Supporting a SaaS Product

The first interaction many customers have with a business is with their support team. According to Forbes, businesses lose $75B a year due to poor customer service. It's therefore important to make sure that the first impression you make on your customers is a positive one. In this post you’ll find some of the things you can do to deliver a positive, lasting impression on your customers via your support team.

Accessibility

Keep it simple. It shouldn’t be difficult for your customers to contact your support team. Find the most appropriate channel(s) for your demographic (B2B - typically email, B2C - typically live-chat and/or social media) and make accessing those services as frictionless as possible. Not doing this will lead to customers simply not contacting your Support team when they have a problem and ultimately, moving away to another platform.

Tooling

Make it easy for your support team to do their job. Cronofy have tried a few different support tools in the past (Intercom and Hubspot for example), but after some trials and tribulations, we ended up choosing Zendesk to manage support tickets. Zendesk is the industry leader for a reason. It makes managing customer interactions really easy, allows us to save time by utilizing Macros to craft common responses and features triggers for automation of common tasks. Zendesk, due to its popularity, has a plethora of additional apps and integrations, for example Hubspot integration, providing our Sales team with a fully centralized view of a customer’s history with Cronofy within native CRM tooling.

Identify efficiencies

Given the choice of doing something themselves, or contacting your support team, your customers are likely to want to self serve. Why? Less waiting. Your customer gets what they want without having to wait and they don’t have to interact with an email or chat platform. Start by looking at the data you already have. Consider the following questions:

• What questions are your customers asking time and time again?
• Could you provide your customers the capability to fulfil their own requests?

Providing self serve capabilities and/or documentation are key to maintaining an effective support team while your product and customer base grow. A good example of how Cronofy recently did this is when we identified a number of cases in relation to our Enterprise Connect product. Specifically, the first time connection with Enterprise Connect. As a result, we re-wrote our documentation to go into more detail around getting started. In response, we’ve had some great feedback from our customers!

Measure the right data

"If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it. If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it. If you don’t measure it, you probably don’t care. If you can’t influence it, then don’t measure it."
Randy A. Steinberg

Understand which metrics are important to the running of your support team. At Cronofy, we want to know that we’re resourced correctly within the support team, we’re responding to tickets in a timely fashion, and that our customers are happy with the services that we provide. Here are the metrics that we report against to achieve those goals:

Tickets opened vs closed

These metrics tell us whether we’re well staffed enough to deal with the amount of tickets coming in, or alert us to when we might need to write more documentation or build new self-serve capabilities.

First time to respond

This metric tells us on average, how long the support team takes to respond to tickets. We use this metric to ensure our customers are getting the help they need within an acceptable time frame. If this isn’t the case, we can then look into why and what we can do to improve our performance.

NPS

Net promoter score provides Cronofy with an understanding of customer loyalty, and the likelihood that our customers would recommend our services to their customers or colleagues.

Utilize daily customer interactions

Your Support team are not only the voice of your business to the customer, but the voice of your customer internally, too. Utilize the daily customer interactions and insight of your team by seeking their feedback. Ask them for their thoughts on product changes or new products. Your support team will often offer an informed view from a customer-first perspective.