Understanding Customer Experience for SaaS

Every company is moving to a customer-centric strategy and focusing on customer experience. It is tough to actually provide the best experience without understanding all the intricacies and details of it. Customer experience is the culmination of every interaction with the customer. In the simplest manner, it is about each customer’s perception of the company. It is based on every interaction of the customer with the brand, messages, employees, and more across every device and platform. For customer experience, there needs to be a shift in what customers think of your brand in totality. Every single aspect of interaction with customers has the ability to shift customer perceptions. There are many ways customers look at the industry. In a study, Adobe found that companies with the best customer engagement strategies enjoyed nearly a 25 percent increase in close rates. This shows the importance of customer experience in sealing fortunes for companies.

And in this debate, the first step is to define customer experience.

Customer experience is the perception of the customer about the company. This is based on all interactions, touchpoints, or engagements with the brand, product, or company. A thing to note here is how touchpoint, interaction, and engagement mean different things. Touchpoint is a single point when the customer comes in contact with the company’s brand or message through any medium. Customer interaction is a two-way communication between the customer and brand. Product Engagement Score on the other hand is commitment to perform an action or deed. Since nearly 52 percent of all internet traffic is from mobile phones, 84 percent of companies who want to be more customer-centric are focused on improving their strategy.

Customer experience for SaaS companies

The thing with SaaS companies is that it involves multiple stakeholders. For SaaS companies, it is necessary to optimise and evaluate the customer experience across the entire customer journey. For SaaS companies, it is necessary to measure across touchpoints, interactions, and engagements.

Touchpoints

• Exposure to any type of advertisement
• Email communication
• Reading blog posts, press releases
• Finding a social media post

Interactions

• Commenting on the company’s social pages
• Visiting the website
• Chatting with the chatbot, employee
• Talking to the customer support

Engagement

• Buying a product or service
• Signing up for a webinar
• Signing up for a trial

For SaaS companies, customer experience can increase revenue by $1 billion. This will improve aspects of customer retention and reduce churn.

Top 3 reasons why SaaS businesses must invest proactively in customer experience

For any SaaS business to improve drastically, they must invest in customer experience. Some of the important reasons to do so include-

• To improve cross selling and up selling opportunities
• To improve customer satisfaction
• To increase the rates of customer retention

Addressing these as pivotal to customer experience can positively impact revenue

5 ways to improve customer journey in SaaS companies

To make the customer experience unique and interactive, there are some things any SaaS business can do. These strategies will give you a competitive advantage over your peers and improve your chances of success.

Use analytics to understand customers better

Every customer who interacts may not be the best fit for the brand. It is necessary to find and attract the right ideal customer. Building buyer personas using customer conversations and behaviour will help greatly. Data from analytics will help build case studies and understand human interactions in the best manner possible. You can use analytics to understand the right feedback and get the right identity. Also, it’s worth having a white label analytics platform at hand to help with user experience and make better decisions.

Choose Chatbots

Chatbots can be an exciting tool when used well. It is a great substitute for human interactions. It makes a lot of difference when there are no customer success agents around. You can use automated conversations to give the right customer information and solve their doubts. These automated chatbots are the first line of defence to clients.

Use account intelligence to drive customer success

For every customer success approach to work, it must be technology-driven. You must build good relationships to give the best for your customers. You can use account intelligence alerts to get the right momentum of customers. With this, it becomes easier to anticipate what they are doing and why. This is a great way SaaS companies can keep their customer success managers aware of what is happening with them.

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Build a strong community to improve retention rates

Having a centred community always helps. Even if you have fully functioning products, sometimes there is less social support. These community members are advocates of your product or service and will vouch for your brand. They will give a tailored solution to customers and this helps improve retention.

Use AI and Machine learning

Machine learning and AI can improve every interaction of your customers. They will get insights from it that matter and improve their overall functioning. You can conduct a sentiment analysis to get insights from customers. This will help you keep track of what your customers are doing and improve your efforts.

A final tip: Make sure you engage well with your customers to boost customer experience. If customers know you are invested in their success, chances of them leaving you are less. They understand the value you offer and work to stick around for the long run. When you approach your customers with a human perspective, chances of them sticking on are more.

Bottom Line

For SaaS companies to flourish and create better customer experiences, they need a holistic customer experience that involves the human touch. This will help them grow at every stage of their customer journey. As per research by Gartner, companies with a good customer experience strategy begin by focusing on customer feedback. Relying on customer experience across multiple channels will help improve interaction and improve communication. Personalisation can help rapidly improve customer engagement and interaction. Customers these days have more power and choice and are open to a lot more options. A good customer experience is all that can help them sail the competition. By making sure that customer experience is smooth, you are driving brand loyalty.