Customer success in SaaS has become the primary frontier of businesses so as to boost conversions, enhance customer satisfaction, and reduce churn. With each passing day, a strong customer success strategy is becoming more and more essential for SaaS companies, and it’s no wonder customer success has quickly moved from optional to mandatory for SaaS companies in a competitive marketplace.
According to a study by SaaS Capital, businesses that deploy customer success strategies typically see a 40% rise in revenue, experience 50% faster growth, and observe their churn and customer satisfaction rate being positively impacted by it. Yet another study by UserIQ revealed that 70% of PM(s) from SaaS companies rely on their customer success teams for on-demand feedback instead of spending time with customers.
Customer success, though uncomplicated, is often perplexing to understand. Is it the same as customer service? If not, then how? How does it impact the overall performance of the business? How does it improve the health of key performance indicators like MRR, LTV, or even CAC? Here, we will take a look at the supposed benefits of a customer success strategy and how an increasing number of SaaS companies are using it as a catalyst for revenue growth.
What Is Customer Success?
Customer success is the art of predicting client concerns, challenges, or issues and proactively proposing solutions to them before they occur. It indefinitely helps businesses enhance customer engagement, improve retention rate, raise sales, and boost customer loyalty.
Your SaaS product exists to help your clients solve a problem. Customer success is an extension of this where you not only assist your clients in resolving their primary pain point through your product, but you also ensure their success with your product by handholding them throughout their buyer journey by offering support, guidance, and consultative assistance before they feel the need to ask for them.
Customer success is so important that it is an essential cog in the wheel of growing businesses that have been found out to be 21% more likely to find customer success important to them in relation to their stagnant counterparts. But how do growing businesses achieve customer success?
The answer is simple – By investing in their customer service program. In fact, as many as 55% of growing companies claimed that investing in their customer service strategy was very important to them, as opposed to 38% of declining or stagnant companies.
But just because you know how important customer success is for your SaaS company doesn’t mean you know how to actually create one. So, how does one get started with a customer success strategy for their business? While there is no ubiquitous solution for every SaaS company out there, there are a few general principles that one can apply to put them on the right track.
1. Offer a superior and smooth onboarding experience
Did you know that 40-60% of software users will open an app once and never log in again?
Customer onboarding is extremely vital to their success, but it is still frequently overlooked. Why? Because nobody is accountable for it. Onboarding ought to be a cross-team initiative where everyone is responsible for it.
Collaboration between departments will manifest a unique onboarding customer experience that will not only delight them but also increase your onboarding rate. Concierge onboarding is one such onboarding technique that involves all customer-facing departments and allows you the opportunity to assist new signups in making progress towards long-term success.
Once your users have achieved “initial success” through your product, you can offer them free samples and templates to get them started quickly. Your marketing team can supply adverts on popular use cases concerning these free resources, while your customer service team can send personalized, in-app messages to encourage early interactions with them to make their job easier.
2. Provide real-time support via live chat
Today, 79% of consumers favor live chat over contacting customer support via phone or email because it boasts of a resolution time of 42 seconds. Forward-thinking businesses that want to boost consumer success should utilize tools like live chat to support consumers preemptively during the beginning phases of their engagement with their product.
A live chat software offers direct access to the pain points of the customer. It provides the perfect opportunity to ask questions and listen to them.
By incorporating live chat into your customer success program, you will preemptively help consumers on their path from discovery to support. It can also help you ensure that they fully profit from your product by supplying them with all the tools required to achieve their goals.
Proactive live chat is a gold mine when it comes to pleasing your clients, improving loyalty, and increasing the rate of retention.
3. Invest in upselling and cross-selling
Perfecting a consumer success strategy generates a rise in cross-selling and upselling. Consumers who are successful and pleased with your service or product may choose to buy add-ons or switch to a more premium version of your product.
By incentivizing the ways in which your service or product can meet the unique needs of your customers, you can boost your MRR and amplify customer experience greatly. You can deploy efficient expansion tactics, such as cross-selling and upselling.
In order to do that, you may provide premium features or plans to customers, upgrade them to an improved version of your product, and more. This helps raise the probability of customer stickiness and boost your clients’ spending, thus improving your MRRR.
4. Focus on optimizing product quality
Customers are the lifeblood of your business; therefore, comprehending their needs and their distastes is crucial. You likely won’t have an audience with a specific mindset. They will have unique needs, and their definition of what customer success means to them will also vary.
Every broader client group will be distinct from the other. As such, you have to focus on optimizing and refining your product so that it’s flexible to the needs of your customer to be flexible. This will mean adapting to their needs and having more than one support/onboarding program, professional services, etc.
Attuning your product to the customer’s personal needs is also a great way to improve customer success. This makes them feel more valued as a member of your organization’s client community and not just another statistic.
5. Plan customer loyalty programs
Customer success breeds loyalty; therefore, it is extremely crucial to the health of your customer success strategy. In fact, customer loyalty is so profitable that 80% of a business’s future revenue comes from just 20% of its existing customers.
Loyalty is the product of successful customer engagement with your company. You need your clients to feel assured that they’re receiving something valuable out of their investment.
This rings truer for software and SaaS companies that need to please their customers both in terms of their product and relevant services to keep their MRR/ARR on an upwards trend.
You can maximize the effectiveness of your customer success strategy by encouraging loyalty through customer loyalty programs. According to Bond Brand Loyalty, people tend to spend more when the rewards of their customer loyalty programs are more significant. If your organization is able to offer outstanding customer support in a concrete form, you will be much more successful at retaining clients.
Conclusion
The most profitable companies are those that guarantee the continued satisfaction and prosperity of their customers. With the help of a customer success program, you can ensure that your clients feel valued during their buyer journey. Doing this successfully can also make them loyal evangelists of your brand and allow you to develop our brand sustainably while building long-term relationships with your customers.
