Knowing how to improve customer satisfaction in SaaS will help you stand out and increase customer loyalty – which is a must for growth.
Collecting customer feedback and data can help you determine what works well with your products and how to boost customer satisfaction.
In this article, I’ve put together this thorough list of tips to improve your customer satisfaction levels and boost loyalty.
What is customer satisfaction?
Customer satisfaction is a concept that helps you understand how happy your customers are with your product or service.
It is measured by understanding how your customers feel about your brand by collecting customer feedback through different surveys. You can use satisfaction metrics such as NPS (Net Promoter Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), or CES (Customer Effort Score) to know how your customers feel.
Why is customer satisfaction important in SaaS
Let’s look at why SaaS businesses should take customer satisfaction seriously:
It increases customer lifetime value
The Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) measures the projected revenue a customer will generate during their lifetime in your company. The greater the lifetime value of your customers, the more income you will generate.
Having exceptional customer service increases your chances of keeping your customers and turning them into long-term clients, increasing the CLV metric. Without great customer service, your client can choose a competitor or tell others about their bad experience, which impacts customer lifetime value.
It increases expansion revenue
When your customers are happy with your product/services, it’s easier to upsell, cross-sell or offer add-ons. Which, in turn, increases the lifetime value of your customers.
It improves retention
According to Zendesk, 82% of customers will stop doing business with a company because of bad customer service.
Having subpar service isn’t worth it because the cost of retaining an existing customer is 5x lower than acquiring a new one. So improving your customer service alone can help you retain more customers and build customer loyalty.
Read more: Customer Satisfaction’s Effect on Customer Retention
Which begs the question, how do you improve customer satisfaction in SaaS?
How to Measure Customer Satisfaction
The way to measure customer satisfaction is through sending out a survey that asks customers to rate their Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). It’s measured by asking customers “How satisfied are you with the service you received today?” or something similar and prompting them to rate their experience on a scale of 1 to 5. 1 is very unsatisfied and 5 is very satisfied.
When you have all of your scores, you add the total of the responses you received and divide it by the total number of respondents. For example, 250 divided by 50 is a satisfaction score of 5 – great work!
Customer satisfaction surveys often include a free text box where customers can include extra information about why they have chosen their particular score. This can be a great way to gather feedback for how your business could improve in the future. 80% of businesses use Customer Satisfaction Score to analyze customer experience and make it better.
Another way to measure customer satisfaction is through a Net Promoter Score survey (NPS), which asks customers: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?”. Net Promoter Score classifies your customers as either a Detractor (1-6), Passive (7-8), or Promoter (9-10), based on scoring out of 10.
You are then scored on a scale of between -100 to 100. NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. For example, 60% (Promoters) – 20% (Detractors) equals an NPS score of 40. Nice job!
A final way to gather customer satisfaction results is to send out a Customer Effort Score (CES) survey. It measures how much effort a customer has to go through to complete a transaction with your business. It’s conducted by asking a question: “[Company] made it easy to handle my issue”. The customer then gives a score rated between 1 to 7
8 ways to improve customer satisfaction in SaaS
In this section, I’ll be sharing with you 8 ways you can improve customer satisfaction in your SaaS business. Let’s jump right in.
Collect customer feedback with multiple satisfaction surveys
The journey to improving customer satisfaction starts with understanding your customers, and what better way to know your customers than taking feedback and collecting data from the feedback?
Here’s the kind of data I’m talking about:
- Customer preferences
- Issues with your product or service
- Friction in customer experience
- Demographic and psychographic data
- Website and product behavior data
Each data set will provide unique insights on ways to increase customer satisfaction.
There are different types of surveys you can use to collect feedback from customers at specific points in the customer journey
NPS Surveys
NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures customer loyalty. Use NPS surveys to gain insights into your user onboarding and the value your users get from your product.
Always include a follow-up question in your NPS survey and collect qualitative data. The qualitative data will provide insights into what makes your users happy or unhappy.
CSAT Surveys
CSAT surveys measure your customers’ satisfaction levels. Use CSAT surveys to collect feedback after an in-app experience or team interaction. If your customer just spoke to one of your customer representatives, you can use the CSAT survey to know if they found the interaction helpful or not.
In addition, if a user’s engagement with a product changes based on their journey, use CSAT surveys at different milestones throughout the journey to track progress.
CES Surveys
CES surveys measure how much effort a user spent performing a specific task.
The survey typically asks, “on a scale of ‘easy’ to ‘difficult,’ how easy was it to interact with (your product name)?”
The CES insight into your customer experience – if your product is difficult to use, it’s not user-friendly and produces a poor customer experience.
Act and improve on products based on customer feedback
Here are some ways to use the gathered data from your customer feedback to improve your products and customer experience:
Reduce time to value with in-app checklists
Use in-app checklists to move customers from one milestone to another and reduce time to value.
