{"id":5772,"date":"2018-05-09T09:10:29","date_gmt":"2018-05-09T07:10:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.red-orbit.com\/blog\/?p=5772"},"modified":"2018-11-13T09:27:24","modified_gmt":"2018-11-13T08:27:24","slug":"the-five-elements-of-a-perfect-saas-support-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.red-orbit.com\/blog\/the-five-elements-of-a-perfect-saas-support-system","title":{"rendered":"The Five Elements of a Perfect SaaS Support System"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019re a SaaS business, chances are support is one area of your business that you want to be flawless. Providing great support is the key to your growth and success.<\/strong> According to an Oracle study<\/a>, 9 out of 10 customers have abandoned a business because of a poor customer support experience. You don\u2019t want to be that business, do you?<\/p>\n

At the same time, customer support can be the most time-consuming (and expensive) activity in your business if it\u2019s not handled correctly<\/strong>. Hence, the way you provide support can make or break your business. It\u2019s not one of those things you can do \u201cquick and dirty\u201d at first and then improve later. Well, you could, but that would be a very risky decision.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been running SaaS companies for the last 15 years. In the early days, support meant email, and that was not very efficient. Then came the help desks, the chat solutions, the knowledge bases, and a lot of tools that made support optimization possible.<\/p>\n

In 2018, it\u2019s much easier to build a top-notch support system<\/strong>, but despite all the available solutions and content on the topic, I still stumble upon SaaS products that are not doing it right. I\u2019d like to share my experience with you so you can optimize your support process, too!\u00a0<\/p>\n

First and Foremost: Make Support Easy to Find<\/h2>\n

When an app user needs support, she\u2019s already entered into \u201cfrustration mode.\u201d In most cases, she\u2019s trying to figure out something or trying to do something with your app and cannot do it intuitively. Maybe your product is too complex to be 100% intuitive, or maybe certain features are not user friendly enough. She may have encountered a bug or is missing a feature that is key for her. Whatever the reason, as soon as she needs an answer, she tries to locate the \u201csupport\u201d link. And if she can\u2019t find it within 5 or 10 seconds, her frustration grows.\u00a0I\u2019ve lost count of the number of SaaS apps I\u2019ve used that have hidden access to their support resources so well that it took me a full website audit to find it! We use Recurly<\/a> to handle our subscription payments<\/strong>; look how well they\u2019ve hidden their support link in the footer, in small print.<\/p>\n

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If you use our app, on the other hand, the support tab is much more obvious. It\u2019s right there under your eyes at all times:<\/p>\n

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Hiding your support resources or, worse, contact channels is NOT the kind of mistake you want to make.<\/strong> And there are no excuses, as the solutions to fix the problem exist and are not difficult to implement.<\/p>\n

Ideally, your support contact form and your support resources should all be accessible via one very visible support tab or link.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Products like Zendesk<\/a>, UserVoice<\/a>, or Support Hero<\/a> will do that for you. That\u2019s an easy win that won\u2019t take more than five minutes in most cases.<\/p>\n

Make Sure Your FAQ Does a Good Job Helping Your Users<\/h2>\n

I don\u2019t know about you, but most of the time, when I have a question about a SaaS product I\u2019m using, I\u2019d much rather find the answer on my own, in five minutes, than have to send a support ticket and wait on an answer for two hours or, worse, two days!<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not the only one. A\u00a0study recently conducted by Zendesk<\/a> showed that 67% of users prefer self-service support over speaking to a company representative.<\/strong> And a whopping 91% said they would use a knowledge base if it met their needs. No wonder all the major help desks offer a knowledge base along with their ticket management system.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the problem: if you ask any support person if they know how well their knowledge base is working, the answer you\u2019ll get every time will be, \u201cI have no idea.\u201d I used to have the same answer with our own knowledge base. We had one \u2013 it took us days to build \u2013 but still, we had no idea if our investment was paying off.<\/p>\n

We tried to leverage the statistics provided by the tools we were using, but, at best, the only stats we got were the number of times FAQ articles were read and the keywords users entered when they searched for answers. That didn\u2019t really help.<\/p>\n

These are the insights we were looking for:<\/p>\n