How Some Brands Have Changed their B2B SaaS Game with a Powerful Customer Support System
Software As A Service — You know what’s really interesting about SaaS? The first S of the abbreviation signifies your product; while the second S defines it as a service. SaaS business owners usually find themselves in a common conundrum of not knowing which S to place their emphasis on. However, this dilemma tones down significantly when talking about B2B SaaS customer service. Here, the customer is aware of the kind of product that they are looking for, but they want to ensure that their partner is going to provide an end-to-end, empathetic and pro-active ‘Service’ experience. It becomes critical for a B2B SaaS company to have a powerful, enterprising customer success and support team in place that can transform your B2B SaaS game with humongous positive outcomes.
Top B2B SaaS companies who realized this aspect early in their business curve have witnessed remarkable year-on-year growth. Here are some examples from the B2B SaaS industry that have put their trust and time in creating a powerful customer support system and how it has worked in their favor tremendously!
1) ‘Customer experience (CX) has the power to make or break brands: companies that lead in CX realize 4–8 percent more revenue than their industry peers (Bain), while 91 percent of customers who have a single poor experience with a company will never do business with that brand again (American Express).’ — Avaya, American Multinational Technology Company
Avaya spreads its services across Customer Experience, Team Collaboration, and Digital Transformation when it comes to their Client’s business needs. They believe that more channels bring in more opportunities, whether it is social media, chat or mobile apps. They reckon that a 360-degree view of customers over multiple platforms can help a business in anticipating needs, thereby taking service to new levels of building loyalty.
2)‘Your business is built on relationships, and today, relationships are built on social’ — Spredfast. Global Social Media Marketing Software Company
Spredfast spreads its services across Social Media Management, Marketing, Care, Insights and Governance. They believe in unlocking social’s potential that can help in strengthening a brand’s customer support and eventually bring about business growth. Their idea of Smart Social brings focus on having meaningful conversations and engaging the right audiences so as to reduce churn.
3)‘Actionable Intelligence is a necessity in a dynamic world of massive information growth because it empowers organizations with crucial insights and enables decision makers to anticipate, respond, and take action.’ — Verint, New York Based Analytics Company
Verint has introduced actionable intelligence in its customer support setup that helped it in two specific areas; customer engagement and cyber intelligence. Businesses can capture a large amount of information from various data types and sources. This can assist them in optimizing customer engagement.
4)‘It should be the golden rule of every customer experience organization — if you take genuine, intentional care of your customers, they will reward you by remaining loyal and bringing others along with them. Sound a little too “feel good” to be true? Consider this: research shows that just a 5% boost in customer loyalty can lead to a 95% increase in profits.’ — Talkdesk, Unicorn in cloud-based solutions
Talkdesk believes in having a separate customer success and customer support teams in an organization since each team serves an extremely unique function. They also feel that providing an impeccable customer experience is everyone’s job and therefore creating a culture of accountability for customer experience brings in great results.
Unlike many support teams, which focus solely on addressing customer issues after they’ve made a purchase, SaaS support plays a role at every stage of the buying process that includes acquisition, activation, and retention. And given that each of these steps has a significant impact on business growth and overall revenue, your support strategy needs to account for all of them.
Also, none of us will be surprised by the increasing role of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning solutions in the form of customer support in the coming years as well. More and more AI and ML products are being adopted and it will certainly have a disrupting influence not only on the SaaS B2B market but also on the ways business is done in general.
Yasasree Nerayanuri in her article ‘on the noise of B2B SaaS customer success…’ rightly concludes “Customer Success is definitely the growth driver and companies who get this right will emerge to be market leaders in their space. However, the biggest challenge is to understand how to tailor/customize best practices of customer success to your business needs operationalize the same.”
It’s high time that B2B companies start putting their mind and money into creating a robust customer support department, factoring in the increasing use of technologies like AI, Analytics, Big Data, Virtualizations and so on to give their customers the experience they have never imagined. Because when the times are changing, your game needs to change too!
Originally published at blog.mobilock.in on February 14, 2019.
