Support

SaaS Customer Support: Best Practices, Key Elements

Published: August 29, 2022
Last Updated: April 15, 2025

By Samantha Rohn

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Effective customer support is critical for SaaS companies, where software continuously evolves, updates are frequent, and tools are mission-critical. SaaS customer support resolves practical issues and enhances the overall user experience, deepening customer relationships.

Great support can inspire brand loyalty and increase your bottom line. 89% of customers say a positive support experience makes them more likely to buy again, and at a SaaS company, this translates to renewals and increased revenue.

Not only that, but happy customers can actually fuel your company’s growth. 94% of customers who rate a company’s customer experience as “Very Good” are likely to recommend them to others, helping a company reach new customers.

On the other hand, the cost of not prioritizing customer support in favor of a better customer experience is stark. 58% of customers who have a poor customer experience will stop doing business with you, and 62% of customers share bad experiences with others, making it less likely that you’ll acquire new customers.

When your support team can guide customers through complexities and provide timely solutions, it reinforces trust and brand loyalty. Not only that, but the connection with customers also benefits your company, helping product development stay aligned with user needs and aware of innovation opportunities.

However, establishing a robust SaaS customer support strategy involves more than a help desk—it’s about creating a support system that:

Decreases the need for direct support interactions with great customer self-serve resources that are consistently maintained
Offers an extremely fast, multi-channel approach when customers do need help
Solves even the most complex user issues quickly and with empathy

In this article, we’ll explore proven strategies for elevating your SaaS customer support, give examples, and help you turn your desire for a great SaaS customer success operation into concrete action items.

What Is SaaS Customer Support?

SaaS customer support is the framework for providing guidance, resources, and assistance to SaaS customers, with the ultimate goal of helping them succeed on your platform. SaaS customer support teams both maintain self-serve resources for customers and act as a direct point of connection for customers who need personalized assistance.

Why SaaS Customer Support Matters

SaaS customer support influences the quality of your customer experience and helps your organization understand and cater to customer needs – all of which are likely to help your organization hit its business KPIs with increased customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Here are some specific factors and metrics that are likely to be influenced by the quality of your support framework:

Customer retention: Quality customer support is a major factor in whether or not your users continue using your platform long-term. Hubspot revealed that 93% of customers are willing to make a repeat purchase from companies that offer excellent customer service,
Reduced customer churn: Churn is a huge problem in the SaaS market, with new and capable competitors popping up constantly and offering your customers other potential platform options. However, brand loyalty can go a long way in keeping your customers around and reducing the likelihood of leaving the platform. Nearly three out of five consumers report that good customer service is vital to feeling loyalty toward a brand, meaning that great support is a good start.
Brand reputation and word-of-mouth growth: When customers have a great experience with your brand and your platform, they’re more likely to speak positively and recommend you to others. This increases the quality of your brand reputation in the market and helps you acquire new customers who are inspired by the positive experiences of others in their field.
More success with product development initiatives: Successful product development is about identifying customer needs and answering them with features, functionality, and UX iterations. A robust and effective support team is a consistent source of customer feedback, helping product and engineering align their efforts with tangible user needs and avoiding failed initiatives. For example, teams that collect and utilize feedback from their support team and understand user needs in-depth are far less likely to fall victim to time-wasting biases, like shiny object syndrome.

With more competition and higher customer churn rates than ever, it’s essential to keep as many customers as possible; your support team plays a key role in doing that.

Key Components of Successful SaaS Customer Support

Hiring the right people is just the first step in creating an effective SaaS customer success operation. In this section, we’ll look at the other critical components to getting the most out of providing impactful customer support.

1. Proactive support and onboarding

Ironically, one key role in your support framework is to decrease customers’ need to contact your support team.

When you take a proactive approach to guiding your customers, they experience less friction and you keep your support team more available for complex issues.

At its core, proactive support involves educating customers about what they need to know to be successful on your platform. One of the most effective ways to do this is to provide an exceptional onboarding experience for new users so that they begin their journey with some know-how.

SaaS customer onboarding aims to drive customer adoption by educating users on how to use your product with minimal friction and maximum efficiency. With the right tooling, you can create an interactive, enjoyable, and educational onboarding experience for your users that will ultimately make it less likely that they’ll need help from your support team.

