The importance of customer support in the SaaS industry has always been there, but today, it’s one of the most influential factors in consumer choice because of the competitive landscape. 

Based on the current data, 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies that offer excellent customer service. Also, 74% of customers would switch to a competing brand or company if they found out they provided a better customer experience. So, how can you offer the best experience for your clients?

It’s clear what users are demanding: proactive support, omnichannel experiences, tailored messages, and effective customer onboarding. In other terms, excellent customer service. However, we know meeting these expectations it’s no easy feat! But the good news is that your company can boost customer service and meet users’ needs using customer support tools. 

This article will help you understand what customer support tools are and how to use them to your business’s advantage. It will cover:

  • What are customer support tools?
  • What are the main benefits of customer support tools?
  • Different types of customer support tools
  • Combining customer support tools
  • Choose the best customer support tool

Let’s get started!

What are Customer Support Tools?

Customer support tools are technologies and applications that businesses use to improve the customer experience, build loyalty and reduce costs. Common elements of an all-around customer support tool include live chat, phone services, email management, and online self-service resources.

These tools help companies manage their customer service and support by providing seamless integration with other systems, automation of manual tasks, and analysis features. Additionally, to create reports and help businesses gain reliable insights into the effectiveness of their support teams.

What are the main benefits of Customer Support Tools?

Did you know that adding a customer support tool to your SaaS company can have many benefits? Here are the main ones: 

  • Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty: Providing excellent customer service increases customer satisfaction and loyalty. The faster your customers’ issues are solved, the happier they will be. Customers value your product more if they receive proactive support and immediate help when needed. 
  • Scale your business: Businesses can scale more efficiently when they have the right tools to handle high volumes of customer conversations.
  • Get to know your customers better: Apart from integrations, product flows, onboarding, or others, customer support tools analyze the behavior of your customers. Using this software, you can track your customers’ journeys and learn where they have difficulties using your SaaS.
  • Small teams can do more: Sometimes, small teams don’t have enough resources to conduct a full customer service team. Including a customer support tool can help small or medium companies achieve their customer success goals without hiring a full team. 

Now that you’re aware of the main benefits of implementing customer support tools in your SaaS business let’s look at the available tools and discover which is the best for your company. 

Different Types of Customer Support Tools

Depending on your customers’ needs, there are different customer support tools available to offer the best customer support: 

Live Chat

Many companies use live chats today, so you probably know what they are. It’s the little chat box that appears when you land on a website, where you can ask anything and solve any problem through chat. It’s incredibly useful for users, and according to current data, live chats have the highest satisfaction rate (73%) out of any form of customer communication.

Knowledge Base

A knowledge base is an online digital library of information about your product or service. Its main purpose is to help users find the answers to solve their issues on their own. It’s a great strategy, as nowadays,  69% of consumers try to resolve their issues independently.

Read more about Knowledge Base Systems and their best practices in this article.

Video Support

Video support is a feature of a customer support tool that allows team members to record and organize video responses for customers. This strategy improves the quality of communication and enhances the company’s ability to effectively guide a customer through their issues or questions. 

Customer feedback survey

Customer feedback surveys are some of the best ways to understand how well your customers are being served. They are extremely helpful, especially when using a SaaS model, where you must stay in constant contact with your customers and create products accordingly.

Community

Communities are places where customers can interact and help each other solve issues about products or services. This system allows users to build a community to share thoughts, tools, strategies, and more.

Self-Service Support 

Customer self-service support is when customers resolve their problems by themselves instead of contacting your support team. It’s the best way for customers to get answers or solve problems independently. Its main purpose is to decrease operating costs by allowing customers to troubleshoot themselves rather than having to find a technical support representative. 

Help ticket system

A help ticket system is a strategy that translates all the user issues into help tickets. These systems are a great way for SaaS companies to keep their customers happy, providing their support teams with a clear framework so that they can respond quickly and effectively to all customer requests.

Combining Customer Support Tools

We agree that it’s difficult to choose a customer support tool from all available options. Sometimes, your company might end up using three tools simultaneously, but why pay for three when you can combine all your customer support tools into one? This is where product success platforms come into play. 

PSP (product success platform) are customer-centric, product-led platforms that use the product to optimize all areas of the customer lifecycle. Moreover, these tools offer a variety of features for analyzing user data, including downloads, customer feedback surveys, behavioral event tracking, engagement, and product flows. A PSP combines the different customer support tools described previously into an all-in-one platform, making it one of the best choices for businesses to improve their customer service. 

Check our blog posts What is a PSP (Product Success Platform) and Redundant Technology: How to Reduce the Costs of your Tech Stack to learn more. 

Choose the Best Customer Support Tool

Customer success has become one of the most important metrics for SaaS companies today. Having your users engaged and satisfied with your products and services is essential for growing your business, and including customer support tools in your daily activities is an effective way to do so. These tools will increase your customer retention and loyalty, scale your business, get to know your customers better, and help small, medium, and large companies to achieve their customer success goals. 

The most common customer support tools are: live chats, knowledge bases, support videos, customer feedback surveys, community systems, self-service support, and help ticket systems. We know it’s hard to make the right choice, so if you are looking for an all-in-one product success tool, book a demo with FROGED today to learn how we can improve the main pillars of product success: customer engagement, customer retention, and MRR.

Are you interested in learning more? Discover our blog post PSP: Essential for Successful Employee Onboarding and our customer support features.