A Customer Success team goes far beyond tracking and solving problems. It is essential to retain and retain.
The relationship between businesses and customers and consumer behavior is changing dramatically.
This happens mainly after the growing use by customers of social networks to position themselves against or in favor of a brand.
In recent years, the number of companies operating under the Software as a Service (SaaS) model has grown. This is a result of changes in the way consumers interact with brands and consume their services.
Globalization, digital transformation, and greater access to the internet have contributed a lot to the creation of more demanding consumers, which leads us to the concept of customer success.
In this article, you will find out how customer success is important for Saas companies to develop better work and productivity to client’s great experience.
What is Customer Success?
Customer Success goes far beyond simple customer service or support. It is a strategic area of the company that has goals and objectives, challenges and an essential condition: proactivity.
The Customer Success area is responsible for ensuring that your customers use your product or service correctly. In addition, they must ensure that customers have a good experience with it.
They must be able to provide full support to customers, but they must also go beyond that.
What is Customer Success in SaaS?
Customer Success is the mindset through which a team or company insanely seeks to ensure that the customer has a positive experience with their product.
The idea that contact with the customer ends in the after-sales period ended in the last decade. The future will be dictated by companies that guarantee the customer’s success. This customer will obtain the expected results when they purchased their product or service.
The first Customer Success initiatives started as a way for SaaS (Software as a Service) companies to fight two big villains in their businesses:
- the cancellation fee;
- the Churn.
While many still see Customer Success only as a way to reduce churn, a mindset that it’s indispensable for many other reasons is going forward.
Performance of the professionals
The implementation of the client’s success strategy involves the performance of a specialized professional to coordinate the project in the company.
This agent, who can be a manager or a Customer Success analyst, is responsible for developing relationships with customers after the sale or contract closing, managing and monitoring the interaction between customer and company.
The main objective of this professional is to ensure the client’s success with the company’s service or product. He needs to act strategically so that the desired results are achieved through the acquired solution.
Thus, some of its functions consist of:
- Qualify the customer through training, mentoring and consulting to use the product or service in the best way;
- Follow up this implementation process to ensure the best conditions;
- Collecting feedbacks in order to improve the relationship between the company and the customer, pointing out the weak points, always seeking to improve processes;
- Develop predictive analytics, anticipating problems and solutions that may affect the customer and, consequently, the company;
- Monitor customer performance metrics to optimize and improve your journey experience;
- Manage a system for Customer Success;
6 KPI Tips for Customer Success in SaaS
Now that you know what customer success is in SaaS, check out some key performance indicator (KPI) tips. They are the most suitable for you to measure and monitor the effectiveness of your practices aimed at customer success.
There are at least six of the most important KPI’s for customer sucess in Saas:
1. Upsell rate
Upsell is when the customer migrates to a version higher than the one they originally contracted. If, for example, a person purchases Dropbox with a 1GB storage limit and then switches to the 20 GB plan, this could be considered an upsell.
Tracking this indicator is important because it shows the consumer’s interest in the service offered and their satisfaction with the brand. After all, if he didn’t like it, he wouldn’t migrate to a higher plane.
2. Cross-sell rate
Cross-sell, or cross-selling, is when the customer buys a product or service that complements what he already has. A company that offers an antivirus system might also try to sell a version to protect the user’s cell phone, for example.
Measuring the cross-sell rate is important to help the customer achieve their goals and drive the company’s average ticket and revenue.
3. Lifetime Value
This KPI shows, on average, how much revenue each customer generates for the company during the entire period of relationship with the brand. The higher the result of this indicator, it means that the customer success strategies are working.
4. Churn Rate
Churn Rate refers to the amount of customers who left your company in a given period.
To calculate this KPI, simply divide the total number of customers who did not renew their subscription to the software by the total number of customers who remained active in a given period. Multiply the result by 100 to get the percentage.
5. Monthly Recurring Revenue
SaaS companies usually operate with recurring payment mode.
In this sense, it is important to measure how much recurring revenue is generated each month to forecast revenue, plan investments and better target customer retention efforts.
6. Customer Effort Score (CES)
The Customer Effort Score is an indicator that shows the effort the customer had to make to solve a problem or use the contracted service. To measure this KPI, a customer survey is conducted on specific topics related to their interaction with the brand.
The respondent must indicate, on a scale of 1 to 5, the degree of effort he had to perform in relation to something specific of the contracted software. Ideally, this average should be as close to 1. Otherwise, adjustments will need to be made to improve the customer experience and success.
Find out what the best practices
More than retaining the consumer, guaranteeing your customer’s success means guaranteeing the success of your own company.
For this, it is necessary to invest not only in the acquisition of new customers, but also in the maintenance of current customers. This way, they will be able to see value in the services offered by your company and understand how you can help them achieve their business goals.
1. Segment your customers
Customer segmentation is one of the best practices in Customer Success. Through it, you can monitor your company’s customers more closely. Also, help them determine a good work model and what actions can be taken to achieve their goals.
With a carefully done segmentation, your Customer Success team will be able to be more efficient in their services. This is because you will be used to dealing with common problems and situations in each segment. In this way, it builds the degree of experience necessary to identify actions.
2. Well-defined processes
There is no point in segmenting your customers to ensure that teams are well aware of the peculiarities of each situation if there are no well-defined processes. After all, they are able to organize and facilitate the management work in any situation.
For this reason, it is important to establish basic procedures, from onboarding. It is the reception of new customers, the customer training process, contract renewals and even new sales.
In this sense, it is necessary to know how to align the customer and sales success teams.
Make it clear that your company has efficient processes that will guarantee the delivery within the expected time. Thus, your client will feel more secure, as he will know that his team advise him in the best way.
3. Monitor all sector results
All actions performed by the Customer Success area must seek a specific result. And then, it is up to the company to define what it will be: obtaining some information from its client, carrying out an action or even achieving the results.
Therefore, it is important that you follow the results of each action. That way you’ll know what went right and needs to be repeated and what didn’t work and needs to be fixed.
In addition, your Customer Success team should be concerned about the churn rate. For that, you need to work to reduce it as much as possible.
And don’t forget to carefully understand the reasons for your customers’ cancellations! These data can help you a lot to further improve your service.
4. Understand the difference between customer success and happiness
The objective of a Customer Success team is to guarantee the achievement of the expected results. This goes far beyond just making the customer happy.
Although, at first, these situations seem to be the same thing, not always what your client wants is what he really needs to get better results.
The focus to achieve customer service success should always be to focus on achieving goals.
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