Every SAAS business relies on customer success for growth. It is crucial for businesses with numerous competitors. In a market full of similar products, successful companies are those that know how to please their clients. Unfortunately, many firms concentrate on expanding their market and acquiring new clients but forget to put efforts into keeping existing ones.
Finding new clients is harder than converting your existing customers. And remember, when the current customers aren’t happy, you’ll lose them. That’s where customer success comes in; it helps retain your clients.
What is customer success in SaaS? It is defined as the state of clients realizing their favored results when using a firm’s product. A company must ensure its customers get positive results from using their products. You need a team of individuals responsible for ensuring customer satisfaction and providing the required support to achieve it.
SaaS businesses require customers to be fulfilled to be profitable. Times have changed; earlier, companies relied on selling their products to clients for a profit. As a result, they did not need repeat business from clients that much.
There has been more competition through the years, and companies need to retain their clients to earn profits. So, instead of selling a product for lots of money to a few, you can sell a monthly subscription to use the software to many for a few hundred dollars monthly.
So, the consumers benefit from your service over the long haul and can acquire help anytime from customer support for SaaS. Client success will involve overseeing the use of your commodity to track client satisfaction. So, a business will predict client needs and fix any issues they face with the commodity, thus keeping them happy.
Measuring client success is imperative because customers will not always tell you when a product fulfills their needs. Through this, many customers will not express disappointment with the commodity and will shift to acquiring alternatives. With SaaS customer support metrics, companies can know whether clients’ needs are being met.
Companies can determine client success by monitoring various metrics. The most effective ones include the following.
The churn rate, or attrition rate, is the speed at which a business loses customers. Some forms of this rate include:
The churn rate does not necessarily tell you why you’re losing clients, just how many. You can calculate it by dividing the number of lost customers by your total number of clients.
Net promoter score determines client loyalty and satisfaction. It involves asking consumers how inclined they would be to vouch for a service or product to other consumers. It uses a scale of 1-10, comprising three types of respondents.
Those who respond with 0-6 are known as detractors, and they will not recommend the commodity or stick around for repeat purchases. The 7s and 8s are called passives, and they will not actively promote the product but won’t damage its reputation either. They need to be won over because they can easily turn into promoters. The 9s and 10s are known as promoters and will likely refer your product to their peers, boosting the business’s growth.
It involves monitoring client behavior to try and predict their next moves. There are three metrics available here:
Customer health scores are useful for any SaaS customer support model because they help investigate customer history, which helps retain them.
The world still comprehends the concept of customer success, but even so, we’ve already discovered some valuable practices.
It involves reaching out to the clients to assess how things are going and whether they need you to assist them. The information clients offer here is often workable in helping you take the necessary steps. Customer success provides you with the tools you require to become more proactive with clients, unlike customer support, which is more reactive.
Companies are rapidly adopting automated email systems because of the effort it saves to engage clients. You only need several emails for different situations and set intervals for them to be sent to specific clients. The emails help you keep your clients close, which is a crucial customer success SaaS practice.
Employing self-support systems helps improve customer satisfaction by giving them the tools they need to solve any issues they might face. It makes it easier for them because they won’t have to rely on customer support for every issue. Furthermore, it reduces the workload on your customer service representatives.
Think of it as a customer lifecycle with your products. Journey mapping aims to ensure clients follow the different stages of their lifecycle with your company. It identifies the different teams of the company and the responsibilities they carry in helping clients move through the lifecycle. That means it’s easier to know the group is failing the system when clients are not following the lifecycle.
Among the SaaS customer support best practices we’ve listed, seamless onboarding is probably the most important one. Many customers churn when they don’t know how to use or operate a product. So, you need to develop an onboarding process that properly guides them through the process. You can even use interactive walkthroughs where clients learn by doing. The onboarding process should also cover as many of your features as possible.
Customer success is still a new concept, and we should expect it to develop and evolve in the future. The main concept of customer success is staying ahead of the customer. This is by identifying and eliminating issues before they arise and finding ways to predict their needs and fulfill them. There is more to be expected of the concept, and SaaS businesses should always pay attention to future trends and developments.