Many teams rely on Whatfix DAP, which drives adoption and effective onboarding across your platform with personalized guidance and embedded learn-by-doing techniques. Whatfix ensures that customers develop a high level of application proficiency within a short period of time to see better results faster. Here are some standout features that make this possible:

Interactive Walkthroughs: Step-by-step guidance that introduces new users to core features and best practices directly within your application, reducing the likelihood they’ll need to file support tickets.
Smart Tips and Pop-ups: Helpful prompts that appear right when users need them, ensuring customers learn about crucial functions or common pitfalls before encountering issues.
Self-Help Widget: An on-demand support option that offers instant answers, walk-through content, and FAQs without forcing users to reach out to your support team.
Personalized User Flows: Tailored experiences that adapt to a user’s role, product usage, or skill level, so they only see relevant guidance that keeps them engaged.
Analytics and Insights: Actionable data on where users struggle or abandon tasks, allowing you to refine support content and offer more proactive guidance for a smoother user journey.

2. Multichannel communication

Gone are the days when customer support was a single email inbox manned by a few agents. Customers not only expect immediate responses, but they also expect to be able to contact you in the most convenient and effective way based on their momentary needs. This requires your team to offer support in various ways.

Here are some components and tooling to consider:

Live chat tools provide conversational support to customers with chatbots or live support agents anytime, anywhere.
Traditional email support is still relevant—most support teams offer this service, which customers still frequently use.
Social media support has also become a mainstream expectation, and answering customer queries via your social media channels can go a long way in terms of a customer’s experience with your brand.
Community resources are digital spaces where your customers can help each other with queries regarding your platform, which has the added benefit of potentially reducing the volume of support tickets.

When you offer a multichannel approach, you ensure that your customers have recourse when they need help and can get assistance according to their preferences.

Tip: When you offer a multichannel approach, make sure that customers can switch from one channel to another and still have a streamlined experience. Ensure that your team chooses customer support software that allows you to track tickets and conversations across multiple channels so your customers don’t have to repeat themselves or experience other frustrations.

3. Self-service options and knowledge bases

When your customers can easily find information when they need it, they experience less friction when trying to accomplish tasks on your platform, and your team has less support backlog. The best way to do this is to offer a comprehensive knowledge base and other self-serve options that are searchable and easy to find in a moment of need.

Here are some self-serve support options that your team should consider:

Searchable, easy-to-maintain knowledge base: Knowledge bases enable organizations to establish a centralized, searchable repository that allows end-users to find information. Knowledge base software provides organizations the tools and infrastructure to create a centralized information hub.
FAQ section on your platform: Your support team can maintain a regularly updated FAQ page as the platform evolves and common support questions change. Users often look for FAQ sections when they encounter an issue that they perceive as relatively simple.
AI Chatbots: It isn’t an exaggeration to say that chatbot technology improves every day, and many companies find that their users can get increasingly adequate support when using them. It’s a win-win situation when they work well because your customers get immediate assistance, and you reduce your support team’s workload.

Tip: Track your knowledge base analytics to see which articles are viewed the most and which drive the most support tickets. When you see articles frequently utilized, consider updating your onboarding flow to give more information about that feature or flow and reduce customer friction. When you see that some articles are consulted but still end in support tickets, have your support team update those articles to include more robust information to avoid more tickets in the future.

4. Customer feedback loops

Another important aspect of an effective support framework is the internal utilization of the customer feedback that is consistently given to support. Since your support reps are on the front lines with your customers, they offer a great opportunity for your team to learn more about your user base.

To foster a user-centric culture fueled by support learnings, include customer support reps in product team meetings, share customer feedback with product and development teams, highlight customer experiences via survey responses, and prioritize building relationships between departments.

Making a strong connection between customer support and the rest of your company will help your team pursue product initiatives that are aligned with user needs and, generally, get more out of your support team’s efforts.

Tip: Ensure your support team has regular check-ins with the right product stakeholders. Some teams do this monthly and even weekly, ensuring the product team is aware of both current and long-term opportunities to improve the customer experience. When there is a regular communication cadence, it’s easier for the Product team to ensure their roadmaps align with current user needs.

5. Technical expertise and scalability

While your support reps likely already know the basic features of your platform, it’s also important to prioritize consistent, ongoing training that helps your agents develop more and more expertise.

