SaaS essential elements in customer service

In IT Services, listed and successful companies put out is the repeat business from existing customers. If that number was in the nineties, that company was deemed as very successful.

The reasoning behind that was low Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores led to increased business and hence higher new customer acquisition costs. So, a lot of investment goes into making customer success a real success for the enterprise.

The monolithic model or the single touchpoint model of the past had an inherent hierarchical architecture involving human intervention for routing issues to subject matter experts which slowed down the cycle time for issue resolution, which in turn led to delays and productivity losses.

Mapping the customer journey from the first touchpoint to the customer staying engaged is the real challenge for any enterprise and a SaaS solution just does this job better than traditional on-premise solutions. The Customer Success story began as a voice-based call center about 15-20 years back. The call center had 1 touchpoint only and the objective was purely transactional.

Customer Service SaaS has imbibed the open API architectural regime and this has unleashed the power of omnichannel experience to the customers thereby enabling social media touchpoints like - Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Chatbots, etc alongside other traditional channels like email and voice.

A robust Knowledge Management System especially a KCS certified system renders Self Service very easy when KMS is integrated with the Customer Service SaaS tool, it increases efficiency and reduces issue resolution cycle time even further. Earlier Sales and Marketing folks in a given enterprise were considered as ‘experts’ when it came to having the pulse of a customer's requirements and pain points, however today, thanks to the omnichannel SaaS model, that center of gravity seems to be shifting ever so slowly to the Customer Success Department. This means that the HR and talent acquisition group in the enterprise needs to pay attention to the type of folks they will need to populate the Customer Success group.

Thus far we have talked about - Omnichannel, Knowledge Management Systems, and the growing importance of the Customer Success teams. It’s essential that we get these 3 absolutely right to deliver top-rated Customer Service to our customers and ensure high repeat business.

McKinsey Quarterly says something similar about the Critical Success Factor ingredients for great Customer Service such as,

Speed and flexibility

Speed and flexibility is one of the top customer service qualities that is very important to fix the customer before you fix the problem which requires minimum processing time, responsiveness, and need-based service.

As companies became more digital during the pandemic and expanded their multi-channel communication capabilities, the flexibility and ease of use of text messaging and social channels have significantly increased. According to research by ZDNet, at least 57% of businesses have been delivering more personalized customer service experiences since the pandemic.

Reliability and Transparency

Reliability and Transparency ensures that customers can depend on your company, it helps in proactive outreach and communication. One's product may be the best in the market, but their business won’t be successful without effective customer service solutions. To ensure that each of our customers has a positive overall experience, we need to make sure that our service is always reliable and transparent in the interest of customers.

Interaction and Care

The number of channels through which communication is done especially during the pandemic is ever-increasing, the customers might want to interact at any time including odd hours of night and thus it's important to have an omnichannel, 24 by 7 framework to ensure continuous interaction across channels.

Care and personal attention towards the customers make them feel like they are understood and taken care of. Customers desire to be empathized with by company representatives and understand the problem from their point of view. Customers these days expect tailor made solutions and they expect nothing less when it comes to their query resolution. Saas has enabled an environment of continuous interaction, trust and transparency between the customer and businesses.

This article has been written by Rohan Joshi, co-founder, CEO, Wolken Software and Sudhir Prabhu, co-founder, CTO, Wolken Software.