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Tech

5 Ways Your SaaS Customer Support Team Can Save Time

Pradeepa S 24 Stories

Monday February 04, 2019 , 9 min Read

It’s common to find SaaS companies working tirelessly to deliver awesome customer service and increase efficiency at the same time. Needless to say, running a support department is a hefty investment, so your team needs to be efficient without compromising the quality of your service.

Surprisingly enough, more than 65% of adults think that the best way a company can deliver great customer support is by valuing their time. This means that both companies and consumers are looking to spend less time communicating and more time getting things done.

Let’s take a look at some effective ways you can help your SaaS customer support team become more efficient and save time on a daily basis.

What Defines Great SaaS Customer Support?

Before learning how to improve your team’s efficiency, it’s critical to understand the importance of great customer support. Delivering poor customer service can be a costly mistake that will likely translate into higher churn rate, so you can’t increase efficiency in exchange for lower quality.

The key is to give your customer a great experience in less time. But, the problem is that many SaaS companies invest in providing better service without improving what really matters to their customers.

Besides fast answers, consumers also want convenience, a friendly service, and consistency throughout your entire company.

5 Ways Your Customer Support Team Can Save Time

Your SaaS customer support team is a vital part of your operation because they serve as the first point of contact with your client base. Customer service agents help troubleshoot issues, educate consumers, and identify problems that need a technical solution.

But, you also need to support your team but giving them the tools they need to deliver effective solutions in a timely manner. This will help them stay focused, maintain a positive attitude with customers, and empower them to turn a problem into a positive experience.

Plus, solving issues in an efficient manner may even reduce your team’s workload and give them a chance to grow their professional careers.

Let’s take a look at some of the most effective ways to help your customer service team save time.

Set Up Goals and a Reward System

Organisations that provide great customer service have 1.5 times as many interested and motivated employees than companies that don’t deliver a great experience.

You can create a set of goals and provide incentives based on these objectives to help motivate your team members. Furthermore, you need to provide growth opportunities for your best performers and allow them to flourish within your SaaS business.

ADVANTAGES

The benefit of setting objectives and rewarding the top performers is pretty simple: encourage your team members to try harder. Office employees spend countless hours distracted, so giving them a stimulant will help your agents stay concentrated on the tasks at hand.

HOW TO SET UP GOALS AND REWARDS

The first thing you need to do is to benchmark your current performance. This will help you set your first objectives and track each employee’s individual output as well as the overall team performance.

Next, you can survey your team and find out what type of incentives they would like to see. While financial bonuses are always welcomed, you can also find other creative rewards like sporting events tickets, healthy in-office snacks, or even luxury car rentals to spice things up.

Whenever there’s an opening for a new role, prioritise applicants that are well-suited and have stellar metrics as well.

Support Multiple Channels

Thanks to the widespread of the internet, consumers can request information through a myriad of channels. These include email, live chat, social media, and self-learning centres. Supporting a variety of communication channels can release some of the pressure off your customer support team because you’ll avoid funnelling all your queries to one queue.

ADVANTAGES

Having a variety of channels will let you break down your support team into smaller cores. Instead of having all of your agents receiving phone calls, having separate teams will allow them to use templates and other tools that help increase efficiency.

If done properly, this can help reduce hold times and streamline your internal processes as well.

HOW TO LAUNCH MULTI-CHANNEL SUPPORT

One of the complicated parts of implementing multi-channel support is figuring what platforms you should use. Email and phone are by far the most common channels, but you should check with your current customers and find out what methods they think work best.

At the same time, you can look at trends for your specific industry before making the final call. Remember, removing a channel after it’s been launched will look bad in the eyes of your customers, so you’ll want to make each selection very carefully.

Once your contact channels are up and running, post them on your site as well as your social media platforms. Inform your entire team and encourage them to introduce customers to your new support channels in order to test to their efficacy.

Categorise Your Support Team

Smaller organisations may be able to take an “all hands on deck” approach successfully. Yet, medium and large SaaS companies can benefit more from dividing their support team into different categories.