You can use checklists in the onboarding process to guide your customers to the activation point where they get their Aha! Moment.
You can also create checklists for multiple points in the customer journey in which you want to direct the customer.
Add in-app product guides and tooltips
Suppose your customer is trying to find what a specific feature in your product does, and they don’t have the time to contact customer support or read through an extensive knowledge base. How can you give them the information without wasting their time?
Use in-app product guides and tooltips – one of the best ways to share information with your customers contextually.
They provide additional information about a specific feature, label, or setting without taking your customers’ time.
With the data you gathered from the customer survey, you can identify where people struggle with your products and add tooltips to such strategic positions. You can also trigger tooltips automatically on specific settings when users access the product for the first time. It can help with the product’s findability or discoverability for new users.
Optimize user onboarding
A poor onboarding process can kill your product before it even has a chance to provide value. If your onboarding is terrible, your users will most likely find the experience unsatisfying and move to your competitors.
Your customer onboarding flow should direct users to the Aha! Moment as quickly as possible. The faster you can reduce the friction between signup and the Aha! Moment, the greater the user satisfaction.
One of the best ways to reduce friction in the onboarding process is to use an in-app checklist. The checklist should contain key tasks users must perform to reach the Aha! Moment. Each task on the checklist should be illustrated with tooltips so the users can fully understand what they need to do.
Segment your users to increase product adoption
Through segmentation, you can group your users into different categories based on specific attributes, including how much they use your product or service, how they think, and what they prefer. When you unlock these insights, you can ultimately keep your users happier.
For example, let’s say you’ve segmented your users by product usage; you can see which users use your product the most and the least.
From there, you can do more research to identify ‘why’ specific segments are not using your products, then take action to win back them.
This might mean running a survey for the lower usage segments to understand why they’re not using the product, then coming up with a strategy to increase product adoption, such as personalized user experience, creating relevant content or training materials for that segment. Doing this will help you boost customer satisfaction and retention.
Pro Tip: Use Churn 360’s customer segmentation solution to segment the customers based on shared characteristics.
Improve in-app user experience
Here’s a scenario. Your user is on your app trying to navigate your product, but your page load is slow and goes blank a few times.
They don’t lose hope and stay on your app, but they are met with irrelevant in-app notifications this time. They dismissed the notifications, but it triggered the survey with the “why did you dismiss this notification?” question, with a large box asking them to give their reasons.
This is frustrating to experience.
If I were that customer, I would delete that app immediately 😉
Every interaction stopping your users from moving forward creates frustration and ultimately leads to customer churn.
You need to create a seamless in-app user experience to ensure customer satisfaction. Here’s how to do it.
First, you need to know how your customers feel about your product. Ask them relevant questions like “how easy was it to navigate this product?” “what can we do to improve?”
Then take the feedback from the survey and use those to improve your product by removing irrelevant steps, unnecessary notifications, and issues to deliver a streamlined experience. You should also invest in improving the technical aspect of your pages, like page load speed and functionality.
Provide multi-channel support
If the customer wants immediate help from you regarding a product-breaking issue, they shouldn’t have to wait for a support ticket. Live chat, social media, and phone support provide more accessible options for resolving queries.
To provide a seamless experience, you need to know which channels your customers use and implement multi-channel support – this is where customer research comes in. Customer research is a set of techniques to identify customer segments, behaviors, and needs – it makes it easy to identify where your customers hang out.
You should have a presence to cover every channel your customers use. These channels include:
- Social media
- Phone
- Live Chat
Train customer success teams
The customer success team is one of the most important teams in your company because they deal directly with customers. You can use all the strategies above, but they won’t work if your customer success team doesn’t know how to handle customers and their requests.
So how do you train your customer success teams to deliver outstanding support? It starts with the hire. Make sure you’re hiring the right people for the role by asking the most relevant interview questions. Also, ensure that you have a long-term training plan to train all your representatives (including yourself) – this includes creating interactive quizzes and courses to train them on different scenarios and collect ideas.
Measure your team’s performance
When looking to measure the success of customer service at your company, you will quickly realize that there are different things to measure. It can be how many customer inquiries your team accommodates daily or how fast your team responds to requests.
So, measuring the success of your team all boils down to one thing – how satisfied each customer is with the support they’re receiving.
To measure customer satisfaction, you must monitor quantitative and qualitative customer experience metrics – average resolution time, resolution rate, sentiment analysis, etc. It’s also equally important to send out customer satisfaction surveys to collect immediate feedback on your performance.
Collect actionable customer feedback with Churn 360’s Survey tool
Customer feedback is crucial to improving your customer satisfaction level – not only does it help you measure customer satisfaction, but it also helps you understand your customers and what is important to them.
Churn 360’s customer satisfaction software allows you to collect customer feedback with customer satisfaction surveys. With the survey solution, you can build multiple types of surveys – CSAT, NPS, and CES – and capture real-time insights.
