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Customer success is one of the most important metrics when it comes to the health of your company.
There is a direct relationship between customer success and your churn rate – that is, the percentage of customers who cancel after a period of time.
If your customers aren’t finding success – if it isn’t providing value to them for whatever reason – they will leave.
Customer success is a lofty task given that SaaS companies are tasked with retaining customers month after month, but it’s critical that SaaS companies fervently do everything they can to ensure that their users are successful.
The good news is that research on the topic proves promising.
Consider, for example, that 85% of customers end up cancelling because of poor service. This is actually good because it means that the task is largely in your hands and not out of your control.
In other words, ensuring that you provide an excellent level of customer service to your users can help them stick with your service month after month.
Even better news is that there are a lot of tools out there that will help you along the way.
Here are 6 essential customer service tools to help your SaaS users succeed.
(Keep in mind that since SaaS tools often have several different features, some of the tools that are listed may actually be able to do more task than one task. In other words, there may be some overlap).
1. Onboarding: Appcues
When it comes to successful onboarding, a critical stage for any new SaaS user, Appcues has all of your bases covered. This tool allows you to create personalized user onboarding (and target the right people at the right time).
It also allows you to encourage users to adopt new features and therefore increase customer success.
2. In App Messaging: Intercom
In app messaging is a necessity for your users, especially during the onboarding stage. In app messaging allows your customers to message you so that problems can be resolved quickly.
In app messaging is also a great tool for converting trial users to paid subscribers.
Intercom also offers a knowledge base/help desk – another critical feature for customer success (more on this to come).
3. Customer Support (Ticketing and Help Desk): Zendesk
Zendesk, a customer service support and support ticket software, can do a lot for SaaS businesses, especially when it comes to customer success.
It’s a great tool for both ticketing and as a help desk.
Their software offers several different features.
One of the main ones is their Ticketing System, which makes dealing with customer support questions extremely streamlined by compiling all customer support requests from all channels (from email to social media).
Conversations don’t slip through the cracks. The record of your conversation is also nicely stored. Problems are taken care of quickly.
Zendesk also now allows you to track feature requests. This is valuable information for your developers in terms of what your product roadmap should look like.
4. Insights On The Effectiveness Of Your Knowledge Base/Help Center: Support Hero
Given that 67% of customers prefer self-service support instead of having to go to the trouble of speaking to a representative, it’s imperative that your knowledge base/help center is working well.
This will not only help customers succeed, but it will also elevate customer satisfaction by ensuring that you meet your customers where they want to be met.
Many businesses have no idea how well their knowledge base is performing. A lot of this is because many tools on the market fail to offer useful data, such as the number of times various pages have been read.
A tool like Support Hero, that provides useful data like the keywords users are searching for when they are using your help desk, what content was read and other helpful data, makes this tool a very valuable one for SaaS companies.
Another benefit of Support Hero is that it has been proven to reduce support tickets by as much as 50%.
Keep in mind that a knowledge base should also seek to answer questions of prospective customers as well.
5. Data On Your Support Tickets: Help Scout or Grove
Just as it’s important to understand the effectiveness of your knowledge base, it’s also important to understand the reasons behind why you’re receiving your support tickets to begin with.
Typically, there are three main causes: bugs, a lack of features and confusing features (or features that can’t be found easily).
Confusing or hidden features are particularly important to pay attention to. Your users should not have to consult your help desk every time they want to figure out a feature. Your software should always be user-friendly, otherwise you run the risk of turning your users away.
When it comes to tools that provide data on your most read articles or the most common searches, Help Scout, Grove (and even Support Hero) will all do the trick.
6. Monitor Engagement (And At-Risk Customers): Totango or FullStory
A survey of over 1 million SaaS customers found that every cancellation was preceded by one element: a period of non-use.
That’s why it’s critical that SaaS companies use tools like Totango or FullStory collect data as to engagement levels of their users. Keeping an eye on this data then allows you to be proactive about reaching out to the customers who have not been using your service.
What’s interesting about FullStory is that it actually allows you to play back video of users’ experiences on your website before they ended up filing a support ticket. This is valuable insight.
Honorable Mentions
A worthy mention in our list of customer service tools to help your SaaS business is User.com, a full-stack marketing automation software known for turning visitors into happy customers.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line is that SaaS companies have to prioritize customer success above all else. That means ensuring that you have your bases covered in terms of in-app messaging but also your knowledge base/help desk given that most customers prefer self-service.
It is also important that you measure the effectiveness of these systems through some of the tools mentioned above.
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