Trends in Customer Service SaaS Products

Luis Ortiz

Jul 5, 2018 — 5 min read

During the latest participation of the SoftwareDevTools team in the Atlassian AppWeek Portland 2018, I learned valuable lessons about where the SaaS products for customer service are going.

Atlassian Jira Service Desk already provides an affordable service desk software solution, that is on its way to becoming the next Atlassian boom. Speaking to Amaresh Ray Product Manager of JSD shared with us some insights of where this industry is going.

The next generation of experiences when providing customer service will revolve around conversational transactions, where support agents have all the business intelligence information of the company available at a glance. On the customer side, they will just experience a seamless conversation, but they won’t know if they’re speaking to a human or not.

Let me tell you a brief story of a concertgoer passing from discomfort to all smiles in minutes:

From Angry Customer to Happy Customer in Seconds.

The last time I purchased an online concert ticket I experienced a weird incident with the delivery format. They emailed me explaining that I would not be able to print my tickets. Instead, I should collect them in will call. They provided me with options to contact Support, but they weren’t precisely friendly; like creating a ticket via an insufferable form, sending an email, calling them (no way), or… tweeting them. Which I did. A couple of DM’s later they solved my problem, a friendly conversation with an agent sufficed to fix the incident.

I knew they had automated responses, and that also the first questions could have been a just tweetbot responding. It didn't matter. I’ve got my tickets now.

Recreating this type of experiences is challenging for support teams, due to the lack of the right processes and the integrations required for centralized customer requests from all company platforms.

Often times the agents are out of sync with others teams using a distinct platform. The SoftwareDevTools integrations of Freshdesk with Trello, Freshdesk & MS Dynamics 365, the upcoming Freshservice with Trello (and soon a Freshdesk with Mercado Libre integration) are a great place to start.

Freshdesk + Trello integration

Customers Are Impatient and Want It Now.

The game of customer service is moving quickly to integrations with Business Intelligence platforms. Also with Artificial Intelligence tools that add a conversational dimension to the resolution of the tickets.

According to this Zendesk survey on the impact of Customer Service on the perceived lifetime value, 69% of customers attribute their good customer service experience to a quick resolution of the problem, while 72% blamed their bad customer service interaction on having to explain their problem to multiple people.

A bad experience dramatically affects future purchases, almost 95% shared a bad experience with others. But also good reviews spread widely in social media making up to 62% of customers to buy more.

The race for making customer service SaaS products more intelligent is on. Here’s what’s coming.

Trends in Customer Service SaaS Products

As Amaresh explained, the goal is for the next generation of service desk tools will be providing agents with quick access to the company’s knowledge base, whether is a built-in source like Confluence or an integration to 3rd party platforms.

Conversational Ticket Resolution

The customer will engage by any channel available but those requests and responses will be managed from a centralized location. The gateway for the first interactions, however, could be a bot that asks initial questions, then scans the KB articles and provides useful resources to the customer, to eventually transition to a human being attention. See for example how airlines are improving flight search through bot-assisted searches.

There is also opportunity in the way the updates of the ticket are presented, think more like the flow of a story, where characters are having a conversation, regardless of the endpoint where messages are coming from everything is centralized and displayed with useful data coming from different sources via

What Hugo.ai is doing to integrate teams and customers via conversations is really interesting. It could change the way all information flows towards the resolution of a ticket.

Intelligent Reporting of Business Intelligence

The resolution of a ticket surely requires information that is updated and in sync with every platform the company is using. But this information should be properly organized in a way that is easy to spot trends

Having integrated business analytics tools, that deliver insights from throughout the company towards the resolution of the customer issue, would be a market differentiator for SaaS products in customer service space for upcoming years.

Solutions as Eazybi.com are already looking to centralize information for promptly data visualization, reporting, and analysis. It already integrates with Jira, Zendesk, and soon to Jira Service Desk.

Assets Management is Booming

According to Markets and Markets article the Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) market is steadily growing and is expected to be the highest revenue generator in North America worth of 6.05 Billion USD by 2022.

SaaS product for asset management face the challenge to integrate every physical endpoint that large companies use to stay competitive, this includes the management of mobile devices and applications installed on them, while making sure that data protection has complied.

The biggest future challenge of EAM is to make visible the complex relationships that exist between the assets, the provider, the distribution network, and the customer, now that new forms of delivery are being introduced, as mentioned in this Stibo Systems article, the concern is making the service experience easy to monitor.

Customer Service Future Depends on Data

No surprise here. As customer service SaaS tools continue to evolve to face the market needs, the trend is clear. The goal is to provide a memorable support experience. This requires centralization of data gathered from different sources and to be presented intelligently, in a way that creates a more conversational resolution of the ticket.

As we learned, angry customers are more likely to tell everybody about it, but happy customers are more likely to keep buying. I sure will keep buying more concert tickets on that platform. In the end experience in software should still feel human.

Keep an eye on the integrations we are creating in SoftwareDevTools to keep teams using Freshdesk or Freshservices in sync with those teams using Microsoft Dynamics, Trello or Mercado Libre. We’re on the mission of creating more happy customers one ticket resolution at the time.

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