It seems kind of obvious and yet it is not: as a SaaS company - in the ticketing industry or any other industry - support is one area of your business that you want to be flawless.
Providing great support is the key to you and your customer's success and happiness. At the same time, customer support can be the most time-consuming and hence expensive activity in your business if it’s not handled correctly. To ensure optimal customer support, you have to keep improving, always keep evolving.
That is how we approach not only the support we provide but all processes. Never settle, keep your eyes on the future and keep improving, developing and expanding. In case you missed our latest webinar about SaaS Ticketing 2.0, you can access it here.
1. Make Support Easy to Find
Chances are that when a customer needs support, the 'frustration mode' has already kicked in. If one can't find the solution within 5 or 10 seconds, the frustration will grow.
That is why Oxynade by SecuTix implemented a customer portal and we keep improving it. In our case, the customer portal is set up with Zendesk. As a customer, all you have to do is sign into the portal and you have access to your activities and a clear overview of your previously logged requests, requests you were CC'd in or organization requests.
2. Make Sure Your FAQs Rock
Great FAQs are not a guarantee for fewer requests or tickets created, but chances are they will over time lower the number as your customers get accustomed to first have a look at the FQAs instead of creating a request right away.
To encourage users to look at the FAQs first, try to answer a request that was obsolete with a kind answer that is simply redirecting to the respective FAQ article. Be ensured, it will have the desired effect.
A study recently conducted by Zendesk showed that 67% of users prefer self-service support over speaking to a company representative. And a whopping 91% said they would use a knowledge base if it met their needs. No wonder that we are putting a lot of effort into our new knowledge base (stay tuned for updates on this matter).
The ultimate goal is to gather all knowledge in the portal and use this as a centralized place where you can find information about the releases, new features & how-to’s, API documentation and much more. If you are curious already, please have a look at oxynade.io.
3. Understand Why You Get Support Requests and Fix the Cause (if possible)
Support requests usually fall into three major categories:
- Bugs
- Missing features
- Confusing or hidden features
An optimized support process will not prevent bugs from happening, and the corresponding support tickets will come in. There isn’t much you can do here.
But, yes there is a but: Oxynade by SecuTix has a Product Status feature that you can check if something seems off to you and you can subscribe to updates as well. This is a single point of information for all incidents (in case there are any) & maintenance. Customers are able to follow everything in real-time.
Any SaaS product is by definition, never complete. There’s no such thing as being done when you build a SaaS ticketing application; there will always be room to add more features to the platform. If one feature keeps popping up in the requests, however, be ensured that our team will have a thorough look into it and if there is a way to integrate it into our roadmap, we will. A win-win for all. Not only will this result in fewer requests from customers about it; but, more importantly, we can make them happier.
If the decision is made that a certain feature should not be built (let’s say it doesn’t fit the midterm roadmap), there will probably be a FAQ entry explaining why and offering alternative solutions. Be ensured, a not-now to a feature isn't a no-never per se and it might be reconsidered in the future.
Our development team is putting major efforts into the intuitiveness and self-service aspect of the Oxynade by SecuTix platform. A great product must be intuitive. Working on making features more intuitive will help customer's happiness and will also decrease the number of support requests. Another win-win.
4. Ensure All Support Requests Go To One Place
These days, communication goes into all directions – email, chat, WhatsApp messages, and so on.
That is why our customer portal is so important. It prevents staff to get overwhelmed, with the risk of things slipping through the cracks. We implemented a sustainable approach to make sure we can deliver the best possible customer service possible.
