For SaaS companies, outshining the competition starts with your product, focusing most of your time, energy, and resources on making sure it lives up to what you’ve promised. So, where does SaaS customer service fit in?

Unfortunately, it’s often deprioritized — if not overlooked entirely.

Truth is, customer service is just as important for SaaS as it is for industries like ecommerce . With roughly 70% of business software now being SaaS and 38% of companies only using SaaS software, customer expectations for SaaS customer service are skyrocketing.

Why you need to up your SaaS customer service game

When customers buy a physical product, they likely only need service for things like exchanges, returns, or questions about how to use it soon after purchase. But SaaS customer service is a little different. For starters, customers aren’t buying anything tangible. They’re buying software that they’ll be using frequently — maybe even daily. That means they could need help long after they sign up, or even before.

Customers are continually paying for your product as a service, usually on a subscription basis. This matters for two reasons: First, people like to get what they pay for — so if they’re paying monthly, they expect service on demand (rightfully so). Second, churn is high due to the short-term commitment.

SaaS companies provide general customer service — for things like payment issues and account inquiries — and technical support. Knowing that every single interaction impacts your customer relationship and shapes your brand reputation, why not make customers feel more valued with top-notch service?

Another key benefit of SaaS customer service is that it offers an invaluable window into how customers feel about your product and your business. Issues often surface in customer service interactions long before they’re bubbled up through customer satisfaction surveys. With AI as part of your service strategy, you can easily mine transcripts for both live and automated interactions to find out what your customers are thinking — and what you can do better. It’s like giving your product and engineering teams a crystal ball.

So, let’s look at some of the ways you can ensure your SaaS customer service lives up to your brand values and promise.

1. Prioritize documentation

Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to revamp your SaaS customer service strategy, start by building a thorough knowledge base for your product.

This may seem tedious, but doing so will pay off in dividends. The more nuanced and complex your software is, and the more features and capabilities it has, the more clear documentation will benefit your business.

Thorough documentation lets you:

• Onboard new employees quickly and easily.
• Enable customers to self-serve for more inquiries, reducing tickets.
• Onboard and train an AI Agent at speed — which in turn, will help you automate more than just basic inquiries. (More on this in a minute.)

Start by collecting your existing documentation. This could include product guides, tutorials, training modules, webinars, and so on. Map out the information you already have. Then, look to your help tickets to find out what’s missing — what are your customers asking about that’s not covered in that content?

Next, get to work filling in the gaps and organizing the content in a way that’s logical and thoughtful, and will make it easy to pinpoint exactly what customers and agents are looking for. (For more on building a knowledge base from the ground up, check out our guide .

2. Automate everywhere

Digitization is driving the SaaS revolution — and shaping how customers interact with the companies they do business with. Naturally, they expect to be able to get SaaS customer service on the digital channels they use every day.

Automating digital customer service conversations allows you to slash ticket volumes for support agents. You can easily scale support during peak periods such as the end of the fiscal year, when many businesses re-evaluate budgets and decide where to funnel excess funds — often investing in new tech solutions to help reach their next-year goals. Plus, you’re giving customers what they want. So, it’s a no brainer.

Start by automating your most common inquiries, including general customer needs like “Do you offer a free trial?” and frequent technical questions.. Look to your existing tickets to identify intents with the highest volume and value, or ask your best customer service agents where you should start.

Automating these repetitive queries will save time and money, while also relieving your valuable agents from the mundane task of answering the same questions over and over. Customers will be happy to self-serve, saving time and frustration.

3. Remember the three P’s: Personalization, proactiveness, and personality

To deliver stellar SaaS customer service, you have to give people what they want. And today’s consumers are clear: They want brands to anticipate their needs. To know them. And to make conversations constructive and enjoyable.

Sound like a tall order? It’s really not. With the right team and tech stack, you can deliver on all three demands and delight your customers.

Personalization is essential, and it’s easily achieved with a modern AI platform that can draw on all the available customer data — whether they’re visiting your website for the very first time or are a long-time customer looking for help. Personalize customer service at every opportunity, from pre-sale and onboarding to troubleshooting and renewals. This makes customers feel seen and valued.

Being proactive is all about anticipating what users need and offering it before they ask. For example, you can offer help at a specific point in your workflows where you know users often get stuck. With an AI Agent, you don’t need to script all the possible issues and resolutions. Just identify the pain points and trigger a conversation. The AI Agent will do the rest.

Renewals and upgrades are key revenue drivers for SaaS, so be sure to reach out to remind customers when they’re due to renew, offer upgrades when they’re ready, and tell them about promotions or deals that might be relevant to them.

Finally, infuse some pizazz into your bot to make automated interactions more human — and more fun. SaaS brands may not generally be known for having effervescent personalities (except yours truly, of course), but why not do things differently? Create a clear brand voice and strong brand personality to make customer service experiences more memorable. Bring your brand promise and values to life by infusing them into every conversation.

4. Measure your progress

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. If you’re looking to level-up your SaaS customer service, start by deciding which KPIs to track and how often you’re going to measure them. Then take some baseline measurements so you know where you’re starting from — and set goals for where you want to go.

CSAT is the cornerstone, so you’ll definitely want to give customers a way to tell you directly how they think you’re doing. Post-interaction surveys are a quick and easy way to capture CSAT. Other customer service KPIs include ticket volume, average response time, and first contact resolution (FCR), all of which give you a good idea of how well your customer service strategy is working.

At Ada, we also recommend measuring Automated Resolution (AR), which is a new North Star for customer service. AR is a conversation between a customer and a company that’s relevant, accurate, safe, and doesn’t involve a human. Increasing AR allows you to resolve more issues, maximize agent efficiency, and improve your SaaS customer service so you stand out from the crowd.

5. Maximize ROI with an AI Agent 

For digital brands, basic chatbots are table stakes. But generative AI-powered chatbots, also known as generative bots or AI Agents, are changing the game all over again.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard about generative AI . New AI platforms like ChatGPT use large language models (LLMs) to generate content on their own. When combined with natural language processing (NLP), generative AI enables chatbots to answer questions and converse with customers freely — as opposed to scripted bots, which can only follow predefined conversational flows.

In other words, the AI Agent can decide what to do on its own.

With generative AI in your corner, you can transform a basic chatbot into an AI Agent that understands, responds to, and acts on customer data in real time. The more you use and train it, the better it gets.

If you start by getting your documentation ducks in a row, you’ll be able to onboard an AI Agent at record speed. We’re talking hours, not days. And because the AI Agent isn’t relying on a script, it can handle both general customer service inquiries and technical support questions. No need to spend months composing answers for all the possible questions your customers might ask, or training two separate teams of support agents.

As long as it’s in your knowledge base, it’s within the AI Agent’s command.

If 2023 was the year generative AI took the world by storm, 2024 will be the year companies really figure out how to use it. For SaaS brands, generative AI is the secret sauce that will help you take your customer service to new heights.