When vertical SaaS platforms move from a referral-based payments partner to truly embedded payments, one of the biggest concerns is support. In conversations with hundreds of SaaS companies, we’ve noticed that these concerns tend to center on two themes:
- We’re a software company and we’re not payments experts, so our payments provider would provide better support.
- We don’t have enough people or resources to support the payments product, a payments provider could do it more efficiently.
The reality is entirely opposite:
- Outsourcing support to a payments provider usually results in a worse experience for the merchant, and worse business outcomes for the software company.
- Software companies often receive more support requests and sink more resources into resolving these requests when the payment provider is “handling support”.
Let’s dive in.
Software companies never win by offloading support
If you rely on your payment provider to directly support your customers, this can go two ways (and neither are good for the software company).
Payment provider does great with support → Software company loses
The “happy path” is that the payment provider does a great job with support. But, as the software company, you don’t actually win here because now the payment provider is building a relationship with your customer.
Your customers trust you, and you want them to trust you more. Providing excellent support builds that relationship and increases trust. By offloading support, you have fewer trust-building interactions. Instead of trusting you more, your customers are starting to rely on your payment provider.
Payment provider is terrible with support → Software company loses
On the flip side, if you offload support to your payment provider and they do a terrible job, it doesn’t make your customers love you more. The problems with your payment provider reflect poorly on you.
And this actually increases the workload for your support team. If the payment provider isn’t resolving your customers’ concerns, your customers reach out to your support team. But, instead of just resolving the issues, your support team ends up in a game of telephone with your customer and the payment provider.
When it’s bad enough, shoddy payment integrations and ineffective support from payment providers can cause significant churn for the core SaaS product.
You will provide better support than your payment providers
As a vertical SaaS company, you already have a deep knowledge of your customers’ business. If your core product is for dental practices, you know a lot more about dental practice management than your payment provider does. If your core product is for lawn care professionals, you already know way more about lawn care businesses than your payment provider does. In most situations, this understanding of your customer will allow you to provide better support on day 1.
On top of that, your customers already trust you, and they’re already in the habit of contacting you when they need support. Instructing them to contact a third party to find out the status of a payment makes it harder for the customer to navigate support. Your customers don’t have time to get bounced around between help desks, they want one point of contact (your support team) for all their needs.
Furthermore, your payment provider doesn’t know your customers’ businesses or your core product, and this prevents them from providing really good support beyond answering basic questions about things like payment status, deposit timing, and decline reasons. And if all the payment provider can really do is respond to basic, programmatic queries anyway, there’s no reason to be afraid of providing this support in-house.
Supporting payments doesn’t have to be hard
Our team has decades of experience building and supporting payment products. We’ve noticed two things that make a big difference for software platforms:
1. Support requests are often symptoms of underlying product issues.
This includes defects (resulting in inaccurate data or mis-matched statuses), UX problems (key information is missing or difficult to locate), or lack of self-service for basic payment operations like issuing a refund. Continuously improving the product will dramatically reduce the number of support requests. As a software company, you’ll get fewer payments-related support requests if you partner with a payment provider who invests heavily in product quality and optimization, because a high-quality product prevents a lot of support requests before they happen.
2. Most support requests are predictable and easily resolved
Your team will field the same few dozen questions over and over again. You’ll get questions about the merchant onboarding process (how and why), payment status and reporting (how to interpret the reports and when deposits can be expected), and chargebacks (how to respond and best practices going forward).
This means you can be prepared. Your team needs only needs three things:
- Answers to the few dozen questions that will comprise the vast majority of support requests
- The ability to action a few common payment operations requests, such as looking up the status of a payment or showing a customer how to issue a refund
- Access to Tier 2 support for the tiny percentage of support requests that are outside the “predictable” range.
Rainforest addresses all three needs. We have a pre-built payments helpdesk that we share with our platform partners, so you can customize it and embed it in your own helpdesk to address frequently asked questions.
We’ve built the self-serve capabilities into our embeddable components (embedded in your core SaaS product and used by customers) and the Platform Portal (accessible by your team), so your team can easily action basic payment operations requests and show customers how to do the same.
And Rainforest will back up your support team with Tier 2 support if they encounter any unexpected issues or get a question they aren’t prepared for.
Offloading support has an opportunity cost – and a lot of risk
Great support makes your product stickier, but only if your team is the one providing support. Software companies that offload support lose out on the opportunity to leverage support as a differentiator.
And the cost of mediocre support is high. It can cause low adoption, lack of volume growth, and in severe cases even customer churn. Ceding your customer relationships to a payment provider is a massive risk, and one that software companies cannot afford to take.
It gets worse, too. Partnership models where the payment provider is responsible for support tend to allocate a lot more revenue to the payment provider, leaving smaller margins for the platform.
When software companies offload support to the payment provider, these three factors together – reduced stickiness, reduced processing volume, and reduced margin – are debilitating to revenue growth.