Payroll Software Needs to put the Service in SaaS
Jadyn DePhi, Birdseye DBM
Snapshot
A cash strapped SaaS company needs to improve their customer support to reduce churn. We create a step by step guide for the company to follow to achieve this goal, as well as additional steps to increase conversion and reduce churn in subscribers.
Client Introduction
This company was achieving something incredible; they were creating a software that could track the amount of labor revenue an employee was bringing in for a company. This empowered business owners to incentivize employees who brought more in for a company to share those profits, giving high performing laborers the ability to make a higher wage, while also benefiting the company.
Problem
The software was in newer stages, and would experience bugs and errors. Subscribers using the software were aware of this, but were lacking support. There were no announcements regarding errors or bugs, there were no live agents to help them through confusing math, and the only resource available was through an online course, making searching for answers and clarification difficult. Having subscribers was key to funding the project, the company needed to improve their support to reduce the churn of active accounts.
Solution
I had worked with this client previously when they were looking to launch a book associated with the softwares mission. When they recognized the need to set up a customer success system, they reached out to me. I would be putting together a comprehensive plan and strategy for the company to execute themselves.
There were a few issues we were looking to solve; how each subscriber’s issues were tracked, clear guidelines on how customer service would address issues/concerns/bugs/praise, where subscribers could find more resources on how the software worked, how subscriber demographics would be tracked, and how to give on demand support while keeping costs down and not hiring around the clock live agents.
Then there was lead nurturing; this wasn’t initially pinpointed as a space that needed to be improved, but after reviewing how the subscribers records were kept, I spotted some growth areas in supporting leads that would help their advertising and to create a sales team with conversion. This solution needed to track the leads journey, show emailing history, track objections, and how much of the associated course they’d successfully completed.
After quite a bit of research and a few conversations with their developer team of what was possible, we decided integrating with a customer success software with AI customer chat assist was the best option. We went with Zendesk CRM, Sales and Chatbot.
Results
After the backend coding is completed by the developers to allow for this integration, Zendesk will be loaded with the current subscribers and their information. This will also integrate with Stripe to centralize information on the subscription payments and the subscriber information. With the use of Zendesk Sales, they will be able to upload information of users interested in the software; these will be those who had either reached out to support previously or had enrolled in the online course that do not have matching information to a subscriber. With an estimated 300 leads that had not been contacted at all to try and convert to a subscription, the subscription potential loss could be between $30k to $60k in revenue- Monthly!
The final piece to this transition would be implementing the chatbot’s resource bank, which can double as a searchable base for subscribers. I put together a full content list with keywords to use for what material needed to be created, making the execution much more achievable for their team. Once this is uploaded, the AI chatbot will be able to search this bank for information the subscriber is most likely looking for- providing off hour support and saving on labor for the company.
Conclusion
The most valuable answer is not always to what is being asked. Dig deeper, look at the full picture to see what could be improved- you’d be surprised how often more than one problem can be solved with a single solution.