Customer Support with SaaS
This might sound dramatic but how successful your SaaS customer support program is, will go a long way to determining the overall success of your SaaS business.
Here’s why. First, with SaaS customer support, ‘experience’ takes on a whole new level of importance. That’s because the business model is built on keeping customers happy and retaining them in order to pay back the costs involved in acquiring them (and then typically looking for upsell and cross-sell opportunities).
If your SaaS customer support teams deliver bad experiences, customers aren’t going to jump at the chance of continuing to subscribe from your business – in fact, they might not even stay long enough for you to recoup the cost of acquiring them.
Unconvinced? According to Salesforce (who know a thing or two about great customer support strategies and SaaS), an incredible 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.
The importance of your SaaS customer support experience becomes even more true if you sell your SaaS product to other businesses. Such SaaS products often involve complex issue resolution, closer relationships with customers, and seamless integration with customer success.
Simply put, it’s hard to overestimate the importance of nailing your SaaS customer support strategy.
"There’s no two ways about it, if you have a SaaS product and your SaaS customer support strategy can’t deliver ‘quality’ you’ll struggle to compete in today’s market."
On this page, we explore everything you need to know about nailing customer support with SaaS.
That means top tips for those looking to build a foundational knowledge of the space, as well as in-depth best practices and advice for those looking to enrich the SaaS customer support program they already have.
What’s on this page:
What is SaaS customer support?
Key definition: SaaS customer support is the support a Software-As-A-Service company offers its customers. This typically includes acute issue resolution, implementation support, training materials, and technical support (amongst other things). A great SaaS customer support strategy delivers the vital help a customer needs to get the most out of a SaaS product.
SaaS products are a unique beast. So the big question isn’t “what is SaaS customer support?”, it’s “what is different about SaaS customer support compared to regular customer support?”
The key difference is that SaaS companies effectively enter into a partnership with customers. This is especially true if your product is used by other businesses rather than individual consumers. This partnership-based model elevates customers’ expectations of what they’ll get from a SaaS customer support experience – both in terms of quality and breadth.
“In B2B SaaS, your software products can become core applications at the heart of someone’s business – this ups the ante on the level of support they need and expect.”
The breadth of B2B SaaS customer support
In this B2B (business-to-business) world, SaaS customer support teams might cover:
- Sales support to cater to the longer buying cycles involving multiple stakeholders
- Seamless integration with customer success, customer service, and customer experience across multiple channels
- Implementation support to ensure robust configuration
- Onboarding and adoption support
- Utilization and product feature support
- Always-on technical support
Why is customer support vital for a SaaS company?
There are two big reasons why customer support is vital for a SaaS company:
- In a SaaS model, customers demand closer relationships with their SaaS provider to ensure they consistently get the most value from the product.
- In a SaaS model, customers typically pay in monthly installments, which means if your customer support isn’t on point, customers might churn before you hit CAC Payback. This is the point at which you’ve recouped the cost of acquiring the customer in the first place.
The best customer support in SaaS goes far beyond controlling churn. If you don’t control churn as a SaaS business, you'll struggle to compete. According to Forbes, the ideal churn rate for mature and established companies is just 5% to 7% in annual churn and less than 1% in monthly churn. Room for error is in short supply.
Another reason why customer support is vital for a SaaS company is that customers often need help overcoming more complex challenges – especially in B2B SaaS customer support.
If your product becomes a core business application for a company, the company will not just need support across a broader range of topics – it will also need quality (we’re talking expert-grade) support.
Let’s take configuration support as an example. According to Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), SaaS misconfigurations were responsible for up to 63% of security incidents. The primary cause? A lack of clarity on changes in the security settings. If a business using your SaaS product runs into a configuration issue and reaches out for support, do you think they want to talk to an inexperienced customer support agent?
No…
They’re going to want to speak to someone with an in-depth knowledge of the product they’re using and the industry they operate in so they can resolve this complex problem as quickly as possible. Ultimately, customers expect the best customer support in SaaS
It’s worth noting that this isn’t just a problem hit by SaaS businesses. Sell a technical, healthcare-related, or premium product of any kind and your customers will expect empathetic, high-quality support from experts who know what they’re talking about. When you look at it in this way, it’s easy to see why quality customer support is vital for a SaaS company
It’s one of the reasons ModSquad only hires experienced customer support experts – and lets them pick their own projects so we can ensure a strong product-to-staff fit.
