You have a great product or service, but what about the people who use it? I'm talking about your customers - the people who get up close and personal with your product or service. Your customer base can either make or break your company. Remember that in SaaS, everything compounds. Let's say that you're losing 10% of your customers each month. This becomes a massive 71.8% over the year. Let me simplify it for you.
If you started the year with 100 customers you would only be left with 28 of them at the end of the year. This means that you would have to acquire 72 new customers to break even. This is where customer success plays an important role in driving retention and reducing churn.
What is SaaS customer success?
Customer success is one of the simplest concepts in SaaS. SaaS customer success expert Lincoln Murphy defines it as: "Customer success is simply ensuring that your customers achieve their desired outcome through their interactions with your company. That's it."
To grow a SaaS business quickly and sustainably, you need to acquire customers and retain them. It plays a role across the customer lifecycle:
Customer acquisition
Onboarding and adoption
Renewal
Retention
Customer advocacy and referral
5 Tips and Guidelines for SaaS Customer Success
1. Don't force onboarding
While some users may love an onboarding experience, others may not have the required patience. Such users would skip through onboarding and start experimenting. Therefore, you need to make your onboarding experience as flexible as possible. Many products offer a welcome tour to educate users on how to use the product.
2. Have quick help links
When users face a problem, they might need help. Don’t make them search for the answer themselves—offer quick links to find what they are looking for (like Zendesk does).
Image source: Zendesk
Don't assume that everyone knows how to use your product. You'll want a robust set of resources available at all times. These can include easy access to forums, instructions documentation, live chat, and other educational resources.
3. Monitor customer data
Usage data is key to customer success management. Without it, you can’t see what works or doesn’t work for your customers. This data allows you to:
Understand how customers are using your product
Observe how often they are using your product
Identify customers who might be a good upsell opportunity
Identify customers who are at risk of churning
4. Create a process to collect and take action on customer feedback
Getting feedback from your customers is essential to improving your product and keeping current customers happy. Your customer success team is in the right position to get frequent feedback from your customers:
Use in-app surveys like Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure customer sentiments.
Request for online reviews on platforms like Capterra, Trustpilot or G2.
Share key quotes from customer emails or phone calls.
Once you gather feedback, you can analyze trends and use that feedback to tailor it to your product roadmap.
5. Make it easy to connect with your customer success team
If a customer is facing issues with your product, they should not be digging around in their email to contact you. Consider offering different ways for customers to find support, such as:
A dedicated email ID for your customer success team
Live chat on your website
User forums
A knowledge base with tips, faqs, how-tos, and troubleshooting information
Making it easy for a customer will help your customer success team to solve your customer's problems and leave a positive impression of being supportive.
Conclusion
The goal of customer success is to help your customers gain value when using your product, improve customer retention, reduce churn, and increase customer lifetime value. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for implementing and measuring customer success. But adopting these tips in your business will help you grow quickly and sustainably in the long term.