In recent years, customer success has become one of the many engagement strategies for businesses. It offered a new way to connect with customers and encourage them to do more business with you. And if yours is a SaaS startup company, you would want to dive into this strategy.
But as it turns out, implementing this strategy in the field can be challenging. You have to overcome various hurdles to make it more effective. Let’s explore how you can do it right through Virtua Solutions’ help and lead your customers to success.
Understanding SaaS Customer Success
In its simplest definition, customer success is the sum of all the methods and strategies that help people achieve their goals with your products. Sounds pretty straightforward, right? However, SaaS adds a new dimension to the formula.
Image from Custify.
In most customer success efforts, there is often only one end goal. Your customer buys your product and you help them use it effectively. But SaaS customer success works a bit differently.
The field uses the recurring revenue model for its business. That means you need to do business with customers continuously to generate revenue. Because of this, customer success becomes integral in every aspect of the buyer journey. That includes the following stages of the customer lifecycle.
- Onboarding and activation: Successful onboarding prepares your customer for using the product and getting value from it.
- Renewal and retention: After the initial use, you need to help customers find more value from your product that suits their continuing needs. That encourages them to stick around for longer.
- Customer advocacy and referral: You want to get your customers sold to the product’s overall value so they would be willing to promote it to others.
Your customer success strategy needs to bring these individual wins together and create a more holistic experience for people. That is what makes the whole work a lot more challenging.
The Benefits Customer Success Offers To Your SaaS Startup Business
With all the work to be done, you might wonder whether launching a SaaS customer success effort is worth it. Here are some of the benefits that your startup company should not overlook.
Reduces customer Churn
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More than any business, customer churn is the enemy of a SaaS company. The larger the number of customers that stop using your products, the slower the company grows. SaaS customer success prevents this by giving them more reasons to continue.
Maximizes Customer Lifetime Value
When doing SaaS, it isn’t just about retaining people longer during the initial run. You would also want to see them return for renewal. Additionally, you want them to consider you as a partner in their growth. That increases their value for your company.
It Opens Second-Order Revenues
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Second-order revenues refer to the revenue made from successful customer referrals. It might also come from your current customers successfully bringing your product to a new market. An effective customer success team can help you land these opportunities more successfully.
Understanding What SaaS Customer Success Looks like
One challenging aspect of customer success for SaaS is that there is no single definition of “success”. Customers use your product for a variety of reasons. With these different reasons also come their different views on success. Understanding what these views are will help you better tailor your customer service strategy to each.
There are many ways you can do this along the entire customer journey. First up, you can ask leads about their goals. You can also run surveys during the onboarding process. Lastly, regular feedback will help you a lot. From there, you can get a good idea of the general measures of success that customers use.
Knowing The Right Metrics
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Once you know what counts as a success for your customers, you also need to know what it would look like for your SaaS startup company. Here, you should choose the right metrics. Some of the crucial ones are the following.
Customer Engagement
One thing to note here is that engagement can also mean differently for organizations. As such, you should have a clear definition of what it will look like in the context of your product. For instance, you might consider engagement to be all about how often customers use your online service.
Retention Rates
With SaaS products, the goal is often longer customer usage. Because of that, retention metrics are vital for measuring customer success. These tell you how much value customers get from your service based on the number of people who stay for longer versus the total number of users you have.
Free-To-Paid Conversions
In some cases, you might initially offer a free version of your service to entice new customers. An increase in the number of people switching from this free version to the fully paid one indicates greater confidence in your product. On the other hand, a low conversion rate might indicate that people are not yet seeing the full potential of your product.
Onboarding Engagement Rates
As mentioned above, onboarding plays a significant role in overall customer success. Thus, higher engagement rates will indicate that your users want to learn more about the product. Look into the number of tutorials they are clicking and which ones people use most. That gives you a clearer picture of their understanding of the product.
How Virtua Solutions Helps Your Startup Company
When launching a SaaS customer success campaign, you will often find yourself having to cover a lot of ground. Each new customer requires your attention throughout their journey. Virtua Solutions is ready to provide you with all the support through our Customer Success team.
Making Customer Success An Early Priority For Your Startup Company
To cement customer success within your startup company, you need to establish it early. However, hiring a customer success manager at this point can be challenging. We give you an alternative route to that through outsourcing.
Our customer success managers have worked with different companies for several years now. And with our experience, we can help you develop your success strategy from the ground up. We will help you implement that strategy in every part of the customer journey.
Effective Onboarding Within Your Reach
We have mentioned several times how onboarding paves the way for successful customer entry into your product. Thus, you would want to put a lot of work into optimizing this stage. We are ready to provide you with all the support you need here.
First up, our customer support agents will serve as your frontline team, handling all the questions that new users might have. We will also help you collect feedback from these engagements.
We then help you ensure that all your onboarding tools are in perfect working order. Our agents can handle the tedious task of updating all your knowledge base content and tutorials in the background. With that, new users can come in knowing that they have all the information they need to use your product successfully.
Bring Success To Customers Of Your SaaS Startup Company
Delivering customer success in SaaS is by no means easy. But with the right partner helping you, you can lead your users to achieve their goals. Virtua Solutions is always ready to help your startup company. Contact us today to know more.