Here are some essential training topics to consider as you design your support team’s ongoing training program:

Technical topics: How can your tech team train your support reps to have more technical knowledge that enables them to resolve a wider variety of support tickets without needing help?
Soft skills to deliver excellent support: Additional coaching on skills like empathy, active listening, and problem-solving can help your reps better serve your customers over time.
Advanced tooling workshops: Your support team likely uses various tools in their day-to-day work. Providing ongoing training to utilize even the most advanced aspects of support-oriented tools is important because it increases the team’s efficiency and scalability.

Tip: Think about the scalability of your support team. One way to do that is to design a continual training program for your support reps that makes each person capable of handling different types of tickets effectively without utilizing other stakeholder resources. When you create your training program, work with various stakeholders who can impart knowledge to your support reps that increases their autonomy when assisting customers.

Common SaaS Customer Support Challenges

As with all departments, SaaS customer support teams have their share of challenges. In this section, we’ll detail some of the most common challenges and suggest some practical solutions for your team.

1. Onboarding challenges

Onboarding new support reps typically indicates an increased demand for customer support. However, there is tension between getting a new agent to peak productivity quickly and also making sure they have an adequate onboarding experience and the necessary training to do a great job.

For example, some teams have their agents working on support tickets even before they’ve finished their product training. Though agents can pretty quickly address simple issues, sometimes customer issues are more than they seem and without proper knowledge, your new agents may not provide optimal guidance to your users.

Solutions

Fortunately, there are several strategies for creating swift but effective onboarding programs for your new support reps. Here are some best practices to consider:

Create an onboarding checklist with specific goals: Ensure every rep understands what they need to achieve during their initial training. Not only is this motivating, but it also helps you and the new team member ensure that nothing crucial is missed.
Give your reps some agency over their pace: Create training materials that are self-paced as much as possible. Armed with their checklist, some new reps will move faster than others. Overall, giving people the ability to move faster, along with accountability to prevent a slow-down, harnesses the motivation of new employees and favors speed.
Include training sessions with stakeholders outside of support: When designing your training, remember the outside stakeholders who can give sessions that will give your reps important knowledge to serve your customers. Depending on your platform, this can include anyone from product stakeholders to engineers.
When your agents begin working with customers, offer ample feedback: For a period of time, someone more senior on your team should be giving candid feedback to new reps. This helps them course correct or find any training gaps, which is great for their ongoing ability to serve your customers.

Mindfully creating a training program that can move quickly is possible, and it’s essential that your new reps have enough knowledge to help your customers before they get started.

2. Upskilling support staff on rapidly evolving products

No platform is static, and your product will likely evolve based on new technologies, growth, and innovation. It’s important that your reps are informed of platform changes and that they receive thorough training on the complexities of any platform iterations when needed. Many companies struggle to properly keep their support teams knowledgeable, negatively impacting support quality and customer experience.

Solutions

Most organizations with adequately informed support reps have processes in place because it’s never a great idea to count on stakeholders to simply remember the necessary communication. Here are some examples of how organizations keep their support reps in the loop:

Create a cadence of syncs between the product team and support leadership: This helps keep everyone accountable for giving all product updates, big and small, on a regular basis. It also leaves time for questions and problem-solving between product and support.
Make it a requirement for product and/or tech stakeholders to have workshops for support reps for significant platform changes: When there are major changes, not only should they be communicated, but your support reps should receive in-depth training so that they can learn the ins and outs of the new functionality with hands-on experience and guidance.
Ask reps for feedback about their own knowledge regularly: The support team’s leadership should regularly check in with reps to find out if they have noticed any gaps in their own product knowledge. Sometimes, even when training programs are created with the best intentions, they have gaps. Your agents will be able to tell you in which areas they still sometimes struggle to help customers so that you can address it accordingly.
Create release channels and include your support team: Make your changelogs visible so your support reps can call out any platform changes they haven’t received adequate training or information about. These updates are often easy to automate with tools like Slack.

Having processes in place to consistently upskill your support team will enable them to give your customers the best possible guidance.

3. Handling high volumes of tickets

You’d be hard-pressed to find a SaaS support team that isn’t somewhat overwhelmed by the volume of support tickets that need to be addressed on any given day. As your platform grows, so will the volume of inquiries – and it can be hard to keep up. If you’re not careful, your customers won’t get adequate help fast enough and your support team can experience burnout.

