Customer Support & onboarding Management for SaaS - How do you do it? - 2022
Hey,
I'm reaching out to my fellow SaaS owners to see how you guys deal with support nowadays.
I'll share what we do at https://simplebackups.com/ and the pain we're slowly starting to feel and hopefully, you will have some experience to share.
How can people reach out to us?
We use Intercom (which btw became really(really) expensive), and enable several processes with it.
- Lead questions: we enable the basic Intercom chat on all pages of our websites. This leads to "pre" subscription questions.
- In-App support: we enable the chat there as well, we get quite a lot of requests there with people asking how to use our app, or (especially) reporting issues.
- Onboarding messages: we send emails sequences to users during their trial period
- Email: some users reach out to us directly via email in the "common" support mailbox which we then forward to Intercom to centralize everything there.
What else do we have to support users?
- App documentation
- User guides (in our blog)
- FAQ (in Intercom Pages)
How do we deal with support requests?
Currently, we don't have any specific process. We check Intercom, and whenever someone reaches out we jump on it.
We thrive to provide excellent customer service, but this opens other issues that I'll share below.
If a ticket requires more work, or needs planning (...) we move it to our preferred task management tool Linear, and then assign it to a sprint.
We always use Intercom, to follow up and keep users updated on their "ticket" status.
Issues we're facing
Support is taking a lot of our time, and the main problem is that it is randomly breaking our days. This usually prevents us to be efficient and productive and often we'll end up having to stop what we're doing (let's say a product task) to reply and focus on a customer request.
How to improve our approach to support?
There are a few straightforward things to do but I'd love to get your opinion but especially your experience on this topic.
Should we stop allowing users to reach out via chat?
- People may tend to reach out to us for things they could have figured out by themselves.
- Most requests are not sensitive and shouldn't break our focus.
- We have users without intent to purchase that steal away our time.
- But at the same time .. this helps figure out quickly if we have issues to fix.
How do you manage time allocation on support?
- Would it be a good practice to only provide support via ticket, that we check at a certain time daily?
- Maybe only offer chat support for our highest plan users?
-What frightens me with this approach is that users will have questions during their trial, and our trial doesn't require any credit card or plan selection, meaning we might not provide "excellent" support to people with an intent to purchase.
Do you have any suggestions regarding tools & automation?
Intercom is a great tool, but frankly way too expensive and pricing will only grow.
We're currently thinking about using https://www.helpkit.so/ but this would just be for the documentation and FAQ.
If we step away from chat (which isn't sure) we'd need a way to track "tickets" with some kind of "CRM".
I hope my points are clear! Would love to read about how you guys structure and deal with support for your SaaS.
Looking forward to reading about your experiences!
Yea this is an interesting problem, on one hand having live chat can be beneficial but could also be distracting and a time sink. I think building a good customer facing knowledge base would very beneficial. Great authentic customer support can't be undervalued. I would be happy to chat with you about some of the problems your facing.
Hello Laurent,
Here's what I usually recommend to SaaS companies:
I am building a SaaS service for support automation for SaaS companies based off the above recommendations.
Will love to find out more about the problem space from you!
Hello Laurent, according to my experience working with startups, sometimes the importance of customer support is undervalued.
I enjoy reading posts from other founders that are instead taking it seriously :-)
IMHO it always good to start with a live chat installed on the website and in-app. The first couple of months no need to add automation. Founder/s can get directly customers requests and gather feedback on their product.
Actually you chose the "Ferrari" of customer support and engagement, which is Intercom. Anyway I agree with you, it's really expensive.
I think what can really help you is to bring some automation in your support flow. I imagine you already have collected what are the most frequent requests of your customers, no matter if they are for free or they are paying.
To help you in automate the support workflow, it's really important to have solutions where it's easy to design bots and conversational flows (better if they are no-code) and, at the same time, they also have a good AI and the possibility to train the bot with the existing knowledge base.
Where you cannot satisfy the requests with automation, you can let your users to open tickets and clearly share with them your SLAs according to the different tiers of customers you have (free, pro, enterprise, etc.) to set right expectatinos.
The good news is that automation can make saving about 30 hours per month to each customer support agent!
We are building livegenie.co and launching in couple weeks, it's a live video chat widget with cobrowsing features.
You can cut down your support time by engaging with your highest plan users instantly via video chat and cobrowsing and you can also use it for onboarding and to convert MQL to SQL straight on your website.
We are open to providing any additional features in case your are looking for a particular solution.. would love to hear you thoughts!
Thanks for sharing this. But I'm more looking for experiences than new solutions tbh.