The Traditional Approach to the Customer Journey:
Historically, many organizations have held a traditional, linear view of the customer journey, believing it starts with sales and ends with support.
Today, SaaS businesses understand the ideal customer journey is not linear, but a continuous and fluid loop. Below, we look at some of the specific ways TheLoops is helping SaaS businesses break out of this old-school organizational mold.
If we were to break it down into steps, the traditional approach to the customer would look something like this:
- Sell a product to the prospect
- Hand the customer off to Customer Success for onboarding
- Hand them off to Customer Support for technical issues
- Never hear from them again
- Find a new prospect and repeat
The SaaS Customer Journey – A Continuous Loop
Research has shown that customers respond most strongly to—and are most loyal to—SaaS offerings that provide an intuitive experience that seamlessly addresses customer’s needs, including addressing technical issues that may crop up at any stage. This is at the heart of “product-led sales.”
In the old, linear model, customer support and customer success were viewed as separate disciplines. But when discussing the customer journey in today’s SaaS industry, support and success must be inextricably linked. Acquiring a customer and then sending them off to a support team missing critical context about that customer and their journey with your product is a recipe for future churn.
Successfully operating in a “product-led” environment means gaining visibility into the entire customer journey. Ultimately, this is precisely what TheLoops was designed to help businesses achieve, unifying disparate, siloed data from across your organization into a holistic, convenient dashboard view that can be shared across the whole organization. Below are four specific tips for improving your SaaS customers’ journeys with the help of an intelligent support experience.
4 Proven Tips for Improving the Customer Journey with an Intelligent Support Experience:
1. Turn Your Support Team Into Revenue Drivers
Upselling and cross-selling are not just sales and marketing tactics. They can add legitimate value to the customer experience by helping customers achieve their goals with your product. The challenge is understanding when and where a potential opportunity pops up. This is where an intelligent support experience—powered by TheLoops—can help. Analyzing customer data relating to success and support provides a more-comprehensive picture of what the customer actually wants from your service and informs your customer support team when revenue opportunities arise.
Once you’ve tied your support, customer, and product usage data together through TheLoops, our platform can generate insights that signal new opportunities within your existing customer base, allowing you to generate more sales opportunities and to build deeper overall relationships through improved customer experiences.
It’s simple—a shared view of the most-important data from across your organization turns your support team into a revenue driver for your business by providing insights about your customers and their experience using your product.
2. Get Ahead of Escalations & Prioritize Product Engineering Effort
Ideally, your support team is not operating in a data-siloed vacuum. Support agents should be able to solve issues in a real-time, personalized way that is directly informed by the customer’s specific issue and experience with the product prior to their outreach. This isn’t possible unless support can see a comprehensive view of the customer’s experience using your product—preferably without the need to jump between half a dozen tools.
Beyond merely solving customers’ technical issues, TheLoops monitors your environment for emerging trends and potential escalations using AI and real-time sentiment analysis. By alerting support leaders of escalations before they happen, customers benefit from a proactive support experience that leaves customers feeling heard and support teams receiving higher CSAT scores.
Meanwhile, product engineering gains insight into the true business impact of bugs and escalations, ensuring that development and engineering hours are being prioritized to maximize business impact.
3. Use Support Data to Pre-emptively Identify and Prevent Churn
Support must be a competitive advantage rather than a cost center. When you lose customers, you lose recurring revenue, the Holy Grail of SaaS businesses. Support agents often have the most contact with your customers. They hear first-hand about problems or missing features and help alleviate customer frustrations to ultimately help the customer toward the goal they originally set out to accomplish with your product. Ultimately, a data-driven customer support experience requires an ability to access the right data in real-time.
Real-time data insights are key when it comes to preventing customer churn. Critical details such as customer sentiment, escalations, ARR, renewal timeline, product usage etc must be considered when prioritizing support and assessing churn risk.
TheLoops enables an intelligent support experience that helps you to gather and analyze data in real-time and identify customers at risk of churning. By relying on AI-based scoring, combined with automated alerting, TheLoops provides support leaders with opportunities to be proactive and to take action before the customer churns.
4. Use Support Data to Identify Opportunity Areas for New Features
When done correctly, intelligent support can go beyond merely providing excellent service—which in itself creates a more loyal customer base—but can actually help you identify what new features are likely to increase customer engagement. Funneling these insights back to the product engineering team is critical in maintaining an efficient product led growth strategy.
We believe this is one of the many benefits of unifying your sales, support, and product engineering data through TheLoops, ensuring that the true “voice of the customer” and the voice of your internal staff are both adequately driving your process.
Sign Up to Demo TheLoops for Yourself
Every interaction your customer has with your product influences your customer’s perception of your brand. Resolving or staying ahead of customer issues is all about learning from every action your user takes.
TheLoops’ Intelligent SupportOps uncovers hidden treasures in your data, enabling your managers to become preventative and your support staff to become proactive. Sign up for a demo today!