Solutions

Since this is a common problem among support teams, there are also many strategies for dealing with a high volume of tickets. Here are some key practices for your team to consider:

Invest heavily in self-serve resources for your customers: When customers can find the guidance they need in the moment, everyone wins – customers don’t have to wait for help, and your support team has fewer tickets to manage. Using a tool like Self Help in the Whatfix DAP allows your support team to maintain a searchable, user-friendly knowledge base that your customers can consult in a moment of need.
Consider an AI chatbot: As the technology improves, AI chatbots are increasingly capable of answering customer inquiries. Using this as a first line of defense for customer questions can dramatically affect your overall ticket load.
Create a great customer onboarding experience: The more you educate your users at the outset of their journey on your platform, the less help they will need in the future. With Whatfix DAP, you can iterate on your onboarding experience as you add new features or other iterations without the help of a developer. This means your onboarding is up-to-date, and product changes don’t cause a huge uptick in support ticket volume.

With the right tooling and an automation mindset, your support team can reduce its overall load and focus more on complex, high-priority customer issues.

How to Measure SaaS Customer Support Effectiveness

Tracking the right customer support metrics is the best way to ensure that all your strategic support initiatives have the intended impact. These indicators provide insight into the quality of support you deliver and highlight areas for improvement.

Here are some key metrics to consider when evaluating your SaaS customer support efforts:

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Looks at short-term customer satisfaction. Customers rate their satisfaction with a recent support interaction on a scale, typically from 1 (very dissatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied). A high CSAT score is a great indicator that your support team is providing good service to your customers.
Churn Rate: Measures the percentage of customers who cancel their subscriptions within a specific time frame. A high churn rate can signal dissatisfaction with the product or support services, highlighting the need for a more responsive or effective support strategy.
First Response Time (FRT): Tracks the average time it takes for a customer support rep to respond to a customer inquiry. Faster response times can significantly enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. You’ll want to make sure that this number is, at worst, stable and, at best, constantly improving thanks to adequate resources and automation initiatives.
Ticket Volume: Counts the number of support tickets created within a certain period. Analyzing fluctuations in ticket volume can help identify specific features or updates that may be causing issues for users so your team can address them proactively.
Time To Resolution: Measures the average time it takes to fully resolve a customer’s issue from the moment it’s reported. A shorter resolution time is generally associated with higher customer satisfaction and more efficient support operations.
Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures customer loyalty and the likelihood of customers recommending your service to others. NPS is calculated based on responses to the question, “How likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?”

The right metrics will help you and your support team celebrate wins and identify opportunities to improve the customer experience over time.

How To Improve SaaS Customer Support

Support teams that provide an excellent customer experience have strategies that go beyond speed, helping their agents make the most of every interaction. In this section, we’ll review the best practices to help your SaaS customer support team reach its full potential.

1. Invest in proper product documentation

Proper documentation of your platform, processes, and best practices is essential in enabling your agents to guide your customers.

Though comprehensive documentation is a time investment, it serves the following purposes:

Simpler onboarding for new support reps: Everything they need to know about the platform is written clearly and easily accessible so they can begin their platform journey
Accessible references when reps aren’t sure: Even experienced agents get customer questions for which they need more information. Your documentation can be a reference for your entire support team when needed.
Easier creation of self-serve resources for customers: When you have the proper documentation internally, your team can easily ensure that your knowledge base and other self-serve resources for customers are comprehensive and up-to-date.

Overall, platform and process documentation ensures that all support reps follow the same protocol and that platform guidance is consistent and accurate across the board,

2. Monitor your support team’s performance with metrics

SaaS customer support benefits from monitoring performance closely to ensure that your team can quickly resolve problems and that customers are happy with their interactions.

Customer support metrics tell you exactly how you’re performing against your target goals and help you adapt your strategy if performance isn’t meeting expectations.

With SaaS help desk software, you can capture crucial metrics and KPIs. For example, you can monitor the average ticket response time and see how quickly agents respond to customer issues or queries. You can even identify the popular communication channels customers use to contact your team and adjust your goals and strategy based on their behavior.

By using customer support metrics, your team can iterate on its strategy and keep moving farther and farther toward its most ambitious customer experience goals.

3. Adopt a proactive mindset on the support team

Customer service is divided into two categories: reactive and proactive. You can typically identify the type of customer service by when the first contact occurs.

