aaS businesses are currently at a growing stage across the world. According to Statista, the global SaaS sector has reached $157 billion in 2020. By looking at this trend, we can safely say that SaaS companies are the future.
However, one common mistake made in this industry is the least focus on customer support initiatives. Most SaaS companies are in the race of developing more innovative services and solutions. What they often forget in this journey is to put the effort into retaining the existing customers.
These SaaS companies should not forget that every action will have a compounding effect in this industry. For example, if you focus on creating a top-notch customer experience, you may enjoy a customer retention rate of up to 70% in a year. However, if customer support is not your priority, you may lose up to 70% of customers within a year.
So, apart from focusing on innovation and lead conversion, SaaS companies should also concentrate on proper customer success strategies. That’s the only way to reduce your churn rate and improve your customer retention rate.
In this article, we present you a set of tried and tested SaaS customer success strategies that totally worked for us. Let’s begin…
Let’s begin with “customer success” for SaaS companies…
Customer success strategies are a set of strategies that any company should apply to help the customers get a better grip over the company’s products and services. For the growth of your SaaS business, it is very important that your customers find your products and services, useful and easy to use.
In the SaaS industry, the concept of “customer success” comprises of the following factors:
Customer Onboarding
After converting a lead into a customer successfully, you need to onboard the customer. For that, you’ll need to give your customer a detailed product tour, provide setting-up support, etc. You need to help the customers to gain maximum value from the product.
Customer Retention
SaaS customer retention works by building a collaborative relationship with your customers. If you can add value to your customers’ lives throughout the contract, you’ll be able to reduce your customer churn rates. Rather than developing a transactional relationship, try to build trust. That goes a long way.
Customer Referral
SaaS customer success focuses on fulfilling the individual needs of the customers to make them happy. A happy customer is a loyal customer. A loyal customer will recommend your products and services to others. So by satisfying each customer, you’re unlocking the door to immense opportunities.
Now that the concept of “SaaS customer success” is clear, let us move on to the tried and tested strategies of SaaS customer success.
5 Tricks to Improve SaaS Customer Success
Here are 5 tricks that worked wonders for us to improve customer success. We hope these tricks will work for you too. Without further ado, let’s begin:
1. Find out what “Success” really means for your customers
Before a SaaS company works on improving their customer success, they should know what success really means for the customers. Without knowing that, it is impossible to develop a strategy.
For some customers, success may mean consistent revenue growth while for others success may mean a high customer satisfaction rate and revenue growth. Now the same customer success strategy won’t work for both these groups.
So, how will you figure out what “success” really means for customers? A great way to do that is through surveys. You can run regular surveys through your social media accounts, WhatsApp for business, messenger bot, and similar other platforms.
Analyze the results of these surveys to find out what “success” means to these customers and what are the gaps between your products and their success. As soon as you figure out this gap, it will be easier for you to build effective strategies.
2. Plan a Detailed Customer Onboarding Process
The purpose of any customer onboarding process is to help the new customers set up an account and getting started with your products and services. If your products and services can help the customers to gain value at the very first attempt, it will be easier for you to retain these customers.
Many popular SaaS companies employ skilled onboarding managers to help the customers in this process. The product manager is responsible for explaining each step of the onboarding process to the customers and assist them toward a detailed product tour.
Some SaaS companies even automate their entire onboarding process starting with email automation. That actually saves a lot of time and keeps the entire process hassle-free. Remember that the onboarding process helps in creating the first impression. So, plan your onboarding accordingly.
3. Don’t neglect the importance of Customer offboarding
Okay, hear us out! Some customers will churn. That’s not a big issue. That’s part of the process. So, what SaaS companies can do is plan a proper customer offboarding process. This will ensure that customers won’t have to leave your company with an unpleasant experience.
Also, leaving doesn’t mean leaving forever. With a pleasant offboarding process, there will always be some room left for coming back.
Here’s what you can do to keep the offboarding process pleasant:
- Make sure that your customers have the option to cancel a subscription whenever they want. Don’t push them to stay and instead make the offboarding process painless for them.
- Generally, SaaS companies offer multiple integrations. So, what happens to these integrations once the customers cancel their subscriptions? Make everything clear. There shouldn’t be any ambiguities. That’s a great example of good customer success.
- Some SaaS companies continue to offer product access to the churned customers. They limit the features but make sure that the fundamental product features are accessible.
4. Keep Monitoring Customers’ behaviors
The secret sauce of SaaS customer success is to keep track of the behaviors of the customers. Here are some customer activities that you can monitor to stay updated about customers’ behaviors:
- For what purpose are they using your product?
- In what frequency are they using your products?
- Are they seeking/receiving support?
- Are there any upsell opportunities?
- Which customers are most likely to churn?
5. Your Customer Success team should be one-click away
Finally, your customers should be able to reach out to the customer success team with the least effort. Here’s how you should make your customer support team available for your customers:
- 24/7 live chat support through AI chatbots
- A dedicated email address that is easily accessible and highly responsive
- A phone number that actually gets picked up
- User forums
If the customers can reach out to the customer success team painlessly, the rate of customer satisfaction will improve. Also, in that case, customers will actually discuss their issues with your customer support executives instead of writing their frustrations and complaints on social media.
So, if you don’t want any negative impression on your brand’s identity, form a responsive customer success team like today!
How Konverse can help you Improve Customer Success?
Konverse helps SaaS companies to build a world-class customer experience. We help you with:
- Intelligent and Industry-specific AI Chatbots
- Live chat support
- 50+ app integrations
- Multilingual AI chatbots in 40+ languages
With us, SaaS companies can automate their onboarding, customer support, and offboarding processes, effortlessly.
Click here to start your free trial today
Additional Readings
Optimize Common Customer Experience Touchpoints
Learn about Customer Feedback Loop
Download our eBook to Know Everything about AI Chatbots
More from
Support
category
