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Customer success is significant for SaaS companies. Satisfied and loyal customers keep your company moving forward. Therefore, we can say that customer success is equal to company success.
No wonder why there are more than 8,000 job posts for customer success manager positions on the Indeed job portal at the moment. Be it a SaaS company or any other type of business, customers’ happiness and satisfaction are essential to your company’s success.
This article will focus on the benefits of customer success, the roles and strategies to reach customer success. It will concentrate on SaaS companies and share knowledge and specifics about SaaS customer success.
What is Customer Success?
Customer success is what makes companies grow. Hence, by making sure the customers are happy and satisfied, their use of your product gives them good results, and companies get the chance to experience tons of benefits.
But before moving forward and elaborating more on the benefits of customer success, let’s learn what customer success is.
Customer success is slightly different from customer support. Customer success aims to learn what your customers are experiencing by the time they are your customers to make their experience seamless and satisfactory.
Customer support is somewhat a means to keep the bridge with your customers, but you will reach customer success only when you know the issues to be solved for your customers to be happy and satisfied with your brand, product, or service.
Many factors are essential for your SaaS company. A long chain of components is significant for recording customer success. It is not just your product or service that can be of high quality or well-branded, and then “Bingo!”. You need to have:
- Well-designed product or service
- Quality assurance
- Customer happiness team
- Problem-solving strategies
- Customer-oriented work ethics
Your customer success is in your hands. You can build an online community by simply caring about your customers’ success. Remember that happy customers bring other customers.
Putting exemplary efforts into your work will return you many benefits. You will know what adjustments you need to make for your customer success, including changes to your product or service, amendments to its design, quality, or functionality, embracing your team and work mentality with customer-friendly strategies, and so on.
All of your efforts will bring back many benefits to you, which will place your brand or service on a higher level.
The Benefits of Customer Success for SaaS Companies
As hinted before, customer success gets your company a long list of benefits. Here are some of those:
- Improved product or service
When you keep in touch with your customers, you get more chances to learn about your product’s problems. Knowing that will help you improve your product. So it is obvious that your improved products are a valuable benefit.
- Loyal customers
When a customer contacts you yet does so continuously, there is no other option but to know who among your customers is loyal to your brand, product, or service.
Especially for SaaS companies whose customers use services and update their subscriptions monthly or annually, getting to know your loyal customers is essential. By the way, you can check this customer lifetime value example for further reference.
- User-persona specifics
Apart from benefiting from getting to know your loyal customers, you also have the opportunity to learn specifics about the people who use your service or product. This way, you will develop and improve your user persona, and it will be easier to adjust your services based on the characteristics of your main buyers and users.
- Better customer support
Your top benefit from your customer success is to improve your customer support. You may wonder how?
Depending on your customers and their characteristics, you will feel which aspects of your customer support, the team, and the methods will need to be changed and upgraded.
These are some of the benefits you will get from your customers succeeding while using your services or products. These benefits, in their turn, will give you another chance for SaaS customer retention.
On the way to your company’s function, you will notice many other details that will serve you as a basis for turning your customers’ data and information into a benefit for all of you, both the customers and the company itself.
The Team SaaS companies Need Inorder to Deliver Better Customer Experience
If stated that the team working in your company ensures your customer success, there would not be any revelation.
However, we can say that every point in the operation chain is vital for the final result. In these terms, be it the engineering team or the design team, they are the first stage of ensuring that the product or the service will be valued and significant for the customers.
They guarantee the customers would enjoy using their services or products, and the latter would give benefits to customers while using your offer. We could say that these teams might be enough for SaaS companies to succeed in customer experience, but there is more.
For example, if the goal is to get customer success, there should be a team for customer-related deals and organizations.
These teams can have different names, such as:
- Customer support
- Customer service
- Customer success
- Customer happiness
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The employees of these teams are on the frontline of contacting customers and giving solutions to issues. Follow an employee onboarding checklist to manage your customer support team.
A lot depends on these teams, but also the critical positions for recording success:
- Chief customer officer
- Customer experience team lead
- Manager of implementation
Chief Customer Officer (CCO)
The abbreviation of CCO in customer success stands for chief customer officer. Sometimes the same role is also titled a chief compliance officer, where the employee is responsible for customer-related communication, customer complaints, and customer services.