For example, a customer reaches out with a question about how to set a new password. They wait for a service representative to respond, and, eventually, they connect and solve the customer’s challenge. This is reactive customer service because the customer made the first contact, and the rep reacted to the query.

Conversely, let’s say you anticipated that customers might have questions regarding account setup. You shared a knowledge base article with instructions for all new users. This is proactive because you gave the customer relevant instructions before the challenge popped up.

When your support team has a proactive mindset, they’re constantly implementing new ways to support customers before a moment of confusion or frustration occurs.

4. Collect customer feedback and react to it

The best resource for understanding the quality of your support is your own customer base. Offer several opportunities for your customers to tell you what you’re doing well and where you can improve.

Here are several ways to gather customer feedback:

Place a feedback form on your website for customers to share their opinions about your service
Deploy in-app surveys for instant feedback from your customers while they’re on the platform
Check social media for company mentions, comments, and reviews
Analyze support tickets to find frequently occurring queries or phrases
Create surveys using tools such as Google Forms or SurveyMonkey to gauge customer satisfaction
Include links at the end of your support emails that prompt customers to share whether the provided support was adequate or could be improved.

Tip: With Whatfix, you can create in-app surveys and collect user feedback right inside your platform. One benefit of doing this is that you can catch user feedback on specific features and flows right in the moment that the user is experiencing them.

5. Develop an automation mindset

If you discover your customer support reps constantly executing the same tedious and time-consuming tasks, it’s usually a good opportunity to start thinking about automation.

For example, if your agents are manually handling requests that can otherwise be resolved using templated responses, it might make sense to automate those responses to save time and effort. This is usually relevant for simple customer queries that are commonplace.

The same applies to many day-to-day activities on a support team, like creating new support tickets and closing resolved cases. Many customer support software platforms offer automation features you can take advantage of, and the time saved adds up.

An automation mindset means everyone on your support team is always looking for opportunities to automate tasks. This frees everyone up for more complex customer queries and keeps the ticket volume healthy.

6. Optimize self-service options for customers

Empowering customers to resolve their issues independently increases their overall satisfaction and reduces the workload on your support team.

Implement a comprehensive knowledge base that includes FAQs, video tutorials, and step-by-step guides. Ensure this content is easy to navigate and search and contains updated information reflecting the latest product changes and solutions to common issues.

Tip: With Whatfix, you can enhance your self-service strategy by integrating interactive walkthroughs and contextual help directly within your platform. This helps users to perform tasks successfully without interrupting their workflow, significantly improving their experience and reducing the reliance on direct support interactions.

7. Embrace a multi-channel approach

Supporting your customers through multiple channels—like email, chat, social media, and even phone—ensures that they can reach out in the most convenient way.

Offering multiple support channels is generally a critical element of good customer service. It enables you to provide multiple types of customer support, as you can create an experience that caters to all your customers’ specific needs, interests, and preferences even when they reach out.

The key to a successful omnichannel approach is maintaining consistency and quality across all these channels to provide a seamless experience. Each channel should have integrated access to the same customer data and history to ensure continuity and context in every interaction. If not, users are often asked to repeat themselves to different service reps, which creates frustration.

With an omnichannel experience, companies can resolve issues faster because they know who they’re interacting with and what information they have already shared. Customers can choose when and how to reach out at their own convenience, which improves their overall support experience.

8. Develop a robust training program for your support reps

Aside from their initial onboarding, your support agents will also require product knowledge training, updates on new product features, advanced troubleshooting procedures, and soft skills development, like empathy training and active listening. This ensures that every team member has the technical knowledge and interpersonal skills to handle complex customer interactions effectively.

Tip: Whatfix can facilitate on-demand, in-app training tailored to each rep’s context and learning pace, ensuring that your support team is always up-to-date with the latest product functionalities and support practices.

9. Personalize customer interactions

Personalization can significantly enhance the customer experience by making interactions feel more tailored and attentive from a customer perspective.

Your support reps can use each customer’s data to understand their history and preferences, and provide solutions specifically aligned with each customer’s individual needs and past interactions. For example, if a customer has repeatedly received links to knowledge base articles that don’t resolve their problem, an agent might choose to provide a different kind of support that’s more likely to work for that specific user.

This personalized approach speeds up the resolution process and boosts customer satisfaction by showing that your company values them as unique individuals.

10. Optimize for fast response times

Timely responses are essential to an excellent customer service experience, and in our smartphone era, consumers expect an immediate response. For example, 71% of people under 25 believe a quick response time is critical to a great experience.

