7 SaaS Customer Service Trends to Watch in 2025

Customer service in SaaS is undergoing a seismic shift.

We’re still at the beginning of this transformation—and we’re just starting to see the cumulative impact of AI since ChatGPT took the world by storm in 2022.

The trends we’re seeing in 2025 approaches aren’t just incremental changes. Instead, they point to major shifts in how SaaS companies approach customer service. And these trends will touch every aspect of the customer experience, ranging from evolving customer expectations and new roles for customer service teams to the need for every agent to develop different skills to succeed.

Top customer service trends for SaaS companies in 2025

The biggest recurring theme among these trends is that the future of SaaS customer service requires finding the right balance between human expertise and technology, chiefly AI. Here are the seven most important trends changing customer service:

1. The rise of hybrid support models

As 2025 begins, hybrid support models will become the norm across the SaaS industry. The standard customer service team will soon have a couple of layers (if they don’t already):

• The initial contact layer will be handled entirely by AI, which will try to resolve all simple and repetitive issues (like password resets, subscription cancellations, and one-touch FAQ questions).
• AI will also collect preliminary information and context to speed up the resolution of more complex issues.
• Human agents will handle the second contact layer, dealing with nuanced problems or emotional situations that require critical thinking, creativity, and empathy.

AI will also be heavily involved in the second layer by assisting human agents in real time with:

• Suggested responses and solutions based on canned responses or sentiment analysis.
• Highlighting relevant customer history and data.
• AI-powered search, connected to internal knowledge sources, surfacing troubleshooting tips and solutions to similar previous cases.

SaaS companies will implement this type of model because it brings several benefits, including:

• Faster resolution for simple issues because they can be solved instantly, 24/7/365.
• More meaningful human interactions for complex problems.
• Reduced agent burnout by automating repetitive tasks.
• Improved scalability while maintaining service quality.
• Cost efficiency through strategic use of resources.

We’ve already seen companies move in this direction over 2024—and excpect this trend to accelerate in 2025.

If you’re a skeptic, all of that may sound a little too good to be true. To be fair, this model doesn’t come without serious challenges, and every team will have to start tackling those challenges in 2025.

Marin Cristian-Ovidiu, CEO of Online Games, noted that one of these challenges will be “digital fatigue.”

“Customers will demand real, human-driven experiences amidst an ocean of automated interactions. Metrics like ‘time to empathy’ will overtake ‘time to resolution’ as key indicators of success. Traditional approaches like scripted support will fail because they won’t resonate with emotionally exhausted users.”

2. The growth of strategic outsourcing

Outsourcing customer support for SaaS will likely grow, as these challenges along with the blended approach of leveraging humans and cutting-edge technology, requires deep expertise to get right.

Implementing AI effectively brings a huge learning curve that many companies might not be able to develop in-house. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies that specialize in outsourced customer support already integrated AI across multiple clients. As a result, BPOs are uniquely positioned to:

• Share best practices from across industries.
• Reduce the learning curve for AI implementation.
• Provide proven frameworks for hybrid support models.
• Scale teams efficiently based on AI performance.
• Maintain service quality during the transition.

BPOs can also provide customers with human support, especially during peak periods or after hours, when in-house teams are unavailable.

Success in 2025 will require a more nuanced approach to BPO selection–rather than simple service providers. As such, SaaS companies will be looking for strategic partners.

For example, BPOs can help companies dive deep into customer feedback data to identify opportunities to improve their team’s performance and product or CX processes.

3. Customer enablement throughout the customer journey

Another rising trend is embedding self-service options across every stage of the customer journey.

This change will most heavily impact SaaS companies that rely on a high-touch sales and customer success model, like those in the B2B space. Previously, SaaS companies would have had close contact with their prospects from the moment they showed an interest in their product. In 2025, more and more customers will continue to expect to find certain answers independently.

This shift reflects broader changes in buyer behavior, where even enterprise customers prefer self-directed exploration before engaging with sales teams. Mckinsey’s 2022 report found a growing comfort level in B2B decision makers to make high value purchases through digital channels. While they haven’t issued updated figures, the improvements in personalization and self-service ushered in by generative AI makes it reasonable that those numbers have continued to grow.

In 2025, successful SaaS companies will need to provide:

• Interactive product tours that let prospects explore features at their own pace.
• Comprehensive knowledge bases that address both basic and advanced use cases
• Optimize knowledge centers for for training AI.
• Automated onboarding sequences that adapt to user behavior and role.
• In-app guidance that anticipates common questions and roadblocks.
• Self-service upgrade paths for expanding accounts.
• Robust community platforms where users can learn from peers.
• Documentation and training materials for technical implementation.

This doesn’t mean eliminating human touchpoints entirely. Instead, companies will need to strategically position their human resources to add value where self-service doesn’t work well—like complex implementations, strategic planning, and relationship building.

Federico Spiezia, founder of Sparkr, says that more companies will invest in digital content creation “with successful companies producing 3-4x more educational content than their competitors.” He recommends companies start preparing for this by:

• Optimizing user experience with a focus on self-service conversion paths.
• Building comprehensive content repositories covering product usage and integration.

Of course, these resources can then feed into the AI tools that companies are using so that they can be more effective and helpful for customers.

