Most of us are aware that it costs less to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones. That means that higher customer retention means higher profits for your business. But what makes a customer leave, and what makes a customer want to stay?

One great place to start when it comes to reducing churn is focusing on creating a consistent customer experience. It’s vital to customer retention. To improve customer experience is to start inspiring customer loyalty, and that means higher retention rates. 

When trying to figure out how to best improve customer experience, you should be mindful of the entire customer journey. You should take a holistic approach and address all customer touchpoints. Keep reading for our tips on how to improve customer experience at your SaaS company.

Design a Fluid Onboarding Experience

You know what they say about first impressions. The onboarding process is the first impression that your SaaS company makes on the customer after they’ve paid for your service. It should be fluid, and it should be easy to understand.

Ensure that your onboarding process is designed around your customer’s needs. They should be able to intuitively find the tools they need for whatever they want to accomplish with your product.

A less than ideal onboarding process can negatively impact the SaaS customer experience. A bad impression of your product or your company might drive them to cancel their subscriptions, or simply not renew.

Personalize Your SaaS Customer Experience

First and foremost, your customers want to feel like the people they are, not just another number in your system. If you can personalize your interactions with your customers, you’re well on your way to improving the customer experience.

When you personalize and you’re able to adapt the experience to the particular customer, their overall journey — from onboarding forward — becomes smoother and more streamlined. They start to put their trust in you, and the relationship between your customers and your Customer Success team gets stronger. 

There are a couple of tried-and-true ways to go about personalizing the SaaS customer experience. Use historical data to personalize surveys, so your customers are only answering questions that are directly relevant to their experience. Keep track of past purchases or activity so you can give specific offers to customers who might be the most interested. Show them you care about their experience.

To keep track and make sense of all of this data, it’s helpful to implement a customer segmentation strategy. It’s a great way to break down your customer population into personalized groups, so you know exactly where each of them stand.

Give Your Customers a Voice

Customer surveys and feedback are important to your Customer Success team for a number of reasons. But when it comes to improving customer experience, this is the time to ensure that your customers feel heard.

When building your surveys and feedback forms, it feels easy to just stick to multiple choice and short answer questions. This, however, restricts your customers’ response options. A better way to get a handle on your customers’ experiences — and improve your customers’ experience — is to let them express themselves in their own words.

Including open text boxes in surveys allows your customers to give their feedback without restriction. Now, you might be thinking, “How can we possibly analyze and gather data from such long-form responses?” That’s where a Customer Success software like ChurnZero could come in. We offer a number of integrated survey options, including NPS, CES, CSAT, and custom surveys. All have the option to add in open-ended questions and encourage customers to provide more detail on their experiences.

Improve Customer Experience Through Customer Service

More than anything, your customers’ interactions with your teams are going to drive their customer experience. The SaaS customer experience in particular can depend heavily on customer service and Customer Success teams.  Your customers need to feel confident not only in your product but in the fact that they’ll be able to get the support they need when they need it.

One way to bolster customer service to improve customer experience is to make sure that customers can get in touch with your Customer Success team in a number of different ways. You should be available across several channels, so the customer can always reach you. This could include email, chatbots, phone lines, and in-app support. No matter what channels of communication you use, however, experiences should be consistent across the board.

Simply being attentive to those customers who reach out to your service team can also help improve customer experience and ensure positive outcomes. Communicate wait times if there’s any sort of delay to speak to a team member, and follow up with customers after the fact. Just make sure your customers don’t feel forgotten.

And to stay on top of whether or not your customer service initiatives are making a difference to your SaaS customer experience, you can use customer health scores. You’ll be able to get a grasp on how your customers are feeling, for the sake of both your team and your customers.

Lean On Your Customer-Facing Teams

Not only do your customer-facing teams define the experience for your customers, but they’re also some of the best libraries of knowledge when it comes to how to improve customer experience.

Creating a great customer experience starts with your employees. Members of customer-facing teams should be trained and coached to deliver quality interactions and service. Speed and efficiency are important, but it’s more important that customers walk away from a conversation satisfied that their issue has been properly and competently addressed.

Employees should have comprehensive training in product knowledge as well as continual support in a number of soft skills. When members of your customer-facing teams have detailed product knowledge, they can understand and respond to customer needs faster and manage customer complaints effectively.

Communication skills, or other soft skills like patience and empathy, are also integral to the success of your customer-facing teams. They’ll help your employees ensure that customer interactions stay positive, and it can help strengthen the customer relationship.

Finally, your customer-facing teams should be the first place you go when you want to improve customer experience. They’re on the frontlines and will have some of the most detailed insights. Make it possible for your employees to provide feedback — consider setting up a suggestion box, so feedback can be submitted anonymously — but also make it a priority to take action on those suggestions

Get All the Tools to Optimize the SaaS Customer Experience

Customer experience isn’t just a one-flip switch. Different things can matter to different customers, and it might take some trial and error to improve customer experience overall. If you think you need a bit more support when it comes to gathering and analyzing customer insights, and how to use all that data for a top-notch customer experience, check out our eBook: The Modern Customer Success Playbook for Creating Data-Driven Customer Experiences. It’ll help you understand just how to leverage data-drive strategies to optimize the customer journey and drive customer loyalty.

 

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