It can be hard to get support staff educated on your product in an accessible way. At the same time, it’s absolutely crucial.
Your team needs to be armed with intimate product knowledge to guide customers through the various use cases for your product. Otherwise, you risk high churn rate and low adoption rate.
To avoid this, you’ll need the proper resources in place, and tools that make the entire process easier on everyone. Let’s chat about how you can provide more accessible SaaS customer support training for your team!
Why Good Customer Support Makes or Breaks SaaS
The fundamentals of good customer support remain the same regardless of industry. Yet SaaS support tends to be a lot more hands-on.
You’ll need to closely monitor your customers through onboarding and the early stages of product adoption, if you want them to be successful.
When they have technical issues with your product, you’ll need to step in to help troubleshoot.
Your customers depend on your software, whether to run their own businesses, complete their work more effectively, or just make their lives better.
What does this mean for your support team?
They’ll need to provide help fast and across various channels. Plus, they need to be fully educated on your software so they can actually solve problems.
What challenges are they facing?
- In contrast to one-and-done purchases, onboarding for an SaaS customer can last for days, weeks, or even months.
- Most customers are subscription-based, and there is so much more at stake if you don’t provide adequate support. You depend on retention for reliable revenue and growth.
- SaaS support inherently has a technical component, and often requires troubleshooting. Your team may be dealing with customers who don’t have a tech background, meaning you’ll need to simplify complex concepts or instructions to make them more accessible.
Why does this matter so much?
Your customers are long-term users. Many of them will be interacting with your support long after their initial purchases. Even if you have an awesome product, if your service is sub-par, you’re going to lose a lot of them.
Top-notch customer service, on the other hand, means:
- Increased Customer Loyalty. Great SaaS customer support enhances customer satisfaction and builds trust. Those who have a positive experience tend to leave reviews of your business online, driving loyalty and attracting new customers.
- Enhanced Customer Experience (CX). Customer service is the primary (and sometimes only) interaction people will have with your business after handing over their money. And consistent support is the key to ensuring a positive CX throughout the entirety of the customer journey.
- Better Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). CLV is estimated amount of revenue a customer will bring over the entirety of their relationship with your brand. Great customer support leads to increases in both retention and CLV. Even a modest 5% increase in retention can lead to a 25% increase in profit.
4 Tips for SaaS Customer Support Training That Works
Great customer service starts with great training.
How can you streamline this important process, without dumping money into expensive training software? Or even worse, leaving your new hires to figure things out on their own without proper onboarding…
SaaS training is particularly tricky, because your support team needs to learn to navigate your software and additional tools used to communicate with customers. It’s not something to rush. With that in mind, let’s go over a few ways to set your support team up for success.
Tip #1: Build a Support Knowledge Base for Your Team
Let’s say your user base is growing, and you’re struggling to keep up with increased demand on a very tiny support team. At the same time, your budget is tight, and you can’t allocate additional finances to optimize the training process with fancy software or expensive modules.
What do you do?
You invest in affordable tools that make the process of training your support team easier.
A help desk can optimize for both customer experience and internal workflows when training new team members. The benefits of a help desk for SaaS customer support are wide-reaching. But in this context, we want to focus on how it enables training through a self-service knowledge base.
Groove is our help desk platform designed for small SaaS businesses.
It’s a more accessible and feature-rich option than standard email clients. At the same time, it’s affordable and easy to learn. Plus, it’s the best spot to build an internal resource for support team training.
Right within Groove, you can create a comprehensive knowledge base full of useful resources. Because it’s housed in the same platform, your team will have more incentive to refer back to it (and it’s easy to find).
As you build out your knowledge base, you can include all the information necessary to deliver stellar support: conversation routing procedures, workflow processes, and specific policies. Some of these articles can be repurposed later as customer-facing.
Diagrams, charts, and videos visually illustrate how to handle difficult procedures or technically complex processes. These can be embedded within knowledge base articles, and are perfect for training.
Having all of this information in one place is a game-changer. It’ll be there right when a new agent starts, and can guide them through key learning stages.
You won’t have to struggle to decide what to teach them in the moment. You’ll decide ahead of time, and everything will be right there organized into an optimal flow. And your entire team will be on the same page (new and old agents alike).
Tip #2: Document the Steps To Success via Comprehensive Onboarding
Once you’ve hired for customer support, the next step is to walk them through a smooth onboarding process that familiarizes them with your company values and identity.
The onboarding process for a support agent can be broken down into a few stages:
- One-on-one, where the agent goes through internal processes, product features, and non-live examples of how to handle tickets with management.
- Self-onboarding, as the agent takes an online tutorial or module guiding them through your SaaS product. If you don’t have access to either of these options, simply allowing your agent to explore the product on their own is of great value. The access they have should (as much as possible) replicate the experience of your customers.