The categories you create will depend on your industry and product, but some common examples include:

Implementation and Onboarding
Account Management & General Questions
Technical Support
Retentions
Complaints and Investigations
Customer Success and Relationship Management

A number of successful companies are now setting up SaaS customer success teams that teach clients how to use their new purchase effectively. Customer success teams are usually in charge of introducing clients to the features on your platform and making sure they use them properly.

Besides monitoring, guiding, and assisting each client, the customer success team members can also identify possible upselling opportunities.

ADVANTAGES

The biggest advantage of dividing your team is having truly specialised agents that take less time to answer complicated questions. While all of your employees should have a similar basic training, deploying specialised departments can encourage your staff to become masters at their trade.

And, as long as you route each inquiry correctly, you’ll spread the workload among your entire team in a more sustainable way.

HOW TO CATEGORISE YOUR SUPPORT TEAM

For starters, you’ll need to identify the different categories you need to create. You can do so by requesting feedback from your current customers, asking your team members, and checking your company inbox for the most frequent tags.

Then, you’ll need to group the issues and questions based on the type of inquiry or the skills needed to solve them. After identifying the categories, train your team accordingly and create a sustainable communication network among all departments.

Provide Powerful Tools that Help Your Customers

Be it a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system or another type of platform, all companies have a central dashboard that they use to view and administer their clients’ information.

But, unfortunately, not all CRMs are created equal. You’ll have to make sure you furnish your team with a robust platform that allows them to deliver top-notch service. You also have provided a safe environment and that your employees can help customers without having unnecessary access to their sensitive information.

ADVANTAGES

There’s nothing more frustrating than contacting a SaaS company for a technical issue that they can’t solve. While it does happen to even the biggest providers, having a powerful CRM that updates regularly and doesn’t lag will help ensure fast service every time.

HOW TO PROVIDE THE RIGHT TOOLS

In many cases, the only ones able to identify shortcomings in the tools you use are the support team. So, you’ll need to start by asking them which of the challenges they face may be due to the tools you currently have in place.

More often than not, you can corroborate these issues through testing or monitoring. Once you’ve verified the issues, work on developing or acquiring new platforms that provide solutions for current and future obstacles.

Deploy a Knowledge Base Software

Creating a knowledge base is an extremely effective way to save your team a significant time. In a nutshell, a knowledge base is a collection of company resources that your support team can turn to whenever they have any questions.

ADVANTAGES

Knowledge bases can be deployed for internal purposes and as customer-facing tools, both of which have different advantages.

Developing a knowledge base for your customer will give them the ability to find solutions without having to contact your support team at all. On the other hand, internal knowledge bases can help your employees find the information they need through one single platform, reducing search time by as much as 35%. This, in turn, can also help reduce hold times by a large margin.

How to Deploy a Knowledge Base

Knowledge bases can be useful in a variety of scenarios, but you should find the most common instances where your company can benefit from them. Next, you have to set up an internal knowledge base team that will be in charge of creating and uploading content.

You’ll also have to find a solid knowledge base that has all the collaboration and safety features your company needs. Standalone platforms like Document360 usually make the best choice thanks to the number of dedicated features they offer.

Document360 provides a series of collaboration features that include commenting on each individual article and the ability to highlight important information. The knowledge base also allows you to assign different roles and can support thousands of files in a variety of formats, which means it can grow with your company.

Finally, your team should develop a content creation calendar and optimise the different pieces every-so-often.

Improving Your Customer Support Team’s Efficiency

Improving your customer support team’s efficiency and saving them time can have a huge impact throughout your entire organisation. Besides keeping your team motivated, it can also improve customer satisfaction and empower your employees to confidently handle any situation that comes their way.

By supporting multiple channels, dividing your support department, and giving them powerful tools you’ll increase the chances of delivering spectacular service every time.

Additionally, a knowledge base can help cultivate a skillful team and an informed customer base that work together to find solutions quickly.