Delivering a unique, reasonably priced, and in-demand product is not enough to delight and retain clients. Leveraging your customer experience (CX) is a key brand differentiator, and great CX is guaranteed using a tight customer success strategy. Around 25% of companies agree and combine their sales, marketing, and CX activities as one department for better alignment.
Customer success ensures that your customers can get what they need from your products without a headache. Happy customers with few complaints lead to recurring clients and a healthy bottom line. Plus, you’re more likely to get customer recommendations and testimonials, which can help boost your revenue.
And speaking of additional capital, at Founderpath, we love to see SaaS founders thrive. To help you generate more funds, we provide non-dilutive finance to bootstrapped SaaS Founders and plenty of cash-boosting advice.
This post takes you through some customer success strategies, how to measure your techniques, and best practices.
What is SaaS Customer Success?
Customer success in SaaS are strategies to ensure your clients and customers achieve value with minimal issues when interacting with your business. Training, intentional onboarding, relationship building, and support help customers achieve their goals.
That being said, it isn’t just the value clients attribute to your product. It’s about how effectively your product or service can help your users meet their end goals. For instance, if your SaaS is based on streamlining social media interactions, your product should provide easy to use tools and functionalities, which can help users meet this goal with as little friction as possible.
Examples of Customer Success Strategies
Here are some ways to increase customer success in your company.
In-App Onboarding
The onboarding phase should ensure your clients know how to use your products well enough to start gaining value immediately. Your customers should have all the tools, resources, and training necessary so they can start taking full advantage of your offerings without assistance.
However, the process should not be lengthy or complicated. A non-intuitive SaaS onboarding process can make people bounce quickly! Consider ways to keep your clients engaged as they onboard. A personalized experience is effective. You can simply address your customers by first name, or nickname, or customize the process with a few simple tweaks.
Loyalty Programs
Customer loyalty stems from positive experiences with your company. Once loyal, your clients will likely advocate and promote your business. An excellent way to keep your clients invested and incentivized to keep buying from you is with a customer loyalty program.
To further capitalize on this idea, you could tie your loyalty program with upselling and cross-selling. Cross and upselling encourages your clients to spend more by upgrading or purchasing something in conjunction with your primary products. Consider offering discounts on purchases or upgrades when the client is part of the loyalty program.
In addition, be sure you’re offering the features and functionality your customers would pay for by collecting regular feedback.
Customer Success vs. Customer Service
The main difference between customer success and customer service is their tactic for customer interactions.
Customer success focuses on preventing problems before they arise, and it looks at the whole picture. You can develop strategic actions from data insights to assist your clients in achieving their goals without issues.
On the other hand, customer service is reactive. It’s required once the customer complains or raises an issue, then finds the most effective resolution. For example, a problem could be technical or confusion around how a feature works. Customer service intends to resolve the issue while creating a positive picture of your client’s relationship with your company.
Why Is SaaS Customer Success Important?
Increases Recurring Revenue
Recurring revenue from your clients and customers is paramount to sustaining growth. And as you know, two ways to increase revenue are through new clients and when existing clients spend more. Focusing on these two areas is critical advice for SaaS founders.
When your customer success game is on point, you’ll increase retention and renewals, reduce churn, and boost revenue.
Helps Product Enhancement
Your customer’s interactions with your products offer the level of exploration and scrutiny required that is difficult to achieve by your teams alone. Their ideas on how your products can be improved and the bugs and defects they find are the best information you need to improve your products.
Effective customer success leads to product success and growth. It identifies your client’s evolving needs and expectations through consistent engagement. Solid feedback from your customers is necessary for fixes, new features, and functionality enhancements.
Customer Loyalty
SaaS customer success is the way forward to cultivating a loyal customer base since retaining old clients can be more difficult than acquiring new ones. A productive customer success strategy helps you encourage loyalty by meeting your client’s needs and making them feel heard. Clients and customers are more likely to stay with a company when they feel cared for.
How Is SaaS Customer Success Measured?
SaaS customer success is measured and tracked using the numbers derived from customer success metrics. The results indicate how well your customer success strategy works as your clients interact with your offerings. Here are some popular metrics to consider monitoring.
