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Are you new to the term “customer success” or trying to have further knowledge about it for your SaaS company? We are here to help you learn the basic practices to scale customer success at your business.
It is a world of unnumerous options. Have you ever thought about how many suntan cream brands exist in a marketplace? Yes, too much. So, changing the decision of a customer what to buy is not a very big struggle. Unless the customer is willing to be a loyal one for a particular brand.
How can you turn your prospect to be a long-term customer? Whatever you sell, a service or a product, the answer is hidden in the customer success process.
What is Customer Success?
The success of every SaaS business is assuredly related to its capability of retaining customers and creating recurring revenue.
Customer success is the business methodology of ensuring customers to reach their desired outcomes through interactions with your company while using your product. Being proactive is the key factor to manage customers successfully which means acting in anticipation of future problems, needs, or changes. Briefly, the objective of customer success is to make the customer as successful as possible.
It has to be emphasized that a business’s success undoubtedly relies on customers’ success. The more your customers fail using your product, the more churn rate there will be.
Why Does a SaaS Business Need a Customer Success Strategy?
Opposite of the traditional approach, sales and marketing are not the only two levers of growth to increase revenues. A strategy that ignores customers and their success probably will fail. Let me explain why customer success is the emerging third growth engine in business following sales and marketing.
Spending a considerable effort on customers and their success with your product will give your business a big superiority to your competitors in terms of user activation and retention rate. Additionally, it creates a word-of-mouth thanks to customer referrals.
Here is a quote from the world-famous expert Lincoln Murphy to sum up the importance of customer success:
“Customer’s desired outcome” is the key phrase for especially a SaaS business. Don’t ignore your customers and you will eventually get what you aim by allowing what your customers aim to get. It will apparently be a win-win situation.
3 Main Roles of Customer Success in a SaaS
1. Onboarding
The main aim of user onboarding is to help your users understand the principal function of your product. It gives a good perception of what your product is good for, what a user can do here and, how a user can do it. It allows you to see your product from customers’ perception.
2. Gathering Customer Feedback
Gathering feedback from customers is figuratively engaging them in a dialog with your product. It is crucial to evaluate how your product meets the customers’ needs and whether there is an area that needs to be improved.
3. Churn Management
The rate of a service’s subscribers who deactivate their accounts or stop using the service for some particular reason within a time period is called churn rate, one of the most important metrics for a SaaS company.
Building a well-planned customer success strategy ensures that more customers are retained and fewer are lost. The more you improve the customer lifecycle, the longer term customer value you own.
Who is Responsible for Customer Success?
Beyond one person’s or a team’s specific job, customer success is rather a vision of the entire business. From the top employee of a company to freelance interns, customer success is a practice that needs to be specifically applied by every employee of a company. Hence, every worker needs to be enthusiastic to claim their role in helping customers achieve the desired outcome.
For growing companies that have many employees, a customer success team managed by the customer success manager can handle the key role in the process.
For startups that have only a few founders, being the customer success manager is everyone’s secondary job. They should learn from the best practices, talk to their users and guide them to success.
Before finishing our guide, let me also give you a short job description of a customer success manager:
Customer Succes Manager Job Description
The main tasks of customer success managers can differentiate among companies but common responsibilities are:
- Determining the objectives which you and your customers will be working on.
- Guiding customers to receive value by managing onboarding.
- Creating additional value by encouraging further feature adoption.
- Generating revenue indirectly through renewals, upsells, and expansions.
- Gathering and analyzing the customer feedback and cooperating with teams to respond to customer needs in a proactive way.