4. The increasing complexity of technical support

A hybrid support model may decrease burnout for some teams, especially those with a high proportion of repetitive queries. But it might also increase burnout for other teams, where handling only escalations and technical investigations can and will be more emotionally taxing for agents.

This paradox creates new challenges for customer service leads in 2025. When agents only handle these high-value, complex issues, they’re constantly operating at maximum cognitive load.

This has a few knock-on effects at all levels, including:

• Agents need to develop deeper technical skills so they can be more effective at handling these cases.
• Support teams have to adapt how they work in the queue and implement, sucha as allowing for “cool-down” periods or rotating responsibilities to provide recovery time.
• Customer service leaders must adapt their metrics and KPIs to balance their expectations against these changes.

Tomasz Borys, Senior VP of Marketing & Sales at Deep Sentinel, explains that agents will need to “blend technical knowledge with emotional intelligence” in 2025. “This trend will require a new breed of customer service professional,” he says, “one who can explain complex technology in relatable terms while building trust.”

In practice, this means human agents handling complex technical issues need more support, not less. This includes both technical resources and emotional support systems to help them manage the increased intensity of their work. It also includes more targeted training to fill in any potential gaps in their knowledge and to continually upskill every team member.

And this might mean hiring managers need to recruit for a totally different tech support skillset, which inevitably involves more learning and experimentation.

5. Customer service teams that embody the voice of the customer

Another frontier AI is impacting is the switch from reactive to proactive customer service.

This is a long-term trend. But  what’s changed is that AI tools have made automated customer feedback analysis affordable and accessible to many more companies. As AI cuts down on some of the work handled by support teams, those teams will have more time to focus on building intentional experiences, not just reacting to emergencies.

Conor Pendergrast, consultant at CustomerSuccess.cx, suggests support teams focusing on this can win in two key ways:

• “CS teams have a unique perspective on customer pain points. With this, we can directly influence product roadmaps, marketing messaging, and sales processes and approaches.”
• “Having more time to build relationships with customers creates opportunities to bring better use and value to those customers—and retain them for longer. While this is typically handled by customer success, it’s likely that some elements of support and success will merge.”

What does this look like in practice?

The direct and real-life impact should be a reduced demand for traditional, reactive support. Ilai Szpiezak, co-founder of Dolphin AI, says that companies need to focus on long-term resolutions, rather than short-term ticket deflection.

“Companies need to understand what the underlying issues driving contact are. Once they identify these at scale, they can implement the right changes and improvements—in the product, documentation, or support operations, to avoid having these issues at all.”

Michael Bair, former SVP for Customer Experience at Figs, refers to this as building a “feedback flywheel.” In other words,  “customers gave us feedback, we implemented it into our products, into our experiences, we told customers that we did that, and so we built trust with customers that the next time they would give us more.”

At Peak Support, we’ve seen how important this is for SaaS companies and are building our own internal voice-of-the-customer tools at a fraction of the cost of third-party tools.

6. Customer success grows into technical operations

The traditional model of customer success managers (CSMs) focusing primarily on relationship management and renewals is becoming insufficient.

Despite increased investment in customer success, net revenue retention is declining across the industry. According to Bain & Company‘s Technology Report: Why Customer Success Is Failing, net revenue retention for SaaS companies is down for 75% while spending 60% more on customer service.

The new model emerging combines technical expertise with operational ownership. Successful CSMs aren’t only relationship managers, but they’re also technical problem solvers who can:

• Drive effective implementation and deployment.
• Understand and resolve technical challenges.
• Own operational outcomes.
• Make quick decisions without multiple handoffs.
• Provide direct technical assistance rather than just escalating issues.

This change comes with its own challenges. Companies are struggling to find and retain technically skilled CSMs, and scaling technical expertise with a growing customer base is challenging. There’s a heavier need to restructure CS teams to combine account management and operations and invest more heavily in technical training.

7. AI-driven support beyond text-based channels

AI tools have been heavily focused on text-based channels like email, chat, SMS, and so on.

In 2025, we’ll see the rapid expansion of multi-channel AI support:

• Phone-based AI assistance that goes from simple command-response interactions to natural, contextual conversations.
• Visual AI support with systems that can analyze screenshots and screen recordings to identify UI elements, detect anomalies, and provide guidance on how to solve these issues.

The applications in SaaS will be massive, ranging from automated video tutorials to AI-powered screen sharing and visual bug reporting.

The possibilities are both exciting and unnerving at the same time.

Companies will need to balance the promise of these technologies with practical considerations like bandwidth requirements, data privacy regulations, and the need for fallback options, while still figuring out the role of human support.

I believe this is already possible.

Future-proof your customer support

The changing customer support landscape of 2025 presents great opportunities and significant challenges for SaaS companies.

Success will depend on how well organizations can adapt to these trends, while still maintaining the human connection that customers value.

That ultimately means investing strategically in both technology and people.

This is the combination that we’ve developed at Peak Support. We can provide customized solutions that align perfectly with the proactive, technical, and human-centric support needs of SaaS companies in 2025.

If you’re looking for a partner to help you scale your team, contact us today! After all, we’re not only up-to-date with the trends, we’re successfully implementing them.