Customer Success is the a Key Revenue Growth Driver for SaaS Companies

Software as a Service (SaaS) is used by companies across industries to lower their costs while increasing operational efficiency. Some of the most popular SaaS products include Salesforce, Office 365, Google Apps, and many other ones as well. While a lot of companies tend to focus on the technical aspects of SaaS, sometimes customer success is shifted to the background even though it is one of the key components of making the product commercially successful. Today we will take a look at how customer success helps SaaS companies drive revenue growth and how it can help you gain and retain customers. 

Customer Support vs. Customer Success

While customer support has a lot in common with customer success, there is one key difference: customer success is about anticipating potential problems and resolving them before the customer experiences any difficulties while customer success is more reactionary to a problem. In other words, if you are aware of potential issues your customers might encounter and provide them with the help they need to prevent those issues from occurring, you are practicing outstanding customer success. In terms of SaaS products, great customer success practices would include demonstrating the value of your product, streamlining the signup process, building relationships with your customers, and many other good practices. By showing your customers that you are dedicated and invested in their success, they will feel a lot more confident and appreciated which will help you increase your conversion rates. 

Why is Customer Success So Important in SaaS?

In the old days, tech companies had a very straightforward revenue model: sell their software to the customers and make a profit. If the customer was experiencing a problem, it was up to them to reach out to the company for assistance. This model worked very successfully until the mid-2000s when cloud computing came and opened the door for SaaS products which depend on customer satisfaction for revenue. For example, Salesforce offers annual subscriptions and heavily relies on customer success for keeping their customers happy so they renew those subscriptions. The same is true with all of the third-party apps on Salesforce’s AppExchange. These are all SaaS companies looking for building a large customer base and retaining all of those customers through quality customer success. 

The good news is that it is easier for SaaS companies to provide outstanding quality success because they collect all kinds of usage statistics which allows them to identify any potential problems. For example, let’s say a customer downloads a product but waits several days before starting to actually use it. This means that maybe the installation process is too complicated or takes too long. This is where your customer success teams need to swoop in and help the customer overcome any issues they are having. 

It is important to note that customer success teams are not reserved for large enterprises. If setting up a customer success team locally would take too many resources, you can outsource such tasks to an offshore service provider. They will be responsible for paying all of the overhead costs such as renting out office space, purchasing equipment, recruiting candidates, and a lot of other expenses. This is a great way to increase your customer satisfaction rates and get a competitive advantage at a fraction of the cost. 

Key Principles of Customer Success

Before you even start assembling a team together, you need to have a clear roadmap in place in terms of how you are going to get to the desired customer success rates. If you are working with a service provider, they will help you identify important customer issues you will need to solve and set up benchmarks to track your progress. Since customer success is a proactive approach, you will need to brainstorm possible questions users might ask you and have some answers ready to go. 

New users will usually require more assistance since they are dealing with a learning curve, so you have to make it really easy for them to understand how to use the product and all of the benefits it offers. Let the customer know that you will always be there to help them with any issues they are having. If you notice a pattern of issues many customers are dealing with, you should share this information with your marketing and sales teams so they can create materials that explain how to overcome the issues and generally be better prepared when speaking with customers. 

Mindy Support Provides Comprehensive Customer Success Services 

During this difficult time, a lot of companies are shrinking their customer success teams to further lower costs. However, as we mentioned above, customer success is one of the key factors that drive revenue. Mindy Support can lower the costs of assembling a customer success team. We will take care of all the aspects of putting together a team from sourcing and recruiting candidates to the quality assurance process. We are one of the largest BPO providers in Eastern Europe with more than 2,000 employees in six locations all over Ukraine. Our size and location allow us to assemble a team for you quickly regardless of the scope of the project. 

Posted by Il’ya Dudkin