The speed of response depends on your support channel(s): 51% of customers expect a response in less than five minutes on the phone, 28% expect the same on live chat, and 46% expect companies to respond to emails within 4 hours.

A quick response and fast average handle time for support tickets make customers feel that their needs and concerns are appreciated, which can help create loyal customers and improve your brand reputation. Not only that, but as a SaaS platform, not knowing how to complete a task on your platform means that their work is slowing down. Getting prompt support keeps them in the flow, making for a better experience.

Tip: While you might not always be able to address specific customer issues immediately, you can acknowledge their concerns and let them know you’re working on a solution by responding and letting them know.

11. Leverage predictive analytics

Predictive analytics can anticipate customer issues before they happen or become too bothersome. By analyzing data trends and customer usage patterns, you can proactively address potential problems and inform customers about solutions before they encounter an issue.

This forward-thinking approach improves customer satisfaction and positions your team as thoughtful and anticipatory in handling customer needs.

Tip: Integrating Whatfix Analytics is how many teams identify these trends and automate communication about potential solutions, enhancing the overall effectiveness of their customer support strategy.

12. Reward customer loyalty

Rewarding customers for their loyalty is an excellent way to show appreciation for them and can also protect against customer churn.

According to KPMG, 75% of consumers favor companies that offer rewards. Your customers want to feel celebrated and seen. You can do this by sending handwritten thank-you notes, providing freebies, offering a special discount, or having a loyalty rewards program.

For example, Sephora’s Beauty Insider loyalty program boasts 25 million members, and these members are responsible for 80% of the company’s sales. In addition to earning rewards for each purchase, members of the Beauty Insider program also receive an omnichannel experience:

While using the Sephora mobile app in-store, customers get information to help them with shopping, such as product recommendations, a view of similar items browsed by other shoppers, and access to their beauty profiles.
Store associates record products used or recommended during the consultation and send them to members for future reference, along with videos and before-and-after pictures.

Sephora provides a great example of a 2-for-1 approach to customer service: customers are rewarded for their loyalty and are offered an omnichannel experience that enhances their shopping journey.

Tip: Organize a brainstorming session with your marketing team. What might a loyalty program look like for your segment of the SaaS market? What can you offer to loyal customers that will help them stay long-term?

Best SaaS Customer Support Software

Here are the five types of SaaS customer support software and some of the most powerful choices in each category. You can use this section to help your team choose which software works best for your organizational needs.

1. Help desk software

No matter how user-friendly your SaaS product is, customers will always have questions. Add in the complexity and dynamic nature of software, and it’s even more crucial that your customers have direct line access to your support team to resolve their issues and questions.

With help desk software, you can provide that direct line of communication between your support reps and your customers, improving customer relationships and making the process more efficient for everyone involved.

Many help desk tools also let you offer proactive support through knowledge bases and automated messages.

Here are some examples of great help desk software:

Zendesk: Zendesk is one of the premier help desk software solutions, and for good reason. Some of its key offerings are:

An AI-first approach, allowing you to automate a significant amount of support tasks
Ability to track key support metrics
Omnichannel support functionality, all on the same platform
Excellent support reporting, enabling your team to share key support learnings with the broader organization
Cost: Zendesk has plans ranging from $19 a month per agent all the way up to custom enterprise plans

Freshdesk: Freshdesk is a simple but surprisingly robust support platform that offers solutions for teams of different sizes and capabilities. Some of its key offerings are:

Low-cost solutions for support teams with budgetary limitations
Omnichannel support functionality, on-platform
AI agent functionality that can be customized to your platform and your customers’ needs
Support analytics and advanced insights to help your team refine its strategy over time
Cost: Freshdesk offers a free plan and has options all the way up to custom enterprise plans. Notably, their plans offer a free trial to help your team determine whether or not it’s the right solution before you pay.

Help Scout: Help Scout is a popular choice for help desk software, touting a people-first approach and emphasizing the customer experience. Some of their key offerings are:

AI functionality and unlimited seats at no extra cost
Great, intuitive design and an easy-to-use interface
Several opportunities for the automation of simple and tedious support tasks
Quality reporting so that everyone on your team can benefit from support insights
Omnichannel support options right on the platform
Cost: Help Scout offers a free plan with several options up to its Pro plan, which is a custom enterprise pricing model. They offer a free trial period before your team needs to make a decision.

