In the SaaS world, Customer Success is everything!

Customer Success in SaaS has gone from a dull, ‘Hackneyed’ saying to a crucial sales weapon to increase conversions, enhance customer happiness and reduce the churn for returning revenue businesses. There is no doubt why a customer success has moved from ‘optional to obligatory’ for SaaS companies in recent years.

In today’s competitive marketplace, the companies that are not providing SaaS , or not even the technology companies, have appreciated the transformational power of customer success and adopted it as their operating model.

According to Lincoln Murphy “Customer success is about more than delivering service or support.”

To be successful, a SaaS (Software as a Service) must focus on establishing an accurate customer acquisition and steady customer retention strategy.

In this article, I will share the top 4 best practices or approaches the ISVs should follow to ensure customer loyalty, satisfaction and develop customer success as the company’s culture. By following these top practices, organizations can leverage to develop and establish the client success culture from the level zero.

Without further ado, let’s start!

Success Culture as Your Top Priority

It is essential for the SaaS companies to ensure that every department, be it sales, marketing or software development are dedicated to create a customer success culture.

And how do you achieve that?

Well, the key is to ensure that every team member is to be made clear that customer success is a priority for the company. Employees will be directly or indirectly involved in making that happen.

Implementation of the culture of success is not only the CSM role alone!

Let’s take Sales and Marketing Team as examples:

If Mr.A from the Sales is selling a product to the wrong customer or overselling the product, customer success will not meet its retention goals.

Similarly, if Mr. M from Marketing department is not able to capture the customer success stories or include current customers in his outbound marketing campaigns, the customer success goals will suffer.

I don’t mean that Customer Success should be used to pinpoint the Sales or Marketing efforts. I simply mean that the success and retention goals of the organization will require the efforts and participation from all departments.

Follow up on every customer interaction and sales

I don’t mean service requests. I’m talking about that instant moment of courtesy after the customer query is solved or a product is purchased.

Following up your customer interaction and sales not only showcase your allegiance to customer service but also assist in building customer loyalty and ensuring repetitive sales.

A follow up usually include:

Providing refunds, repairs, and warranties

Interacting with customers after purchase or query solution to ensure they are happy

Creating customer follow-up opportunities like sales alerts

Customers appreciate the personalized attention and care. Even a small hacks like remembering his name, a previous interaction with ended on a positive note, assist your customer to feel “belonged” to the business.

It is advised that you remember your customer and pay attention to their interests and requirements.

Align to Customers’ Goals & KPIs

The key to establishing a mutually beneficial and strategic partnership between your customers and SaaS organization is understanding the customer inside out.

As a service provider, it is necessary that your team should form a solid relationship with the decision makers, architects and with everyone associated with the business including your users and even beyond.

Your team should be well aligned to get to the roots of everything, especially the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and the individual goals.

You should be asking them various questions including:

What are their foremost KPIs?

How are the compensated or measured personally?

What are their preparations and team goals to offer solutions?

And more…

After all the information is collected and well understood, it is now time to customise the solution to what matters most to the client. This will ultimately assist you in realizing what will make your customer successful.

Brand yourself as a service, not a software

World is a tricky place for SaaS providers. It is so much of the competition around. They offer both the software and service and can’t fake it on either side.

Your customers are paying you every month, isn’t it? Are you not serving them? Don’t they know this? If you are able to offer your customers the service in tangible ways, you will more successful in rendering the customer satisfaction.

It is advised that you roll out service improvements schedule with your billing schedule. While your customer watches the withdrawal of the payment, he should also be convinced that he is getting something valuable in return.

By introducing new updates, increasing the security, storage, etc. you can make your customer feel comfortable in the value-addition process.

Conclusion:

Customer Success is the most important activity in a SaaS business.

A real testimony on any organization’s culture, product and professionals is highlighted in the success of its customers. Customer success should be given top priority, not just by the company itself but by each and every employee or a team which is associated or own a stake in the customer’s success.

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What is your favourite Customer Success Strategy?

About Author

Ankur Kumar is a content marketing expert and an experienced blogger. He works in a reputed software development India firm and likes to ideate, write on various topics including technology, digital marketing, startups and environment. An avid outdoorsman, explorer and nature lover who believes in minimalist lifestyle. You can find Ankur on LinkedIn.