Customer Success is now an integral part of every business, particularly in the SaaS frontier. Growing businesses tend to be prioritizing more on customer success. In fact, 70% of growing companies believe that customer success is quite important to them. Contrarily, only 49 percent of declining or stagnant organizations say the same.
While it may seem irrational to come to conclusions from correlations, customer success appears to be an important contributing factor to the growth of any business. And more enterprises are starting to acknowledge that an excellent customer experience is what sets them apart from their competitors.
If you want to succeed in the business world you must concentrate on your customers’ success, otherwise, you risk falling behind your competitors. That said, customer success is still quite new, and such, it won’t be easy to jump on board without having much understanding about it.
In this article, we’ll be providing you with seven effective customer success tactics for SaaS companies.
Customer Success: What Is It?
At its core, customer success refers to the business practice that focuses on proactively working with your customers to ensure that their goals are met by using your service or product. It’s the process of foreseeing customer questions or challenges and offering answers and solutions to those issues before they arise.
Critical to the success of your business, Customer Success improves customer loyalty and happiness. And by helping your clients achieve their desired goals, they’ll become your top advocates and promoters. So, you can say that it’s directly correlated with your bottom line since it helps you in reducing churn rates, refining renewal, and satisfaction, thereby boosting revenue.
According to a study by RightNow Technologies, 89% of buyers will purchase from a rival company if the customer experience is bad. Also, the same study revealed that 86% of customers will spend 25% higher for great customer experience. Therefore, even if you have to charge more to devise and carry out a top-notch customer success strategy, do it.
7 Customer Success Tactics for SaaS Companies
Customer success tactics for SaaS companies should be restricted to specific objectives around your consumers. You’ll want to devise systems, processes, and tools that help everyone meet specific goals, as these are quite easy to understand, monitor, and refine. Here are 7 Customer Success tactics for SaaS companies:
1. Proactive Outreach:
When it comes to customer success, proactively reaching out to your customers is a signature tactic. This means you’ll have to call or deliver emails or to your audience and enquire about their experience regarding your service or product and see if your assistance is required. Sometimes this approach can help you obtain insightful actional data.
No matter what action you take, some clients will always churn. It’s still important to reach out to these clients as it’ll help you in understanding why and develop efforts to address churn for others. You may even track trends that lead to customer churn.
2. Your training should be focused on boosting customer success
In the SaaS world, refining your training is an important and effective customer success strategy. This involves simplifying manuals and processes, breaking up functions with clear steps, and making everything you offer (FAQs, walkthroughs, images, videos, blogs, etc.) searchable.
Additionally, you can step this up by framing training and support pertaining to particular real-world use cases. It’s also essential for you to demonstrate why it’s important and how users will benefit from it. Look at dashboards and features to flag what insights your end-user will obtain from it and why it’ll benefit them. When you train your customers to acknowledge your software as one of the parts of customer service tools, you’ll be able to clearly demonstrate your worth in their success.
3. Celebrate customer feedback publically
SaaS organizations are always trying to obtain feedback as it can guide in the development and refinement of software — and customer surveys can help you in devising some great ideas. When creating effective marketing or customer nurture campaigns, having access to information by means of customer feedback or surveys is an essential step.
You can tie each specific change or improvement to the client(s) who mention it, when possible. You can also thank them publically when you execute these updates; and definitely follow-up after implementation.
Ask the consumers about how the updates improved their operations, sales, or other efforts. Talking to clients about the changes gets them to acknowledge certain gains and metrics. As such, it helps them realize that you’ve accelerated efficiency or sales by X%. When possible, publically congratulate your client on these wins, as it’ll give them bragging rights as well.
4. Get to know your customers and focus on building loyalty
One very important thing to remember is the fact that every single person in your audience wants to be heard. So if you want your business to succeed, you’ll have to gain insights concerning the needs of your customers. But, it’s generally a few select clients that offer the best insight. Focus on building a rapport and relationships with the help of the aforementioned tactics along with other loyalty efforts.
You can start by creating a list of select clients who you deem profitable for your business. This will help in boosting your feedback potential and also help in building a strong, lucrative, long-term relationship with these few select clients. For this group, learn about their entire customer journey by asking what works for them, what doesn’t, what’s vital to them, etc. I recommend you do this quarterly.
5. Remove customer barriers
Your consumers want a service or product that’s viable and easy to understand. This means you’ll need to examine your system to see if there are unnecessary things that get in the way or the simplicity of your software. While customer feedback can help you in obtaining some information about this, you may need to perform a specific analysis with paid groups.
Get groups to examine existing compatibilities and functionality to identify what might be frustrating to them. It’s very important to work on improving how you engage with your customers, particularly in times when they’re having issues or problems with your service or product.
With the advent of sophisticated and advanced technologies like RPA tools and APIs, it’s easier than ever to simplify the process. Nowadays, you can improve customer engagement significantly by making use of automation tools.
6. Customer journey mapping
Customer journey mapping may not seem like an ultimate strategy for customer success. However, it’s critical when it comes to helping customers succeed. One of the advantages of customer mapping is that it allows every team within the organization to know their responsibility in keeping the client moving throughout the journey.
More importantly, it shows how your customers need to be moved from one team to another. The way each team manages your customers when they visit your website plays a major role in terms of providing an impressive UX. Plus, they make sure that your clients get their issues or questions resolved as early as possible. When you’ve got a customer journey map prepared and it’s visible to employees, you’ll be more able to help your customers succeed.
7. Developing custom services and practices
You have to understand that no two groups are alike. Your audiences have different needs and each defines success differently. Plus, they’ve got a unique lifecycle journey. As such, your customer success efforts have to be flexible, which means adapting to your customers’ needs. Various onboarding or support packages, professional services, etc. are great ways to offer the personalization and extra that many teams need to find value and be successful.
Your customer success teams play a major role in support and implementation. Whatever the needs of your customers are for success, you’ll be able to deliver on it. Just be broad-minded and you’ll find the right strategies for your SaaS business.
Robert Jordan, a seasoned marketing professional with over 10 years of experience, currently works as Media Relations Manager at InfoClutch Inc. His passion is writing. Now he provides StudyClerk essay help as a content writer.