"Customer experience and support are everything”

Area: Customer support and education
Goal: Educate customers at scale while maintaining the feeling of a ‘one-to-one’ experience that customers love
User cohorts: Applicable to all user cohorts.

We’ve all heard that “customer experience and support are everything”, but I’d argue many SaaS companies I’ve dealt with still have a lot of work to do when it comes to their customer support processes.

Whilst personalized customer support is not a new insight for anyone reading this, it’s an area that continually needs to be optimized, tested, and paid attention to carefully.

Personalization is everything, especially if you’re in a competitive vertical. Expectations for users/customers in the SaaS world have never been higher.

Remember, your competitors are raising the level of care they provide as they know it’s a competitive advantage (even if they aren’t as feature-rich as your product).

Why personalized support is critically important

• Helps users feel like they’re being looked after and cared for (feels like a personalized service to them specifically). Plus, a human touch cuts through the other ‘always on’ marketing noise.

• Great for guiding users to learn and understand further how they can get more value from the platform, which they may not have realized from self-serving.

Mistakes to avoid (and recommendations)

Sending "personalized" emails that are obviously automated

Honestly, everyone knows what an ‘automated’ email looks like. Automation and tracking emails that are sent to users are fine (and we have to send these as marketers to measure effectiveness), but keep it plain text and natural in language—there's no excuse not to do it these days with the power of AI and personalized copy. Plus, avoid the heavy branded headers or signatures. Keep it simple - no fancy design, save that for the newsletters and standardized email automation flows.

Don’t push too hard on the ‘book in a call to chat with a team member’ CTA

Recently, a client of mine was using a product that was sending us a lot of emails asking us to ‘book a time to chat’, where we didn’t really need to chat. Plus, we can tell it was clearly automated. Sending a reminder or two (at max.) is fine, but we were getting prompted regularly, and it was pretty annoying. Past a couple of reminders, focus on sharing helpful resources and content that can be read and accessed whenever the user is ready.

Experiments and optimizations to consider trying

If you’ve got the specific training, resources, and content in place (which most of you reading this would already have), it’s now about ensuring you offer highly-personalized support and conveys this through emails and in-app notifications/customer support prompts (anything within the product).

Here’s an actionable process I recommend to SaaS companies to really dial up with personalization (and how you can do this at scale):

1. Dial into your product analytics and determine the various customer cohorts and user behavioral segmentation types. Example user behavior segmentation types include:

• Plans - Free trial period, free users, users based on tiered plans

• High-tiered customers - highest ARPA/APRU users and customers

• Product engagement - active cohorts, non-active cohorts

• Feature-adoption - feature-specific

• Time as a user/customer - the length of time since they originally signed up (or upgraded to a specific plan)

There are lots of combinations here, and it’s totally worth the time to ensure these various advanced segments are well set up.

2. Depending on the size of your company, there’s a lot of work to do to tackle all the above segments and ensure customer support is highly personalized. Split up responsibilities internally and get people to focus on their strengths, especially those who will be looking after feature-specific and ARPA/APRU customers.

3. Use AI to create copy based on recent product behavior and about the user themselves (check LinkedIn and recent company news).

4. Then optimize, test, and refine further across your copy, messaging, and the resources and content you share.

Over time, you’ll see amazing results, as I can say from experience that personalization in SaaS really does work.