How SaaS companies should structure their Customer Support Teams?

 3 best practices for SaaS support

While the basic principles of support are very easy (reply to customers, kind and useful, and solving their problems), providing great support requires a strategy that is not always clear.

Here are the three best practices that you might not consider, but they will make your life (and live your customers) easier.

1. Prioritize documentation

One of the first supporting tools you have to enter your focus is a thorough knowledge base. Every time you spend making documentation will pay ten times later.

Not only 70% of customers say they prefer to answer their own questions using self-service documentation, but encourage customers to search for your knowledge base will reduce your entrance ticket volume.

Onboarding new employees is much easier if you write the information they need. Without documentation, everything is only stored in someone's head. If the person goes, takes a sick day, or just busy, your team will struggle to answer customer questions effectively.

Getting known product knowledge is the key to providing a great customer experience, even when your company grows.

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2. Build a close relationship between support and product

Can tempt to hire several entry-level employees and place them to work in their own corners responding to customers. But creating a silo between customer support and other companies will cause a number of problems on the road.

Customer support spends most of the time talking to customers. They know what customers want, what they stand for, and how they communicate. Building a strong relationship between customer support and the entire company will help keep your focus on customers when you grow.

To develop this cross functional communication bridge, bringing customer support members to product meetings, circulating customer support conversations in the company, highlighting customer satisfaction survey response, and building connections between employees in various departments.

3. Measure your progress

What is the meaning of "good" support for you and your customers? Without measuring the results, you will not know whether you provide great support that makes a difference for your business.

First, you have to measure the performance of your support team (even if it's only one person). The most critical support metrics to monitor is:

A number of tickets: Is the volume up, down, or remain the same?

Average response time: Do you consistently respond quickly to customer demand?

Customer Satisfaction: Do customers show that they are happy with your service?

It is also important to understand how your customer's support efforts have an impact on your growth. When the SCOUT support team assistance focuses on growth strategies driven by support, they found that 70% of people chatting with them when the trial ended as a paying customer.

To measure this number itself, consider analyzing the number of customers who increase from experiments to paid customers, as well as the number of customers who churn with customer support.