fast… your product is changing rapidly to adapt to the market and the customer’s needs. If you don’t have a process that informs your support team about it… they’ll end up in a spot where the customer is expecting an outcome that they have no idea about.

That’s the root of unsatisfactory customer support, disgruntled customers, and churn.

Invest in training your support team to be 100% equipped to give your customers the best experience possible.

They’ll need to understand:

1. How escalations work?
2. How customers are using those core outcomes and what it means for their business?
3. Any changes in your product

3. Understand Flow Escalation?

It doesn’t matter what type of business you have. Your escalations can be placed into 3 categories:

Tier 1 escalations: the common issues that happen with every tech product?

Tier 2 escalations: Escalations that are specific to your product?

Tier 3 escalations: Tech or frameworks that are robbed and duplicated from best practices that should work but don’t for some reason.

Your support team needs to know these definitions so they can bucket their tickets into these categories and know exactly who to escalate them to.?

Somebody needs to review the number of tickets in each tier at the end of the day and ensure they are moving forward. The reason? Most support engineers tend to cherry-pick the “interesting problems” and kind of dally and delay on the “annoying problems”.?

Having someone looking at ticket progress ensures this doesn’t happen and that your customer support becomes truly world-class.

This step is what gets you those glowing reviews and word-of-mouth referrals.

4. Know What Metrics to Measure

After marketing, your customer support metrics are the easiest to measure and are a goldmine for quantitative product insights (qualitative ones being your customer support tickets).

The top ones to measure are:

1. Time to first response
2. Time to open tickets
3. NPS or a measure of customer satisfaction

The best way to leverage customer support metrics is to set some ambitious targets for these metrics and review them weekly in your leadership meetings.

5. Productize the Knowledge Base

Wanna know a crazy stat? 85% of your customers don’t really want to send you an email or call you when they face a problem.

If your website has automation in place to answer customer questions… not only will they use it, but they would actually feel like you know them and their needs inside out.

So gather your insights, make screenshot videos resolving common or recurring issues and have a support page in place that easily gets them to that preloaded solution quickly.

Bake your customer support team’s learnings into your marketing website.

The tools your support team uses to make their job faster will have everything you need to create a self-serve support portal for your product.

Conclusion: Why is Customer Support Important for SaaS Companies?

Having a killer Customer Support system means active customers are getting incredible first-hand experiences from your team… and that translates into direct recommendations.

Dreaded customer support tickets become treasure troves for insights that make your product indispensable in your market.

And the revenue… I mean, isn’t that what all this is about? ;)?

Got specific questions about SaaS customer support strategy? Get them answered here>>>