SaaS customer support best practices – key components your business needs
When it comes to SaaS customer support best practices there’s going to be some variation based on your industry. But there are some core elements that you need to have in place regardless of your sector.
Those core elements are: expert teams, an adoption program and broad knowledge base, metrics, and SaaS cost optimization.
Expert teams
If you sell SaaS products to other businesses or a premium SaaS product to consumers, they will expect customer support provided by experts.
That means hiring the right people for your SaaS customer support teams is vital.
In technical SaaS products that’s because the nature of the problems they need to solve are often more complex. With premium products however, it’s that customers expect your support to uphold that premium brand experience – this is especially important in competitive markets.
Take music streaming services as an example. Spotify has always prioritized having a great customer support strategy as a way to make sure their customers feel engaged with their brand in an ultra-competitive market.
It’s why they chose to work with ModSquad to ensure they delivered quality support to their customer and secure an incredible 92% CSAT rating on the way – read the full Spotify case study here.
Adoption programs and knowledge base
When it comes to B2B SaaS customer support, something that’s often overlooked is the importance of a rigorous knowledge base and strong adoption support.
A knowledge base ensures customers can access the self-service support they need to overcome typical support issues through FAQ pages, user documentation, and troubleshooting guides.
Here's the problem, if customers fail to adopt the SaaS product without proactive adoption assistance from customer success teams and a comprehensive customer support program, SaaS products can fail before they even get going. Workers are often reluctant to adopt new systems and opt instead for “Shadow IT” – using unsanctioned tech without their IT department's knowledge.
And guess what? That’s really bad news. According to one report, 55% of organizations have reported security protocol lapses since the start of the pandemic, with 80% of these breaches being caused by unsanctioned applications.
SaaS customer support metrics
Customer support is vital for the ongoing health of your SaaS business. To keep that support program in a good state of health,you need a robust SaaS customer support metric framework.
Some key SaaS customer support metrics you need to track:
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is a cornerstone metric used by just about every customer service, support, and experience program on the planet. It measures how satisfied customers are with your product, service, or brand overall.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures the likelihood of customers recommending you to their peers. It's a useful metric as it goes beyond simply assessing if you’re ‘satisfying’ it ascertains how many customers think you’re nailing customer support.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV) means the total revenue you can expect from a customer during their time with your business. Keeping an eye on how changes in your customer support program change the purchasing behavior of customers will help you understand the impact your support program is having.
- Customer acquisition cost payback (CAC Payback) is possibly the most important metric in SaaS. It measures your break-even point – the point at which you recoup the cost of acquiring a new customer. In a SaaS-based model where customers pay in monthly installments, bad customer support experiences can increase the chance of churn before you hit the break-even point.
- Customer churn rate measures the number of customers that leave your business over a given period. Related to CAC payback, when your customers don’t feel they’re being well served by your customer support program, they start to shop around. Keep an eye on your churn rate and it can help you assess the effectiveness of your customer support program.
Want the full story on customer success metrics – including how to calculate them? Explore our metrics page.
SaaS customer support cost
SaaS companies need to offer quality support to ensure retention and CAC Payback, but they need to keep the cost of that retention as low as possible. This is why it is so vital for SaaS businesses to break the zero-sum game between cost and quality.
The key to doing this and optimizing your SaaS customer support cost is using an on-demand staffing model. Such models allow you to increase and decrease your customer support capacity depending on your needs.
This is especially important if you’re using an outsourcer for your SaaS customer support program. And be warned – many outsourcers will try and lock you into a rigid contract that means you’re constantly paying for a level of capacity you don’t use during off-peak periods.
But the most forward-thinking SaaS businesses take the staffing model innovation a step further by consistently lowering SaaS customer support costs as quality rises. In order to do this they’re working with customer support outsourcers that feed AI models with historical and real-time data to maximize staffing efficiency and using it to automatically review and score customer interactions to drive continuous improvement.