Mike HeapMike is an experienced Product Manager who focuses on all the “non-development” areas of My AskAI, from finance and customer success to product design, copywriting, testing and more.
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Jan 3, 2024 05:33 PM
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Jan 4, 2024
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There isn’t a one-size-fits-all, best way to do SaaS customer support. How you serve your customers can vary based on a lot of things, the biggest one being the stage that your business is in. How you support customers when you are testing an MVP is very different to how you support customers when they are big corporates.
We’ve put together an in-depth guide to show you what strategies and methods you should use at each stage of your journey, based on our trial and error in building My AskAI.
From Launch to 50 Paying Users
You’ve spent days, weeks, or months (hopefully not years) putting the final touches to your product and launched it to the world on Product Hunt, but there’s still just one (or maybe 2) of you and you want to make your customer support as simple as possible.
But this is also the time when you need to be talking to users, getting feedback, finding out about bugs, and what is missing from your product.
The focus at this stage is on the human touch, reacting and responding quickly to feedback and rapidly improving your product to suit, it is what will set you apart from so many others and also what will shorten your build-measure-learn cycle to the smallest possible increments.
Here’s what you’re going to need:
- Set up a free chatbot
Use a free chatbot service like Crisp or Tawk.to which you can add to your site with a couple of lines of code. This will enable people to send messages directly through your site (make sure you respond). Both of these tools have extensive free plans so you won’t need to change from them any time soon.
- Easy access to email support
Don’t go hiding your email address away somewhere, make it visible, you want to make it as easy as possible for users to contact you at this stage.
- Take calls
It might seem scary but you’ll get far more value from users if you speak to them, you can dig into their questions and concerns and build relationships that might make them that little bit more forgiving when they spot a bug. Block out times in your calendar when you want to take calls then use a tool like SavvyCal to let customers book in (Top tip: add some qualifying questions to make sure you get some background and are speaking to the right people).
- Direct Slack or Discord communities
From 50 Paying Users to Ramen Profitability
At this stage you have got a few paying users, you are getting a good amount of feedback and your next step is to turn this from a side project to something that can support you.
You likely haven’t found product-market-fit, so you still need to be spending considerable time talking to users but the number of teething issues and bugs is coming down now, and you have an idea of the common questions you are getting.
This is where you can start to put some very lightweight processes in place (in addition to your current methods):
- Basic documentation
Create a public Notion page with customers frequently asked questions and answers, if you want to make it look more professional you can use a service like Super or Helpkit to make it look more polished.
The focus here is lightweight, take a few screenshots, and a little text (use ChatGPT to help you structure it) but don’t go too heavy as your product is likely still evolving.
- Capture processes
Again as your product is likely still changing and you are adding new features by the day or week, there is no point in spending time on quality videos, but a tool like Scribehow will get you most of the way there, you just hit record as you perform a task and it will automatically generate the steps for you, minimal effort required.
- Take calls (but be more strict)
At this point, you hopefully are starting to see some form of patterns in who your customers are and therefore how you can better qualify them for your product to protect your time from those that aren’t a good fit, use qualifying questionnaires to make sure they are right for your SaaS and if not, politely tell them, so you don’t waste either parties’ time.
- Prioritization
You may also start to see that you are getting a few more bugs and feature requests than you can deliver, so now is the time you might want to start prioritizing simply.
Start with paid user requests first, then any issues or requests that can be resolved in less than 5 minutes before using a more thoughtful approach for the remaining requests.
From Stable Product to 500 Paying Users
Now is the time you need to get serious about your customer support. You have customers who are relying on you, and however intuitive your product is, customers are still going to have questions.
Your product isn’t changing quite as much now as you are starting to find some semblance of product-market-fit and you must ensure you are building a business that can operate if you need to take a day or week (or month off).
This is when you start to take things more seriously as you are likely in it for the long haul now, so in addition to what we have already discussed:
- Blend human and AI customer support
You always want to be able to respond to customers yourself and they should always have the ability to talk to a human, but most queries are things that could be resolved if the customer were to read your documentation.
This is where an AI Customer Support tool like My AskAI comes in, ingesting all your documentation and creating an AI Customer Support Assistant that uses AI to respond to customer queries 24/7, only passing the most tricky ones onto a human.
- Rich documentation
Now your product is mostly stable and features and screens aren’t changing too often you can invest some time thoroughly documenting your product. At this point, you might also want to move from your basic setup to a more powerful, dedicated documentation tool like Gitbook.
Not only will this allow more users to self-serve, as you can link off to it in various points of your product and emails, but it will also help you start to build some SEO content.
- Customer success focus
In addition to providing reactive support, you may also want to consider proactively reaching out to your higher CLTV or enterprise customers regularly to see how they are getting on, how they are using your product, and if there are any features they want to see being built or other feedback they have.
- Ticketing and prioritization
As you are now getting more tickets you may want to consider a ticketing system with some form of prioritization. If you are already using My AskAI then you’ll be able to see what the common issues are with automatic AI topic summarization and aggregation features.
Product Market Fit and Scaling Beyond 500 Paying Users
Ok, your SaaS has taken off, you have nailed your product-market-fit and now you just need a way of keeping up with the demands of your users.
The goal here is not to become a slow-moving, slow-to-respond SaaS like everyone else, it is to become the SaaS you always wished they had become.
Building on all the customer support strategies you have put in place to scale to this point, you can start adding a few more approaches to really wow your users:
- Polished video tutorials and academies
This is when you want to invest time in making high-quality video tutorials, either by recording them yourself or by hiring someone on Upwork or Fiverr. Not only will they help improve your support and activation, but when published on YouTube they may even bring you a few new users and you can always repurpose them for social media sharing.
- Communities
Now you don’t need to wait until this point to start a community around your product for support but if you do start one earlier bear in mind that they don’t run themselves. They are a product in their own right that will need onboarding, regular engagement, and of course, administration.
But when you do have the bandwidth to set one up, they can be a great way to collect feedback and let users help one another out, giving another option for users on free tiers to get support.
- Regular training spots and webinars
To ensure you can maintain that slightly more “human” touch, you could set up regular video calls, meetings or webinars or drop-in sessions that allow you to onboard and support small or large cohorts of users at once.
- A full support team
After you have done all you can do to create a scalable customer support function for your SaaS you will likely still have to hire a few more people to help with your ticket load, but that’s no bad thing, especially if, given all of your other strategies, you enable your new support team to focus more on the “success” part of customer experience, finding ways to activate, engage and delight your users in ways only humans can!
What Not To Do in Customer Support
You may have noticed a couple of things we specifically haven’t included in this guide, because they are generally quite dated or bad practice:
- Hiding access to get support
There are still too many SaaS businesses right now that make it difficult to request support on purpose because they don’t have the resources to help.
Not only is this a terrible customer experience but it also means considerable revenue is left on the table from users that don’t know how to use their products and are therefore far more likely to churn.
- Contact forms
Many SaaS businesses also use contact forms to submit tickets. These are another form of friction for customers a lot of the time and when filled in will often not collect the necessary information the business needs to support the user.
Avoid these at all costs (they also look very web 1.0…)
Conclusion
How you approach customer support for your SaaS will vary based on what stage your business is in.
Hopefully, this guide has given you some inspiration for how you can create a world-class customer support experience for your SaaS.
