How to Improve Customer Retention for SaaS Companies
A vast majority of companies spend most of their money on generating new leads and spreading their brand awareness.
Millions of dollars are invested in comprehensive marketing campaigns, SEO, social media strategies, and more. While all these are crucial for attracting new customers, they won’t help you retain them.
But, why are we talking about retention? Well, here’s something that might interest you -
Just a 5% boost in your customer retention rates can increase your profits by 25% to 95%!
So, it’s evident that retaining clients is just as important as generating new ones, if not even more so.
With this in mind, improving customer retention as a SaaS company is pretty unique. You need to approach this task with careful thought and consideration. Take a look at the following customer retention techniques.
Meet Your Customers’ Expectations
It takes a lot of effort to get a potential customer to notice you, take an interest in your brand, consider your offer, and sign up for your services.
There are many points in this funnel where your prospect can step away from their purchase and fail to convert.
So, if you’ve successfully converted your lead into a buying customer and they churn soon after that, it’s likely that your software hasn’t met their expectations.
This happens when your product doesn’t match the promises made by your marketing.
To prevent it from happening, it’s crucial that you’re transparent and clear in your message to your potential customers. Do not advertise misleading information and avoid ambiguity at all costs.
Do your best to be clear and concise and explain what you are offering thoroughly, in a language that everyone can understand.
Of course, you can use flashy words and images — it is advertising after all — but the point is not to lie. False advertising is discovered fast, and the word about it spreads even faster nowadays.
Also, under-delivering is never a good business plan, and it’s often the cause of poor customer retention rates.
Consistently under-delivering will cost you your current customers, your new ones, and it will harm your reputation — something that’s notoriously difficult to establish and maintain.
“Focus more on their work, and less on managing things so that they can deliver work that meets client expectations. Switch to ProofHub.”
Reaffirm the Product Value
Your new customers have signed up for your services because they believe you have something of value to offer them. Reaffirm this belief as soon as you’ve converted your lead.
Examine your value proposition, see what message you’ve sent with your marketing campaign and landing pages, and ensure that the users receive what was promised.
Your value proposition should be clear and concise, informing your customer of precisely what they’re getting from you and what results they should expect.
And don’t just reaffirm the product value to your newest customers. On occasion, remind your old ones of what they’re getting from you to inspire loyalty and improve customer lifetime value.
Make it clear to everyone why working with your company is the best choice they could’ve made. Dive deeper into your customers’ problems, and explain thoroughly how your products and services solve them.
One of the best ways to do just that is through case studies.
Insightful case studies on your longest customers can work wonders in more ways than one — just make sure that you get consent from the subject of your case study!
They’ll help to reaffirm your company’s credibility. They’ll help your new and old customers understand how your SaaS company works and what goes on behind the curtains.
Case studies will emphasize your value, showcase your strongest points, and help inspire trust and confidence among even the most skeptical of your customers.
They’re excellent tools to use in your marketing campaign and a must for any SaaS company.
Perfect the Customer Onboarding Process
The customer onboarding process needs to be as smooth and straightforward as possible, even if the services you offer are exceptionally complex.
According to statistics, companies will lose 75% of their new users within the first week. If you want to avoid this staggering number, you’ll perfect your onboarding process.
Keep your new clients informed about your product and services. Offer instruction manuals, tutorials, and informational guides.
But don’t just give them a 1,000-page book. Everything needs to be broken down into chunks of information that are easy to digest.
Step-by-step guides are incredibly useful here. They can effectively disseminate information and make everything much easier to understand.
But remember to treat every guide and tutorial the same way you would any other type of content in your marketing campaign.
You don’t want to present your customers with blocks of text that are bland and boring — no one would pay attention to them.
So, include visual content. Explainer videos, images, even GIFs, can be immensely valuable. They break up the text nicely, engage your audiences, and offer clearer instructions.
You’ll also want to focus on user-friendly design to optimize the entire onboarding process and make it seamless.
Have a responsive design and ensure that all your content is clear and legible across devices. Improve your site’s and app’s loading speed, get rid of any glitches, and have every tool and actionable button operational.
Drive Engagement
Keeping your customers engaged is the best way to nurture your relationship with them and inspire brand loyalty.
Your interactions with the customers don’t stop once they’ve paid for your services, quite the contrary. That’s when the conversation really starts.
To drive engagement, you can do something as simple as sending automated emails once a certain action’s been performed.
Let’s say your new customer has successfully set up their first project with your project management tool. Send a “congratulations” email and tell them what else they can do next, or offer a few tips for better task completion.
Put your social media accounts to work and post engaging content to start conversations with your new and old customers.
Create a quiz on Facebook, for example, that’s interactive, fun, and even insightful. Something along the lines of “What type of project manager are you?” can be lighthearted and educational to your audiences, getting them to interact with your company in a completely new way.
