Customer Success (CS) is the company’s long-term strategy to make every client happy and satisfied.
Still, the fact that you should take care of your users is obvious and you probably think that you don’t need a special strategy or a separate team to make your client happy. But why then are so many successful SaaS companies putting so much emphasis on success stories and implementing CS in their business?
CS is based mainly on two areas: caring that the buyer receives positive emotions while interacting with your SaaS and making sure they see the value of using the service. Taking care of SaaS customer success doesn’t mean just driving sales or talking with users about product benefits. It means offering clients solutions to problems that may occur during the period of using the service and telling them how to make the most of using it.
Such complex services like SaaS require a special approach to each customer. Failing to fully understand the capabilities of the product, the user will not get the desired result. And for business, this is the risk of losing a client.
And it is only one reason why you should take care of customer success. Before talking about other benefits for your cloud company, let’s define what CS actually involves.
What SaaS customer success involve
Managers from a customer success team have the following responsibilities:
- Communicate and arrange personal meetings with clients to understand what are their expectations from the product, help them learn the product faster and more efficiently
- Improve customer knowledge about the company’s software and teaches them to use it
- Keep customers engaged and satisfied with the product, as the result turn them into loyal customers
- Define the most common problems of buyers and offer them the most suitable solutions
- Stay in close contact with other departments of the company to make sure that the company goals and tech requirements of the software facilitate creating a solution useful for clients
- Work on creating and improving onboarding processes both for new and existing customers
- Conduct case studies and collect feedback from users
Finally, let’s move to reasons why SaaS companies should put so much effort into making their clients happy and satisfied.
6 reasons to start implementing CS right away
Build trust and loyalty
The market is now overwhelmed with different product propositions, from kinds of toothpaste to online solutions for your business. That’s why clients tend to opt for your competitor’s product once they had a bad experience interacting with your SaaS.
At the same time, more than 85 % of users are ready to buy more expensive services in case they get a high-quality customer experience. This fact proves that it is worth spending a budget on developing a customer success strategy.
Take care of the level of service you provide. Start with talking to your clients to identify their needs: define which product features they use most often and which they tend to avoid. Think of possible ways to improve the software functions and add some new ones as well. It will make your SaaS impossible to give up.
Eliminate churn
Churn rate shows you the number of users that for some reason stopped using your service. And one of the main goals of CS is to reduce this index by providing an ongoing positive experience to all your clients. In case the user is satisfied with the service they receive and they see what value of the product there won’t be any reasons for them to leave.
Very often customer success strategies achieve reducing churn by anticipating and eliminating issues the client may face when interacting with your cloud service.
And it moves us to the next benefit of CS.
Prevent issues before they occur
As you have a SaaS business, you make a product that is distributed by subscription, in addition, it is software, which means there is an opportunity to constantly refine and improve it. Therefore, it is extremely important to keep the user satisfied.
The Customer Success Manager should not just solve the client’s problems as they arise (as happens in the case of regular support service), but make sure that they do not occur at all. When you implement CS, you think about customer training, remind in advance about the payment, ask if everything is fine, tell about new features, and updates.
Increase retention
SaaS stands for software-as-a-service and when we pay attention to the word “service” we understand that it is not a one-time deal, but an ongoing experience where you should constantly support your users.
Retaining customers who have already made a purchase or used your products is much more profitable than attracting new users. And implementing CS helps to make your current customers loyal to your company, which gives you a great competitive advantage. In addition, if you take care of customer success, in case a buyer has a problem, they are more likely to contact you, rather than spend time and effort looking for a new company.
Provide more referral customers
A global survey conducted by Nielsen found that 84% of respondents in 58 countries consider the recommendations of friends and acquaintances to be the most reliable source of information about goods and services.
In the era of the online revolution, the users themselves, if properly motivated, become active promoters of your product.
And what kind of client is most likely to recommend the service to their friends? Right, a happy customer.
Makes your service better
Having a CS strategy means that you constantly communicate with your customers to learn if they have any struggles with the software. As well, being customer-success-oriented involves communicating with other departments to understand the company’s goals.
This way you constantly improve your SaaS, think of new useful features and check if the existing ones work properly.
The success of your company starts with the success of your customer
The decision to get better in terms of customer success can be your first step that leads to less churn, better products, and more useful features, better market fit, better customers, more revenue from referrals, higher customer lifetime value, and more consistency in your organization, as everyone will work on mutual goal: to solve the customer’s problem.
Talking to your client next time may be the beginning of you implementing SaaS customer success.