5 Ways in Which Your SaaS Customer Support Team Can Save Time
Having good customer support in terms of both the human customer agents as well as the state-of-the-art infrastructure is critical to the customer success initiatives of any organization and SaaS.
In the yesteryears, there were several limitations in the number of touchpoints that were available which made customers rely on only a few sources. The customer agents were required to continually track the multiple customers, that many a time resulted in customers being unaddressed.
Technological advancements have had an impact on the way customer services now operate. Time is one of the critical parameters as far as both the customers and the customer agents are concerned.
As per PwC, about 80 percent of the consumers in the United States identify speed, convenience, friendly service, and knowledgeable help as the most fundamental element of a positive customer experience. Customers now value time more than cost. So, it is important to ensure that the customer agents adhere to the best practices that enable them to not only save their time but the time of the customers too.
So what are the practices that enable a SaaS customer team to save their time as well as to ensure that they make the best use of the available time? Lets see one by one
Ways in Which Your SaaS Customer Support Team Can Save Time?
1) Identifying a Timeframe
A SaaS customer team can consider setting a timeframe for every call. You can show some extra courteousness to voluble customers by directly getting to the point by politely conveying the matter. You can refer to the time by using phrases like ‘we value your time ’, or ‘ could you spare a couple of precious minutes of your time, and so on.
This helps both the customer teams as well as the customers to save their time, though the prime intention is to save the time of the customer team. This can make the conversations remain as crisp as possible and also to the point. Even customers will be happy and they do not feel offended as you make a reference to the time and by letting them know that you value their time.
2) Provide Self Service Options for Customers
Providing self-support resources to your customers can serve as one of the best solutions that enable customer support teams to save their time. Self-help resources enable customers to rely on themselves to find the solutions.
A most commonly adopted highly effective self-help resource is FAQ support. Providing FAQ pages for your products and services can help your customers a lot.
Some customers like to fend on themselves to find solutions to their issues. It is in this scenario that the availability of self-help support systems based on FAQs becomes more important.
FAQs are pages that contain the most common concerns or questions that customers are likely to face and provide appropriate solutions or support links that could take customers to different web pages to offer the solution.
Customers need not reach out personally or write an email which all can consume time overhead. Just like a google search, customers can get the solutions to their problems within a matter of seconds. It not only saves the time of customer teams but also that of customers.
3) Use Multi-Channel Capabilities
Nowadays customers are no longer restricted to a single touchpoint as was the case in the past. The rapid adoption of the internet and the emergence of digital technologies has resulted in customers embracing the customer support trends like multiple channels that are available at their disposal
. In this digital era, it is very important to offer multi-channel support through social media, live chats, emails, etc. Adopting multi-channel capabilities helps SaaS enterprises primarily in two ways; they can maintain a better brand presence as well as offer better support to their customers.
Secondly, it can offload your customer agents to a great extent. Imagine a situation in which a company offers support only through the phone. It will put a larger burden on the customer agents as well as serve as a cause for customer displeasure as often their calls can get queued thus inviting the ire of customers.
4) Use Latest Tools and Solutions
SaaS business or any other business for that matter should have a customer relationship management (CRM) system or a dashboard platform that can be used for administering the information of the clients.
Some of the CRM solutions consist of dedicated time tracking tools that help customer agents to manage their time. Time tracking solutions can often be added to search engines as an extension.
Investing in such solutions can enable you to monitor how many customers were addressed during a particular time frame and what was the average time required to handle a customer and so on. Such solutions can help you to gain the visibility required and thus act on them to optimize the time.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions can serve the cause of both customer agents as well as the customers as far as saving time is concerned.
According to a survey, customers prefer to use AI capabilities to save time. AI solutions based on voice assistants and chatbots can enable a SaaS enterprise to address its customers round the clock.
These solutions can address your customers independent of any time constraints as is the case with human agents. Such solutions can address multiple customers simultaneously thereby enabling your customer agents to devote their time to high-priority customer concerns.
5) Set Goals and Reward System
Unlike the above-discussed solutions, this includes adopting a psychological approach. To offer great customer success you need to have motivated and enthusiastic employees. Boost the morale and spirits of your customer agents by letting them know that you are very happy and indebted to have their service.
Consider addressing your customer agents by their names rather than merely considering them as numbers. Instill in them a sense of pride for becoming a part of your brand.
Such techniques can empower the customer agents from within and truly commit to the cause of serving the customers. You can consider offering rewards or incentives for top performers. These all do their part in bracing up the spirits of the customer agents and the end result is that they become more productive.
Conclusion
Customer support operation, though can be considered as a backend functionality is the lifeblood of an organization. Time is money, not only for you and your customer agents but also for your customers. Adopting the practices that we have outlined here can help you in saving the time of your customer service team.
Activelobby is a company that provides cloud and Application Support Services services. As part of cloud services, we offer cloud management and migration solutions. If you are looking for a SaaS solution for your business requirements, you can avail our SaaS services.