Post some informational blogs relevant to your niche, host live Q&A sessions on Twitter or Instagram, make use of stories on Facebook to give your customers a glimpse of what’s going on behind the scenes.
There are many ways to get your customers engaged. Get creative and make use of tools like social media that are readily available to anyone.
Listen to Customer Feedback
As a user gets acquainted with your software or services, they’ll learn what they like about them and what they don’t like as much.
If you want to ensure that their experience is mostly positive, you’ll need to ask for feedback and, of course, act on it.
You can use a simple quiz builder to assess your customers’ experience or create a short survey. If you create a quiz, make it engaging and interactive by including GIFs, pictures, and short videos.
Once you’ve received the feedback, see what you can do to improve the user experience. Fix glitches, improve performance, and offer frequent upgrades.
Provide your customers with plenty of opportunities to give feedback directly to you. Otherwise, you’ll only see it in the form of negative reviews and complaints.
Have a readily available survey or form they can easily find and complete, and make sure a support team is always online to help with questions or concerns.
You’ll also want to constantly monitor your online reputation. Your current and former customers might be mentioning your company anywhere on the internet, offering you unique insights and feedback without you even realizing it.
Check forums and discussion groups where your company’s mentioned, see what you can learn from them, and act on the insights you receive from them.
“Switch to ProofHub and get one place to plan, collaborate, organize and deliver your projects, and end all the chaos.”
Ensure Superior Customer Service
Offering excellent customer service is of utmost importance for a SaaS company. Your customer support team needs to be friendly, knowledgeable, responsive, and available 24/7.
Over 51% of customers will stop doing business with a company after a single negative experience. And not to mention that they’ll be much more likely to share a bad experience than a good one with others, damaging your reputation and costing you more customers.
So, focus your efforts on educating your sales reps and perfecting their skills.
Again, you can use a quiz builder to create a quiz, test their current abilities, and then develop training that will close any potential knowledge gap.
With an excellent support team, even the grumpiest of customers can be handled with ease.
As a second part of the equation, you’ll want to enable all your customers to reach you quickly and easily by providing them with several contact options.
Offer live chat services directly on your website, have a quick response time on all the emails you receive, answer questions in all your messaging apps, and respond to all comments on social media.
All these make up the recipe for superior customer service.
Build a Support Community
Although perfecting your customer service is a must, you need to be aware that a vast majority of customers will first try to find a solution to their problems alone.
They’ll contact your representatives only after they’ve failed to find the information they were looking for by themselves.
To make it easier for your customers to solve their problems alone, you’ll need to provide them with the tools and information necessary for that.
That means creating detailed FAQ pages, uploading educational blog posts, creating forums and discussion pages, tutorials, guides, and more.
Your customers will make a support community by themselves if they need to. But it’d be much easier for all the parties involved if you provided them with space where they can hold discussions and help one another without your involvement.
So, it’s in your best interest to create a forum page on your site where your customers can post questions and answer them without needing to contact you.
Of course, you’ll need to keep an eye on the forum and provide support if needed. But mostly allow your customers to have discussions between themselves.
Create a Valuable Reward Program
You don’t want to neglect your oldest customers when you’re focusing on keeping your newest ones loyal.
To establish long-lasting, fruitful relationships with them, you might want to consider offering valuable reward programs.
That can mean anything from significant discounts for renewing their subscriptions to free additional services.
You can even make lucrative referral programs that will offer rewards to your existing customers when they bring you a new client — it’s a win-win situation.
For a more personalized approach, you can make use of all the client data you’ve gathered to offer gifts and rewards on their birthdays or other significant dates.
Create Exit Surveys
Since you cannot hope to keep all of your customers loyal forever, you can at least learn something from those who are churning.
Create informative exit surveys for those who are canceling their subscriptions. Then, see why they’re leaving and whether there’s anything you can do to ensure others don’t leave for the same reasons.
Keep updating your services and policies based on the information you receive from these surveys, and see your customer retention rates start to increase.
Just remember to keep your surveys short and sweet. If it takes your customers half an hour to complete a survey, and if it makes them feel guilty for leaving you, no one would want to partake in it.
Final Thoughts
Improving customer retention rates proves to be more profitable than continually acquiring new ones.
As a SaaS company, you need to ensure you’re doing everything in your power to keep your customers loyal. That includes:
- Meeting your customers’ expectations;
- Reaffirming your product value;
- Perfecting the onboarding process;
- Driving engagement;
- Listening to customer feedback;
- Ensuring superior customer service;
- Building a support community;
- Creating valuable reward programs;
- Creating detailed exit surveys;
It takes more effort to retain old customers than acquire new ones, but it’s worth it in the end.
Author Bio
Angela White is an ed-tech enthusiast with a passion for writing for the consumer market in the areas of product research and marketing using quizzes and surveys. Having a knack for writing and an editorial mindset, she is an expert researcher at a brand that’s known for creating delightfully smart tools such as ProProfs Quiz Maker.
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