Churn Rate
The churn rate is the percentage of customers canceling their monthly subscription service. It measures the number of clients lost or the revenue lost.
Occasional leavers are typical, but if customers frequently leave, asking them why offers valuable feedback. With this information, you can improve your customer success game by fixing the most prominent reasons to prevent them from being an issue for your future clients.
Unfortunately, many SaaS companies suffer from high churn rates, often caused by several issues, including the wrong fit. For the right fit, only target and qualify clients that can fulfill their objectives using your particular SaaS.
Sessions Per Day
The sessions per day measure the number of times your client and customers use your platform daily, which gives you an idea of how engaged your clients are and how effectively your product allows them to meet their objectives.
Customer Lifetime Value
This is the total value expected from a customer over the entire relationship. The customer lifetime value (CLV) helps you to understand how your customer success efforts contribute to increased revenue. An efficient customer success strategy will enable your teams to increase annual revenue per client and extend the average yearly client relationship length.
Repeat Purchase Rate
You can tell how happy your clients are if they continue to use your products. A great customer success strategy improves the percentage of satisfied customers
and as a result, increases your repeat purchase rate through more repeat subscriptions
Number of Referrals
75% of customers are more likely to buy your products based on a personalized recommendation. Your referral rate can also confirm what your customers think. They
will only feel comfortable recommending your SaaS to others once they can achieve their objectives and think it’s worth recommending.
Retention Rate
The retention rate is similar to the churn rate since it looks at how effective your customer
success strategy is in holding on to customers. However, they are entirely different data points. The retention rate determines how often you keep clients rather than lose them. A high retention rate means your customers are achieving their goals and, therefore, are happy to stay.
Free Trial Conversion
This tells you how many free trial users become paying clients. High uptake following a free trial indicates the value provided is helping users to achieve their objectives enough to want to pay.
If uptake is low following a free trial, you can look at options to make your client’s initial interactions with your offerings more valuable. Again, customer feedback can point you in the right direction.
Product Utilization
How often your customer interacts with your products is a great way to tell if they’re receiving value. You can find out how often they access your platform and the most and least used functionality. As a general rule, the more features they use, the more value and success they receive.
MAU (Monthly Active Users)
This metric tells you the number of unique users who have signed in and interacted with your platform at least once a month or in 30 days. It’s a positive sign that your customers use your platform frequently to achieve their objectives.
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) Scores
The CSAT scores measure how happy your customer or potential customer is with personal interactions with the company. It asks questions like “how happy were you with the support you received today?” You can use positive responses to gauge how satisfied people are in fulfilling their objectives and receiving value through interactions with your SaaS.
SaaS Customer Success Best Practices
- Ensure your customer success strategy is an early priority. Start early so you can build a customer-centric company. According to research, customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that are not. Prioritizing clients should be the mindset shared across your company.
- Understand what your client’s idea of success is. Your customer and clients will have unique goals, so individual definitions of success will differ. Find common themes through regular client feedback surveys, focus groups, and one-to-one interviews.
- Develop a customer success journey map. Armed with an understanding of how your clients view success, visually plan the steps they take to achieve it. This technique helps you understand your client’s needs to overcome the problems they may face along their journey. With this information, you’ll know at which points to deliver more support or value for customer success.
- Offer a personalized solution. Build rapport by delivering personalized customer service. 72% of consumers expect companies to understand their needs and interests so they feel valued.
- Develop outstanding feedback loops. Let your clients be in charge of driving the improvements and changes of your products. This practice is called the “feedback loop.” Where you’ll continuously collect feedback to analyze and take action. You’ll present the results to your clients and customers to show them how valuable they are.
Use Founderpath for More Financial Success
Companies need to go above and beyond for their customers these days. An effective way of doing this is by providing value rather than just momentary satisfaction from achieving their goals, which also helps!
Customer success allows you to develop better relationships and increase client retention. Once your customers are happy, more sales opportunities emerge. A solid customer success strategy is a much-needed solution for bootstrapped SaaS founders. Founderpath is another solution that helps bootstrapped SaaS founders acquire upfront cash through unconventional funding options, detailed analytics, and more. Find out how you can turn your monthly subscription into money by trying out our service for free.