Your chief customer officer will also be accountable for doing customer research to unveil the user/buyer characteristics, in which research automation might be enormously helpful. It is important to note that in this rapidly developing stage, professionals still need various tools for more successful results.
The teams need an experienced leader for their success. The successful work ethic of the team ensures the success of customers. Each and every customer support team needs a CCO to manage high-level situations, challenging problems, and customer-related issues. Community management has always been complex, so a chief officer would be needed to run the deals on the managerial level.
Manager/Team Lead of CX
As much as it is vital to have a CCO in your SaaS company to lead your customer service communication, so is having a customer experience manager.
Moreover, depending on the size of your company and the number of your customers, you can have several teams for customer support and customer happiness.
Obviously, the different groups should have their managers and team leads to get the best of their experience.
To ease the process of customer management, you will need to hire customer experience managers to run the command of several teams and make sure they reach their targeted goals.
Depending on the subscription, you may have different sections of your customer happiness team to handle a wide variety of customer contacts.
Your customer experience managers can manage their teams, classifying them by:
By subscription (Premium, pro)
You can hire customer experience managers for the subscription options you offer. For example, a customer experience manager with his team can be responsible for only a free subscription, another for Premium, and the third for a Pro subscription.
In this case, you will have highly experienced team leads with deep knowledge of very complicated issues for each subscription option you have. This may get a little complicated if you offer additional options such as coupon codes for certain services or access to certain features for free.
By matter of the issue (technical, daily )
It is always good to have personnel that is good at everything. However, suppose you want to have strict divisions among your customer teams based on the type of issues they will be handling. In that case, it will be necessary to have a customer experience manager for a variety of technical, subscription, login/sign-in-related issues, or digital security concerns.
Additionally, you can have support teams for daily light problems that require less technical knowledge, like creating an invoice templates, deleting a photo, upgrading to another subscription option, or vice versa. All in all, all the teams will need knowledgeable and experienced team leads.
By means of contacting (phone, website, chatbot, social media)
You may want to divide your teams based on the means they will use to keep in contact with customers.
Based on that, you may need:
- Call center team lead
- Email, online chatbot, and messaging team lead
No matter what customer happiness teams you will have, you will need customer experience managers to organize your customer communication on various channels smoothly, be it part of social media management, website chatbots, or call center technologies.
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Your customer experience managers will highly appreciate the use of advanced technologies when assisting your customers. If for seamless user experience it is required to speed up WordPress, just do it. If they need email marketing automation tools, then provide them with those. If it is necessary to get a call center noise reduction, then go for it. After all, the benefits from a successful customer experience are for all of you, generally for the SaaS company itself.
Manager of Implementation
In the chain of command, after the Chief customer officer and customer experience manager, your SaaS products and services may need the manager’s touch of implementation.
Again, it might seem that the support team members might be enough along with the two previous roles, but the manager of implementation would be a great asset to your customer success.
The manager of implementation will be responsible for
- Helping customers have a seamless experience
- Assisting customers in signing up for the products
- Installing necessary plugins and software
- Setting up the essential platforms
- Solving any problems your customers may encounter during the use of your products and services
Customer support teams are for helping your customers solve their issues related to your products, but for reaching customer success, you will need to have managers of implementation. Depending on the type of product your SaaS company is offering, you might need all or some of the key roles to ensure your customers are succeeding.
For example, suppose your product is a logo maker. In that case, your customers might need some help in the implementation process, where the manager of implementation could ensure they have a successful experience.
Best Tips for SaaS Customer Success
Having customer success might seem difficult at first sight. However, implementing the following tips will give you excellent chances for customer success for your SaaS company.
In order to make sure your customers succeed using your services, you should:
- Turn customer success into a priority
- Create a complete customer onboarding process
- Follow up the customer data and feedback
- Gather the most customer-oriented support team
Let’s go over each and every tip below.
Turn customer success into a priority
Your customers should be your top priority. Prioritizing your customers means you prioritize the success of your company’s future.
