When I first started Swipekit, I always wanted to provide excellent customer support.

And why not? I mean everyone in the tech space would emphasis quality customer support as a gamechanger.

A year later and these are some best practices I've learnt from providing customer support.

Early on, I installed Crisp.chat as my live chat system. This came with a widget that I could embed on my webapp and I can reply to my customers either from their webapp or from the Crisp app.

This was a gamechanger. Instead of waiting for them to send me an email, they can simply click on the widget and send me a message.

Right after installing Crisp, I installed their app. Now I could reply to my users from anywhere.

PS, not shilling for Crisp but they are the best choice for early stage businesses. Intercom is too expensive and tawk.to has a really hideous design.

There are other solid options too if you want to explore.

After adding the live chat software, I would talk to as many users as possible.

Over time, one thing became apparent. 90% of my replies won't get any responses back. But the 10% that did? They always were the ones where I replies ASAP to their query.

Knowing this was a gamechanger.

Why is this so important? When you start openly talking to your users, you get to know how they found you, how do they find your app, etc. Being able to talk to them in an open manner will open up lots of exciting possibilities.

This guy became a paying user over a year later

For Swipekit, I got referrals, testimonials, hard-to-find bugfixes, and much more from these long chats.

Since I'm based in AEST timezone and all my customers are on the other side of the world, I would sleep with my laptop, quite literally.

- Shash from Swipekit

So I highly recommend to start talking to your customers quickly - event if it means sleeping with your laptop :P

Often times, there are clashes with how your users interpret your webapp. They may say library, but they mean webapp. You may think webapp but they think dashboard.

These are silly issues that can come out of language barriers, differences in technical prowness, etc.

One way to resolve this is to internally refer to specific parts of your app with a specific terminology.

For instance, when I rebranded my own SaaS, I made sure everything had a specific name.

This was also reflected in my marketing copy, support docs, etc

The tone you use when messaging your customers will set the stage for the entire conversation.

In my experience, interactions with other SaaS business owners over support chat have generally been pleasant. However, there are ways to further improve these interactions:

• Be brief but polite. Customers need quick help, not lengthy discussions about the local weather.

• Acknowledge their query immediately but provide a detailed answer later.

• Read their query at least twice. Important details can often be missed in a single reading, and you don't want to misunderstand their issue.

• If you can't help them, be honest about it. A straightforward answer can quickly turn a frustrated user into a loyal fan.

Examples:

• Instead of "Hey, what's wrong?" use "How can I help you?"

• Instead of "Your trial is over, you need to pay for X product," use "Your trial has expired. You can continue using X product by paying at xyz.com/billing."

Fundamentally, maintaining a consistent tone is crucial. When things go sideways, keeping your tone steady rather than changing it based on the situation will help maintain a professional interaction.

Once you start chatting with customers, you'll soon realise that their problems are already solved from prior customer chats.

At this stage, you need to start working on a documentation page. This can be a simple page or you can use something like a knowledgebase SaaS for this. Crisp has something like this anyways.

For Swipekit, I opted to write my content in my headless cms. This ensured that I can display my docs right inside my webapp as well as in the marketing pages - so they get indexed.

After doing so, I added a small automation to Crisp that would tell users to refer to the docs before trying live chat.

Eventually as you grow bigger, you'll want a more structured support system around. Live chat only works until it doesn't.

For instance, I would also get really annoying chat requests.

Mike from Senja also noted how they were getting crappy requests. So they turned their live chat off - and surprisingly their operations were much smoother.

If you absolutely must - keep live chat in, but only for specific scenarios.

For instance, we at Swipekit don't show out live chat until the user turns into a paying customer. This massively reduced inane queries.

Here are some more tips that may or may not be applicable to your business

Resolve customer support queries like a pyramid

Start with the easiest possible solution, and explore more complex solutions afterwards. This is how I do it for my own SaaS.

Start with basic queries, then make your way to the top

1. When someone has a query, I first direct them to my docs. This is done semi automatically by referencing the docs page as my first chat inside Crisp.

2. If that doesn't work, then I ask them to try common workarounds(eg, have your tried restarting your device?)

3. If that doesn't work, I ask them their setup, so I can possibly replicate it. For instance, do they have other extensions installed, are they using a vpn, etc.

4. If nothing works, I ask them to get on a quick video chat. Video chat with screensharing pretty much fixes the problem.

I hope these best practices were helpful for your SaaS biz. If you have any questions, or would like to get more details, I'm always happy to help at @shash7 on twitter.