Customer success is a growing field that SaaS CX professionals are adopting. It’s easy to see why. Focusing on SaaS customer success can improve the customer experience, increase product adoption, lower churn rate, increase loyalty from both customers and employees, and boost revenue.
Are you looking to build or enhance your SaaS customer success strategies? Here are some quick tips to help you bring focus to improving your customer success team.
First let’s talk about what isn’t customer success. Customer success isn’t customer service.
Customer service can absolutely contribute to customer success (we’ll get into that later), but it’s not the only player. Customer success involves a diverse set of activities because there are many contributing factors.
At its core, customer success means understanding the business outcomes your customers are striving for, and then ensuring your SaaS solution helps them achieve those goals. SaaS customer success teams define customer goals, track/measure them, and ensure the right processes and supports are in place all along the way.
When focusing on customer success, customers are seen as partners. Your customers get more value from working with you because of your commitment to them and their goals.
When defining customer success, don’t stop at your customer’s business goals. Drill it down to the individual level — your main point of contact.
What persona do they fit into?
What does success look like for them individually/what are their personal KPIs?
Can you help them earn recognition at their company?
Can SaaS success help them achieve a promotion?
People connect to people, not software. If you can support your individual customer’s success, you’ll have a customer for life. Establish yourself as a true partner, not just a software solution.
A lot of customer success is focused on individual relationships, making it essential that you have the right team in place to develop and nurture those relationships.
Customer success is still an emerging field, so you may or may not be able to find people with a lot of professional customer success experience. That’s OK! Look for the following:
You can train team members to develop technical skills and software knowledge. It’s harder to teach someone how to foster meaningful connections. Seek out candidates with strong soft skills who will be committed to customer success.
Remember when we said customer support contributes to customer success? Nearly 70% of customer churn can be attributed to poor customer service. So while customer support isn’t synonymous with customer success, it’s an important factor.
When it comes to SaaS customer support, it’s important that you have multiple channels. Give customers a mix of proactive (chatbots), reactive (email), and self-service support. This will ensure your customers get the right level of support — how they need it and when they need it.
Want to dive deeper? Click the link below for more SaaS customer support tips.
Read: How to Make SaaS Customer Support Outstanding
Empower your customers not only to use your SaaS solution, but to make the most of it. If you’re focused on customer success, consider offering product training courses or tailor a training session around a customer’s specific needs. This will help them see the value in your product and give them the confidence they need to actually start using it.
Bonus: training is also a great opportunity to develop that individual relationship!
If you know your customers well enough, you should be able to know what they need before they even realize they need it. In the SaaS world, you’re not just solving problems — you’re providing innovation that makes people’s lives easier in sometimes unfathomable ways.
As Henry Ford famously said, ““If I would have asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
You’re not in the business of faster horses. You’re in the business of innovation — innovation that drives customer success.
How do you anticipate customer needs? You have a strong relationship with them, you have developed and studied in-depth customer personas, and you know their goals and obstacles. And as an outsider looking in, sometimes it’s easier for you to see what’s ahead with a different perspective.
In today’s high-tech world, we have access to a phenomenal amount of data. But are we making the most of it?
Data is meaningless if it’s not actionable. When you have all your customer data in a central place, you’re better able to assess the customer’s temperature (without having to bombard them with surveys).
You can also use this data to be proactive. For example, if you know that your customers tend to drop off when they haven’t been engaged for two weeks and don’t have any open tickets, you can reach out to them before they hit that two-week mark and resolve any issues they’re having (but not reporting).
Even with the best customer success strategies in place, you’ll inevitably lose customers.
When it comes to customer churn, it’s important to understand the why. Look for commonalities and use your findings to inform future decisions.
This could mean product improvements or enhancements. It could also mean that there’s a specific business sector that isn’t a great fit for your product, and you need to adjust your marketing messaging accordingly so you can focus on customers that you’re more likely to retain.
Focusing on customer success efforts can reduce your churn rate, but it’s still important to investigate your losses so you can better serve your current and future customers.
Personal online support can make all the difference for SaaS customers. Download your free copy of our eBook, Personal meets Digital: Guided Experiences for SaaS, to learn how to stand out among your competitors through meaningful digital interactions that can be a game-changer for your SaaS CX and customer success efforts.
Here at Glance, we help facilitate a more personal customer experience at moments that matter most. Solutions like cobrowse, website chat, and customer service video can elevate your SaaS customer’s digital experience to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Request a demo today to see how Glance can transform your SaaS customer experience.