Running a customer service department involves evolving from customer conversations to successful customer support. SaaS companies are selling a service that will inevitably have issues and require customer support.
Kennected’s vice president of operations, Ryan Roa, provided excellent inside information for what makes Kennected’s customer support above standard.
What's SaaS Customer Support?
SaaS customer support is one of the most valuable aspects of a marketing company. They are the ones who take the time to resolve trouble and issues with products and services sold. With the right tools, support teams can provide high-quality support to customers. Every SaaS company like Kennected has a support system that offers support at the beginning and end of the sales transaction.
Each customer service member is a small branch of your company. Your company’s reputation falls back on how they represent the place they work. Understanding your SaaS customer support will provide insight into how they feel about the company they work for.
In today’s world, business moves fast, and the customer base needs to remain informed at all times. Good customer support from Saas companies involves updating customers as products evolve and change. Customer service teams use phone support, email support, and live chat support for rapid response.
Customers are why a business thrives or sinks in the sales world and most industries in general. Support agents require many technical skills and knowledge base of the product(s) to provide excellent customer service. Much of the team’s performance relies on the customer success manager.
“When people sign up with us, we want to make sure they have an incredible experience whether they’re successful or not on the tool,” said Roa. “We want to make sure their interactions with us are all positive.”
How To Handle Customer Support Requests
Happy Customers Increase Your MRR
The monthly recurring revenue or MRR is a predictable revenue range a company expects to make monthly. If a SaaS business is receiving repeat customers under an organized customer relationship management, then the company’s monthly revenue is likely to become predictable. Happy customers come from a positive SaaS customer support team and managed support strategy.
“We’re lucky enough to have a 13-month average retention rate which is good,” said Roa. “It’s way above industry standard.”
When you define SaaS customer support, you may think of a positive customer experience or customer satisfaction, but there’s a foundation for all that. The customer service philosophy is the belief system and set of goals a customer support team provides to every customer. Although not every company will have the same customer service philosophy, it should support every customer.
What’s the tone that you want your company to have? How can your customer support differ from competitors? Keeping questions like this in mind can bring great customer service.
Consistent Feedback Loops
No customer support team is without its downs and missteps, and customers provide feedback on the support experience and service they’ve received. A feedback loop between the customer and customer service agents can significantly improve service and support for most companies. The feedback loop system involves customer support receiving feedback on customer experience and conversations. With customer feedback, support agents can shape the best way forward to provide excellent support.
Kennected ensures issues are relayed back to team leadership to make necessary changes. The company also takes feedback and recurring issues submitted by customers to ensure improvements are worked.
Build Good Helpful Resources
Specific customers learn differently from others. SaaS support may provide a “How-To” guide on setting up said product depending on the product. But another way to find answers might be seeing an infographic or visual guide of some sort. SaaS customer support adapts their support strategy to the feedback they receive. We want everyone to be on the same page when an issue arises.
Observing Google analytics from what works best for customers and what doesn’t can widen the knowledge base of the right tools to offer support.
“We have someone who is constantly monitoring our knowledge base to see if there are new articles we need and if there are articles that are no longer relevant based on the changes in our software,” said Roa.
Team Leads Know What KPIs Are Being Measured
Key performance indicators or KPIs represent a company’s progress toward its goal. To put this in perspective, customer support might want to know the average time a SaaS customer is on hold. Another goal might be to increase the company’s revenue over the past months. Like any goal, small steps ensure the service continues to progress and improve.
But to take those steps, the support team needs to know what needs improving. And don’t worry if you’re not good with math; identifying which KPIs need to be measured involves observation and communication open between everyone. The support team might be noticing issues too.
“Our KPIs are based on our customer feedback loop and team’s feedback loop and research we do inside of the industry,” said Roa.
Make Sure The Team Knows The Daily Activities That Increase KPIs
If support is unsure what daily activities need to be done, the company is in for a rough ride to the finish line. Having that constant point of contact between leaders and team members will help reduce miscommunication and distrust in one another.
“We have a great leadership team that manages the onboarding and the tech team to make sure they’re hitting those KPIs,” said Roa.
Closing A Ticket
One of the more challenging aspects of customer service is opening a support ticket. When there’s an issue with a product or service, customers can contact support to open a support ticket. The key is to work with customers, ensuring there’s a solution presented that satisfies the customer. Once a deal is met with a solution, support can close a ticket.
“We take the information and try to solve the issue quickly,” said Roa. “If it needs to be escalated to the DEV team, or one of us, we do it all through HubSpot. Once the issue is resolved, and the customer is happy, we’ll close the ticket.”
Customer Satisfaction Score
Short-term reports on customer support come from the customer satisfaction score. It’s a definite number representing how well or not a customer support team is performing. While a net promoter score is shown as a number, a customer satisfaction score is shown as a percentage.
Net Promoter Score
A net promoter score results from customers taking a service whether or not they would recommend your business. When we’re in passing, talking to family members and friends, we discuss the best and worst products. Have you offered your friend advice on the best vacuum brand? What about buying from a particular dealership? Imagine this times 10.
The score can range from negatives to as high as 100. You want your business to have superior numbers as it publicly reflects your customer support. These surveys even apply to self-service companies as everything can continually be improved for a more user-friendly business. The net promoter score usually measures long-term support, while the customer satisfaction score measures short-term support.
Roa stated that last year Kennected had an NPS of -19 but is now at 89 after tweaks and changes.
Knowledge Base KPI
Empower Your Reps To Make Decisions & Resolve Issues With Speed
The support team will face many circumstances and personality types, even virtually. They need to take advantage of any opportunity to show off their brand’s greatness and usefulness in the customer’s life. When a deal is reached, it may be possible to issue a cross-selling, where support sells an additional product along with the initial product.
This service offer does not always succeed, and one shouldn’t expect it to. However, there may be instances where customers appear to need an additional item for their endeavors or business. When support is in those cases, they should attempt to convince customers they will be better off with the product.
Kennected’s SaaS customer support is well-versed in friendly competition. To compete with team members, they need to be fast and eager to get a sale. This doesn’t mean support should be at odds with each other, but it’s a tactic commonly used to increase sales. We use leader boards updated every day to inform SaaS customer support on their progress.
Invest In Team Education
The onboarding process in customer support should be one of the main priorities for investing. Customer support for new employees should lean on the whole company. Horrendous service says a lot about a company’s customer support and even more about the business itself. The same can be said for excellent customer support.
There needs to be a good team built from values and genuine support from the business and employees for as many customers there are. Each team at Kennected holds daily meetings, including our SaaS customer support team, where everyone is heard and can communicate their thoughts on day-to-day happenings.
Before serving it, support should start within the company first, so every business should evaluate their customer support team beforehand.
“It’s all about knowing people and dealing with different personalities and making sure that everyone has the end goal in mind,” said Roa.
If you’re having trouble with Kennected’s service, click here to fill out a customer service form. It takes less than five minutes.
The post How To Run A Successful Customer Service Department In SaaS appeared first on LinkedIn Automation, Messaging & Outreach Tool - Kennected.
source https://kennected.org/successful-customer-service-saas/
No comments:
Post a Comment