Customer Service Tips for Saas Startups
This article is written by Jeremiah Uke, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.
Dilawar Syed is a seasoned business leader and has been at the helm of affairs at a number of organizations, currently, the President and CEO at Lumiata, Dilawar, Dilawar is leading the company’s growth and transformation as a leader in the AI health analytics market. He was present at Etohum San Francisco conference where he talked his journey as president of Freshdesk.
Over the years, Freshdesk used to build customer service software for big companies and corporations, this has changed dramatically as small startups have now started worryingabout public data. Because if you do something wrong, someone can write a bad Yelp review on you, or start a conversation on Twitter about how bad your service is.
When Facebook announced bots on the Messenger app, Messenger was going to become an operating system for businesses to run on, businesses like Bank of America have bots which give basic customer service. Freshdesk also introduced machine learning powered solutions to improve customer support on the platform.
Dilawar mentioned the importance of in-app mobile support because our mobile phones have become our primary communication tool to businesses. The context of customer service has to be not just in mobile, but within the mobile app. Dilawar mentions Uber’s customer support as an example, where if you wish to address a ride issue, you have to fill a static page in the app, after which you will get an email to resolve your issue.
Dilawar believes Uber as a mobile app company should have an in-app exchange where customers can communicate with customer support within the application. Uber integrated this feature a month ago. That is how far we are as an industry. While we have about 40-50 apps on our mobile devices, probably only one of them have in-app interaction with the brand.
Startups who might be interested in dealing with SaaS have a number of things to consider. Freshdesk’s customers discovered them on the web, years ago, Freshdesk will go to customers to make presentations in order to sell their product, but now, the customers discover the product, and they come to you, they might have signed up on trial, it is your job to take care of them and close the deal. Most of Freshdesk’s big customers came to them via google ads, they made sure to take care of them.
In order for this to work for you, you have to make your software very quick and easy to onboard, it has to be near consumer experience. The same way Facebook customer support does not help you install the Facebook app on your phone, your business software should not require any help either to install.
Freshdesk has had a very liberal customer support strategy, they have people that will help companies regardless of the size of customers they have. As a startup, if you take care of people at the trial phase, they will trust that you will do the same when they finally sign that contract with you.
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