Less friction, more business, and the power of great CS during every transaction

Aggressive market share expansion and a mindset of "growth at all costs" took precedence during SaaS’s Covid-fueled boom, leaving customer experience at times on the back burner. Years out, SaaS's growth has leveled, leaving companies with an opportunity for deeper examination of what it means to serve customers.

CS as a differentiator: According to Aaron Spence, Head of Customer Support for NoFraud, SaaS companies are looking towards customer service as an area to be better understood and even reimagined.

"Customer success has ebbs and flows. A lot of businesses think of marketing and sales as a standard business unit, but CS has always been uncertain. It's such a new discipline, people really don't know. Is it revenue-generating? Is it just an enhanced service tier? Folks are trying to figure out where that fits."

NoFraud in particular focuses on customer service as one of their main cornerstones. They serve as an e-commerce solution that removes friction while maximizing merchant revenue via fraud prevention and managed services. The company integrates with most top merchant providers and large commerce and content platforms like WordPress.

Slower ROI: What’s caused the pause for reinvention is a slower ROI after a burst of investment in SaaS as well as general cooling in the global economy. In general Spence sees a more conservative approach to growth with a renewed focus on customer success and analyzing what "customer experience means at its core."

Aaron Spence on AI within customer service: AI is an essential part of Spence and his CS team’s workflow, but Spence mentions that "asking the right questions" is the only way to get trustworthy AI outputs.

"For a while, you're going to have to stress test and do manual analysis alongside AI until you're getting what you need." Emphasizing that teams can’t just rely on one method or source of data he adds, "We still look at the recordings, analyze ourselves, and tend to find things."

AS on AI and Customer Experience Teams: "We're going to see a major contraction of AI tooling." Spence says. "There will be a lot of acquisitions or sunsetting of tooling. There's going to be a lot of pivoting in AI because it's evolving so quickly."

Spence predicts that even though tooling could be different in the next few years he will still need to equip his teams with core foundational skills to work with AI and adapt quickly to every new AI iteration.

Despite these changes, Spence stresses that AI will complement rather than replace customer service representatives: "The AI tool is not going to replace the human, but it will slow the pace of hiring in some instances. Customer Success Operations, CX-ops, is not going anywhere."

AS on E-commerce metrics for customer service: Spence points to a range of e-commerce metrics that businesses, and their customer service teams, need to hone in on to understand the customer experience:

"For businesses in e-commerce, the number one thing to do is understand your pass rate, conversion rate, how many people go through the purchase process, and abandoned cart data. Understanding your numbers is crucial because payment processors and gateways care about them. You can lose access to those if your fraud risk and chargeback risk climb high enough. You don't want to be in that position because it will disrupt more than just the shopping experience; it will disrupt your business."