2. Live chat and AI chatbots

Messaging and live chat features are crucial to your stack when offering omnichannel support. The best messaging and chat tools should help customer support teams:

Assign customer conversations
Search and filter customer conversations
Enable effective collaboration among stakeholders

Here are two of the premier software solutions for chatbots and live chat support:

Intercom: Intercom is a dynamic, robust support tool that offers nuanced and comprehensive chat and chatbot functionality. Some key offerings in this realm include:

A technologically advanced AI agent, Fin, that has some of the best accuracy in the market
An AI-first approach that helps enable your team to save time with live chat and chatbot support channel offerings
Customizable AI experiences for your customers, allowing you to tailor AI options to different customer segments and increase the chances that your customers will get the support they need without the help of a human agent
Cost: Intercom offers plans starting at $29 per month per agent and custom enterprise plans for larger organizations. All plans include a free trial period for teams.

Sendbird: Sendbird is another AI-first support platform, and its live chat and AI chatbot functionality are favorites among many support teams. Here are some of its key offerings:

Omnichannel AI support that customers can utilize on all of your support channels
Customizable AI agents that allow your team to personalize the AI experience based on what you know about your customers and your platform
Testing functionality and the associated metrics to help you track and iterate on the effectiveness of your AI and chat support
Cost: Sendbird segments its pricing based on functionality. Plans for AI agents and live chat are separately priced, ranging from free to custom enterprise prices. You can pay exclusively for the functionality you need and benefit from free trials before making your final choice.

3. Knowledge base software

A knowledge base houses FAQs, company information, and product-related documentation that may be helpful for customers and employees alike. Knowledge base software typically uses AI to organize and keep data current.

For example, when a customer enters a query in a knowledge base, the software uses AI to help them narrow down an answer – reducing the need to contact customer support.

Another advantage to using a knowledge base is the SEO benefit of publishing helpful, customer-centric content on your website. Prospects and customers will find your website via Google by searching for questions you have answered in your knowledge base.

Here are two recommended options for knowledge base software, along with some of their key offerings and pricing information.

Document360: Document360 is a powerful, AI-fueled knowledge base platform that offers a lot of functionality to help you keep your knowledge base updated efficiently. Here are some of their key offerings:

Customizable AI agents that help direct your customers to the knowledge base documentation that will help them best
Powerful, robust AI search options so that your customers can find what they need fast
A vast library of software integrations that allow you to automate a lot of your knowledge base updates for easier maintenance
Cost: Document360 pricing requires a conversation with their sales team to identify the best custom plan for your organization. However, you can begin a free trial before getting a price quote.

HelpCrunch: HelpCrunch offers several different options for support teams, including impressive knowledge base functionality. Here are some of their key offerings:

Knowledge base widgets that you can put in customer-friendly locations wherever you’d like on your platform
Help with SEO optimization for your knowledge base articles
Great search functionality to help your customers find what they need quickly
Cost: HelpCrunch offers plans ranging from $12 – $20/agent/month and an all-inclusive $495/month for larger teams with more robust needs. They also offer a free trial to determine which plan works best for you and your team.

4. Digital adoption platforms (DAPs)

A digital adoption platform (DAP) simplifies onboarding and improves user experience by guiding users through task completion and adopting new features.

With AI, analytics, and automation, DAPs can provide easy onboarding, better training, and improved user support through the contextual content displayed at the time of requirement.

Whatfix: Whatfix is a digital adoption platform (DAP) that provides in-app guidance and contextual, real-time support for customers and end-users. Whatfix offers an in-app self-help widget that enables real-time help at the exact moment of need. AppHub deflects common support issues and gathers data to identify what other support issues organizations should create documentation and help content for.

Cost: Whatfix offers customized pricing plans depending on your team’s unique needs. Book a demo to learn more about the platform and discover which pricing options work best for you.

5. Contact center software

Some SaaS customer support teams offer phone-based service for their customers, which can be a great option when your customer base needs complex support at the moment of need.