- Apprenticeship, when the agent finally tackles real customer inquiries/questions with management, who provide feedback on each reply before it is sent to the customer. Sometimes, employees will ‘shadow’ a more experienced colleague rather than a manager.
Along the way, you’ll want to document the “steps to success” agents need to take. Use the onboarding process to highlight how systems and tools within your business are used for customer interaction. It’s also the perfect time to introduce customer service policies they’ll need to uphold.
You can leverage prior calls, feedback, or service tickets as representative examples of positive or negative experiences. These “real-life” examples show how to handle an inquiry and what not to do.
In particular, working in a SaaS environment calls for knowledge of software development. For example, if your product is cloud-based shipping software, you’ll want to hire a candidate who has relevant knowledge within that niche.
It might be possible for new staff to learn your product without a technical background. You’ll need to decide how much experience is required to accurately assist your customers should they reach out for troubleshooting. Remember that it’s harder to teach than to use.
While developers don’t need to be in front-facing support roles, your technical department should complement your support team. This might mean onboarding or product training through your IT department, since they have the most hands-on experience.
You can document the onboarding steps, software, and other resources in your knowledge base (as mentioned above). This information needs to be readily accessible for all your employees.
This is also a good time to review what tools you’re using for customer support tasks, and consider whether they’re making the training process easier or harder.
A lot of support software can be difficult to learn, and often requires its own in-depth training. If you’re trying to quickly onboard new agents to deliver service ASAP, you can’t spend weeks familiarizing staff with a complex platform (in addition to your own software).
That’s why Groove is optimized for accessibility. It’s specifically designed so your team can pick it up in minutes, with clear contextual guidance and a UI reminiscent of Gmail.
Tip #3: Monitor Customer Support Metrics and Use Them To Set Goals
Your team already understands the purpose of customer support. They’re there to resolve customer inquiries.
Beyond that, setting concrete goals based on metrics (or key performance indicators) helps your team work toward growth. It sets expectations early on, and improves performance over time.
For example, it’s not enough to tell your team that they “need to prevent customers from leaving”. They need something tangible.
We need to reduce churn rate to 5% by the end of the year. To do that, we need to improve first response times by 25%, and customer satisfaction rates by 33%.
Support metrics are easy to track with a help desk like Groove. In our platform, they’re automatically recorded and stored in the Reports dashboard. You’ll get visual, easy-to-understand charts, and you can even view individual agent performance. No confusing setup, no tech degree required.
In that example above, the business would need to calculate its churn rate over a predetermined period of time. First response times are available right within Groove. Together, this information answers key questions like “Does lower churn correlate to faster response times?”
Let’s take a look at another example:
Is there a connection between CSAT scores and our monthly conversion rate?
To assess this, you’d compare your CSAT (customer satisfaction) scores for a specific time period against increases or decreases in monthly conversion rates. CSAT can be tracked within Groove, and is the number-one measure of your support team’s success.
Whatever metrics you focus on, be clear and specific, and communicate those goals to new hires upfront. Then during your SaaS customer support training, point them towards the resources and functionality that will make those goals attainable.
Tip #4: Provide New Opportunities for Training and Development
Professional development isn’t one-and-done. Especially in the world of SaaS. As your product receives new feature updates, you’ll need to proactively educate support staff.
Customer support is far too often viewed as a reactive measure.
And that just isn’t ideal.
That sort of thinking won’t help your business grow. Outstanding service is proactive. To make that happen, we’ve found it fruitful to think about employee education/training as directly tied to customer success.
Think about it this way. If your support team can lead customers to success with your product, not only will they increase retention. They’ll also help to grow your business through positive word of mouth.
You don’t get those kinds of benefits by being reactive. It’s not about the short-term. And that isn’t always easy.
But the extra effort of keeping your customer support team up-to-date on all the goings-on will help your business’ growth in the long run.
If you notice that a particular team member has great communication skills but struggles with time management (evidenced in poor response times), you can implement one-on-one training sessions. A transparent conversation can also identify any roadblocks to success.
Maybe they just don’t know where to find the automation features all your other support agents use. A quick training session can address this in a couple of minutes.
Depending on what software your team uses internally, you can schedule regular meetings (in-person or remotely via Zoom) to address concerns and provide up-to-date training as your product adds features, integrations, or patches. Your support team isn’t a separate entity. Keep them in the loop!
Unlock the Secret Weapon To Effective SaaS Customer Support Training
An individual support agent might wear five different hats during their time with your company. This is where a purpose-built help desk rolls in, to save them from hair-pulling frustration.
Groove enables proactive service. It makes the entire SaaS training process so much easier for your customer support team, thanks to self-service resources, rules that automate rote tasks (so they don’t have to be taught), organizational features (to save everyone time), and advanced reporting.
It’s easy to navigate and use, so you can focus all your training efforts on your own software. Sign up for a free trial of Groove today, and unlock the secret weapon to effective support training!