The benefits you will get from your customer success is one of the most important outcomes of your customer-oriented strategies. Unfortunately, it seems easier to say than implement specific steps for prioritizing. Check the points below to learn how to turn them into a priority.
- Listen to your customers’ suggestions: If you want to turn customer success into a priority, make sure you and your teammates have listening skills. Being an active listener is essential for having customer success. Succeeding in relations with your customers starts right here.
- Value your customers’ opinion: When you listen, you understand your customers’ problems when using your service or products.
- Be open to discussion: Discussions will lead to better solutions. When you listen and value what your customers say, you have close to zero chances to disappoint your customers or make them unsatisfied.
- Put your customers’ needs above yours: One of the best ways to show that customers are top priority is to put their needs above yours. That’s also another way of expressing your customer-orientedness.
- Solve the problems as soon as you can: Be a time-saver. If you can solve the problem right away, don’t postpone it over and over again.
Create a complete customer onboarding process
The organization is essential for having customer success. Your customers should know exactly in what order they will be able to use and get the most value from your product and services. Hence, outlining a complete customer onboarding process and creating a checklist might be a good idea to stick with.
Your customer onboarding process should answer the following questions:
- What is it?
- When can I unsubscribe?
- Why should I pay for a Pro subscription?
- How is this product used?
- How much is the fee?
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This may sound like a journalism course, but believe me, the answers to these questions are what your customers are looking for when they first land on your website or check your social media accounts.
It is important that they with or without contacting you get to know how your services work, how they can join you or buy a subscription, how much will that cost, why they will benefit particularly from your service, when and where they can unsubscribe or cancel the subscription.
So, you should include this information while building your website and be ready to deliver it through your customer support teams. This tip will smoothen your way towards customer success.
Keep up with customer data and feedback
Another great tip to ensure your customers are satisfied when using your products and services is actually to work on the customer data and feedback.
Obviously, you should first gather the feedback. For that, you can:
- Create polls
- Conduct surveys
- Gather reviews on review websites
- Check for social media reviews
- File customer feedback
Make sure you don’t lose any piece of data, as even minor details matter for customer success. In the meantime, make sure to understand your customer’s preferred methods for payments. For example, with the rise of technology and digital coins, many people and businesses have acquired a crypto portfolio tracker to keep up with the value of their currencies in real-time.
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To get the best outcome of your collected data and feedback from customers, doing customer analytics will take you closer to customer success.
By analyzing your customers’ feedback, reviews, and other data, you will see the full image of your customers’ actual experience. You will learn what got them to continue their subscription or cancel it. In addition, you will gain knowledge on what you will need to work on more for better results.
So, accept this tip as your customers help you improve to help them improve their customer experience.
Build a supportive customer success team
Having customer success would not be possible without a customer success team. The SaaS companies that hire caring and friendly teammates benefit the most.
Here are some characteristics for the best customer success team:
- Caring
- Friendly
- Responsible
- Showing empathy
- Valuing customers’ time and energy
- Problem-solving
When you start building a customer success team for your SaaS company, make sure you hire employees based on their professionalism and personal features.
It is essential that your customer success team cares about your customers and does everything within their powers or even beyond it to help customers have successful experiences with your products or services.
It is also significant to value the time and the nerves of your customer. Your team should know how to handle different situations without making them worse. Most importantly, being responsible and problem-solving will help you have favorable customer feedback and words of gratitude directed towards your customer success team.
Building the best customer success team is an investment, and it is justified, and the return on it is your loyal customers bringing lifetime value.
Conclusion
Customer success plays a significant role in the overall success of your brand and its services. Various factors affect the customer success of your SaaS products, including key roles, methods, and strategies.
The best customer success team and proper managerial level, like CCO, managers of customer experience and implementation guarantee your customer success.
Making your customers a top priority and smooth customer onboarding is another factor positively affecting customer success. Make sure you also correctly analyze customer feedback and data to contribute to the list of the benefits from customer success.
Among the latter, having loyal customers, improving your services and products, adjusting customer support techniques may seem the least.
Customer success may require a lot of effects, but the return on this investment is justified, as your loyal customers guarantee the successful future of your company.