There are a variety of software options that make call center support much easier for you and for your customers. Here are two of our recommended platforms for contact center software:

RingCentral: RingCentral allows your team to manage a contact center efficiently, with various options for you and your customers. Here are some of their key offerings:

Different channels for interacting with your contact center, including phone, video calls, and SMS support.
AI features that function as the first line of defense with customers, decreasing the need for human input to solve simple customer needs.
Cost: RingCentral offers several different plans with add-ons, depending on which contact center channels you’d like to use. Their plans generally range from $20 per month per user to $35/user/month, and you can create a custom plan.

Talkdesk: Talkdesk is an AI-powered customer contact center solution that allows your team to address customer concerns with AI and support reps. One of the major value propositions of Talkdesk is the variety of AI features that limit the need for human support. Here are some of their key offerings:

AI-powered routing that helps your customers get the help that they need quickly and seamlessly
AI quality control features, helping you consistently iterate on the quality of AI support and therefore decreasing the need for customers to speak with actual agents
Interaction analytics that help your team analyze your effectiveness over time
Cost: Talkdesk plans range from $85 a month per user to $145 a month per user, depending on your precise needs.

Customer Support Trends to Watch in 2025

Customer support is constantly evolving through AI, personalization, self-service options, social media, and more. This evolution offers many exciting opportunities for you and your team.

In this section, we’ll look at the top five support trends to follow in 2025.

1. Hyper-personalization of customer support experiences

Customers expect businesses to understand their needs and provide tailored solutions. Support teams are increasingly addressing this expectation in innovative ways, from personalized communication to tailored recommendations fueled by machine learning.

Hyper-personalization aims to provide individualized support beyond traditional customer support techniques. Your company can deliver personalized support that meets customer needs by using data and technology to gather customer information and provide personalized help at scale. Whatfix allows you to contextualize customer adoption for a more personalized customer experience.

2. Increase in self-service options

Self-service empowers customers with the tools and resources they need to solve their problems or answer their questions on their own – without help from a customer support rep. Some examples of helpful resources you may have heard of include FAQ pages, knowledge bases, help centers, and other tools that can provide more immediate support.

This trend is largely driven by the increasing demand on support teams and the need to provide customers with a more convenient experience. Companies that effectively implement customer self-service options can anticipate reduced support costs, better ticket queue management, and less customer support rep burnout.

3. Omnichannel experiences

An enhanced omnichannel customer experience focuses on providing a consistent customer experience across multiple channels. This means that no matter how a customer contacts your company for support, they’ll all receive the same level of support and have access to the same resources. Not only that, but they’ll have a streamlined experience and not have to repeat information to different service reps.

According to Business Wire, 40% of consumers cited “multiple options for communicating” as the most important feature of a company’s customer support department. This year, you can expect to see more and more companies investing in multiple support channels and increased tooling for teams to better manage omnichannel support.

4. Conversational chatbots and AI agents

Chatbots are designed to handle simple requests and respond to customer needs quickly. They work well for tasks like answering frequently asked questions, providing product recommendations, or troubleshooting simple technical issues.

Even beyond the usual chatbot functionality, AI agents can now support customers with AI-powered digital assistants. Using LLMs, these AI customer support chatbots can be trained using a company’s training resources, help desk, knowledge base articles, and other documentation to provide an intelligent solution that enables customers with real-time support.

With chatbots and AI agents constantly improving, you’ll see a lot of support teams making significant gains this year in faster response times and reduced ticket load.

5. Data-driven decision-making

SaaS companies have always made decisions based on data. However, using data to make decisions in support teams is becoming more and more common.

SaaS customer support involves using customer data to guide customer support strategies and decisions. This could mean analyzing customer behavior to identify trends, leveraging feedback to optimize customer support processes, or using customer data to tailor support experiences.

Data-driven decision-making improves the effectiveness of your customer support framework by using data to drive continuous improvement. This year, you can expect to see more sophisticated use of data on support teams in the SaaS industry.

Whatfix empowers customer support teams to discover key behavior analytics that help build a data-driven digital adoption strategy. With Whatfix Analytics, you can get actionable insights on customer behavior within your applications and real-time feedback on in-app experiences.

Examples of SaaS Companies with Great Customer Support

By now, you’re probably feeling motivated to enhance your support strategy, so we’ve created a list of the top seven companies with outstanding SaaS customer support to inspire you.

1. Mailchimp

Mailchimp stands out for its user-friendly email marketing services, helping users manage campaigns and analyze results effortlessly. Their approach to global support allows businesses to engage with their audiences effectively, making digital marketing accessible to everyone, regardless of their technical expertise.