Getting a higher-than-usual number of customer support tickets can be a strong signal that something isn’t right. What’s causing the problem can be varied, but the solution always comes down to the same thing – improving your user experience (UX).
Luckily we are here to help you solve that!
Join us as we explore how great UX design reduces your SaaS customer support tickets.
Why a high number of customer support tickets is bad for business
Typically growing support ticket numbers show that your SaaS product is suffering from
- Poor onboarding process triggering confusion either at signup or in the first-use tour
- Lack of documentation and guides to help users solve issues for themselves
- Difficulty in usage
- Differences between user expectations and the software’s capabilities
- Increase in technical issues or bugs
- Slow response times or insufficient responses trigger further tickets
What does this mean for your SaaS business?
The more confused and dissatisfied your user becomes the more likely they are to stop using your app. Leave this problem brewing for too long and you’ll also add higher support costs, decreased engagement, missed upsell opportunities and potential reputational damage.
How UX design can provide the information your SaaS customers need
UX design is the embodiment of a user-first approach. Exploring the setup and delivery of your SaaS product from this angle means you can tackle potential issues before they become product problems.
Most SaaS business owners think UX design is something you work through at the beginning of a project. That isn’t the case.
The way I see it, UX design is your first port of call whenever you experience a drop in user satisfaction or you want to roll out a new feature.
Our top UX tips for reducing your SaaS customer support tickets
While your situation might call for something specific we have created a list of what we think are great UX starting points. Work on these and you will very quickly see tangible results.
- Start by talking to your users – Create a survey and find out what their biggest issues are. Don’t be frightened of feedback either, one of the best ways to design and deliver a better app is to understand your user. Once you have this information you’ll see what the real problems are and you can plan to resolve them. Better still you can keep your users in the loop, by delivering message updates showing that you are addressing their needs – great for breeding app loyalty!
- Improve your onboarding process – Making that process easy to complete is the first step to helping users. Remember this is the first time they are using your app, so they won’t know where to find information, or how to complete simple tasks. How you guide them is going to reduce tickets and churn rates.
- Make sure you have your guides and resources updated regularly – Your customer services will have a wealth of information when it comes to customer feedback. Check here first so you can plan which guides you need to update or build to answer FAQS. Don’t forget to prioritise this list! If you see the same issues coming up, then a big chunk of similar tickets could be cut by having the right guides in place.
- Clean up your navigation and make finding help intuitive – I can guarantee that a good deal of your support tickets is questions like, “Where to find…”, or “How do I…”. Cleaning up your navigation makes self-service easier to achieve, which reduces the need to submit support tickets.
- Highlight a call to action – If a common question is “How do I add a new task?” on your productivity app, then it sounds like you need a big call to action button that makes that job easy to do on sign-in. This same tactic can be embedded into the design of any SaaS product, so think about how you can make engagement easier.
We’ve put together a really useful guide for increasing SaaS engagement and productivity. I think you’ll find that helpful when looking deeper into your UX and decreasing tickets and churn rates.
- Cut your “time to resolution” – In customer support, there are three levels of service; self-help is level one, level two is service agent involvement and level three is software engineer support. The ideal situation is to have the highest portion of your tickets solved at the self-help level. If you have followed all of our steps so far then it’s likely the majority of users won’t need to submit a ticket, but if they do you want to offer quick links to guides and resources that offer real solutions. Re-examining your user flow could make a big difference here.
How Strafe can help you reduce customer support tickets effectively
As UX designers we start every project by learning about and understanding the user. Having that information available as we work through your business goals allows us to deliver the best user experience possible.
Our expert understanding of how UX design reduces support tickets and churn means that we make a big difference to your MRR – sometimes with some pretty simple tricks.
Drop your details into the Project Planner below if you need a UX design team to cut your SaaS customer support tickets and let us whip your SaaS into better shape!
