What is SaaS customer success?
SaaS customer success is the methods, strategies, and relationships that guide your customer towards the objectives they wish to achieve. Of course, the path should include the product or service you are selling, but it can also include insight and advice outside of the SaaS business offerings to ensure an overall valuable experience for your customers.
Customer success permeates every aspect of a SaaS company including user experience, marketing, sales, and product. The whole company needs customers to be successful to ensure customer retention, upsales, and growth.
How is customer success different from customer support?
Customer success is all about the long-haul. Customer success is concerned with the total customer value that includes upgrade paths, user feedback, and highlighting your SaaS product or service value to consumers or business organization customers.
Customer support is about understanding and evaluating immediate customer needs. Have a button that no longer functions? Need help creating a new account? That is where customer support shines. Once they solve a customer problem they move on to the next one.
Customer support is about solving short-term problems, customer success focuses on providing long-term value.
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Why is customer success important for SaaS companies?
SaaS companies have to continue to earn their customer’s business because they can cancel the subscription, the lifeblood of a SaaS company, at any time. That is the power of the SaaS business model, incentive to continue to provide value to customers in exchange for their business.
In the modern SaaS landscape, knowing how happy your customers are with your offering is not only a necessity for internal business decision-making, but is often a required data point for seeking venture capital. If you wish to grow with venture capital, having happy customers that do not churn out is critical evidence of long-term growth potential.
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What are the SaaS customer success principles you should live by?
Every SaaS company is different. Some tactics work better for B2B companies while others should be reserved for viral consumer products. However, there are some SaaS customer success principles that apply to all SaaS companies that you should live by.
Make a plan
It all starts with the customer success strategy. A strategy starts with your goals. Common SaaS customer success goals are:
- Decrease the time it takes for a customer to experience value, also called Time to Value (TTV).
- Increase the time a customer remains a paying customer, also called Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
- Increase the amount of current customers buying upgrades or new products from you, also referred to as an upsell. This increases the CLV.
- Reduce the cost of acquiring each customer, also known as Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
With these goals in mind, you can now build a strategy around a simple formula:
Growth = (CLV – CAC) – TTV
Your SaaS customer success strategy should be centered on growth by ensuring customers are getting to value quickly, are happy enough to stick with you for the long haul, and you are building relationships without going over budget.
Prepare a educational content upfront
A SaaS customer success team needs to know their customers and target customer personas backwards and forwards. Knowing what questions customers have, their pains, and their goals is essential for developing educational content for customers. Often referred to as a “knowledge base,” customer focused education is crucial for informing new customers on how to get up and running, as well as, explaining new features to existing customers.
As a bonus, an effective knowledge base paired with automation like Hubspots’ customer support chatbot will reduce customer support calls by allowing customers to find the relevant knowledge base article in seconds.
Optimize you onboarding process
Onboarding is like the first few pages in a novel, if you are not feeling like your time is well spent you will just stop reading. If you want to reduce the TTV, then you need to make sure your new customers are getting to value in as few steps as possible. For example, if you have a 13-step process due to a complex account creation form, consider simplifying the form or moving to a different part of the onboarding process. The key is to reduce friction!
Direct communication flow
A SaaS customer service team collects a treasure trove of customer feedback and can play a key role in directing that information back to each team in the SaaS business. Communication often flows from customer success to :
- Marketing for insights into what topics customers are interested in learning more about for a more informed approach to content creation
- Sales for a better understanding of current customer concerns, budgets, and referrals.
- Product for a better understanding of customer pain points and jobs to be done, which means new features and products are informed by customer problems and not what the SaaS company thinks are the problems.
With all of these teams working together with the customer success team, the customers are more likely to get value and remain a customer for a long time.
Celebrate Customers
The key to increasing CLV and reducing CAC is by celebrating current customers so they provide referrals and word-of-mouth marketing for your SaaS business. Because referrals and word-of-mouth are free ways to market, you spend less on customer acquisition and gain a champion in your delighted customers.
You can celebrate customers by hosting quarterly check-ins and recount the value your provided last quarter and how awesome they are. Some companies will also host special events for their best customers. However, a few nice words and a reminder of your appreciation can go a long way to establishing life-long customer relationships.
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Customer success is SaaS success
A SaaS company is successful when they delight their customers and grow with them. Growth is faster and cheaper with customers championing your value to other consumers or businesses in your target market. By creating a SaaS customer success plan, a knowledge base, smooth onboarding, internal collaboration, and celebrations for your customers you will see SaaS success.