As a SaaS business, you can either focus on acquiring new customers or retaining existing ones. You should know that retaining more customers can increase profitability between 25% and 95%, so that tells you where you should direct your energies.
Managing your existing customers is necessary to improve business operations and for that you need the appropriate customer success software. If you want to take your customer success to the next level and ensure that customers are achieving value with your product, you need to adopt the right tools to empower your customer success team.
Customer success software is critical for SaaS businesses (especially B2B) because they operate on the subscription model. This means you need to be constantly aware of those customers who are at risk of churn and take steps to prevent them from leaving.
What is Customer Success Software?
Customer success software helps your B2B SaaS business to retain and expand customers. It’s aimed at businesses that want to nurture their existing customers and increase revenue.
At its core, customer success software gives your customer success managers (CSMs) a 360-degree view of your customers. It has the ability to analyze your customers’ behavior and engagement, and translate this into an insightful health score that offers a prediction of churn. You can track key customer success metrics automatically such as NPS and CSAT.
One feature of the best customer success software is the capability to integrate with all your other customer software such as billing and CRM. Most SaaS businesses use multiple platforms to manage their customers and you can bring all your data together in a single dashboard view.
Your customer success tool will help you identify those customers who have not seen value from your software yet, and allow you to track customers who need help by creating alerts and notifications for your CSMs to take action. Actionable insights enable you to improve adoption of your product and drive growth.
The right customer success software enables you to enhance the customer onboarding process through automations as well as optimize the customer journey. You’ll be able to ensure customers are successful and make your business thrive.
Why do I Need Customer Success Software for Saas Performance?
1. Makes it possible to proactively reach out to customers
In contrast to customer support, which is a reactive function, customer success teams are tasked with the responsibility of reaching out to customers who might need help. This type of communication is proactive because CSMs don’t wait for customers to send a distress signal before they offer their services.
Customer success software assists with this type of communication by giving you a customer health score and data relating to product usage. CSMs finally have the insights that tell them when is the best time to speak to a customer.
Instead of sending them vague, generalized messaging that doesn’t really hit home, you can mention that you’ve noticed that they haven’t taken advantage of a particular feature. You can send them a targeted message with a tutorial that helps them get the most out of your software.
2. Reduces customer churn significantly
The big advantage of customer success software is helping your team to reduce churn. Some level of churn is inevitable, as companies no longer have a need for your services or it turns out that there isn’t a good product fit. Preventable churn occurs when customer’s card details expire or they fail to be properly onboarded to your software.
Customer success software helps you prevent this kind of churn by alerting your CSMs when customers aren’t moving through the stages of the customer journey and they have gotten stuck somewhere along the way. Your software can automate actions that are designed to recover lost customers or your CSMs can reach out manually.
If you don’t intervene with customers who are unhappy then you risk losing them altogether. Looking at your churn data can tell you where your product is causing the most problems for customers and then you can take steps to eliminate the bottleneck.
3. Offers in-depth reporting and tracking
Segmenting customers and tailoring customized reports is a crucial benefit of customer success software. CSMs can view at a glance important KPIs like customers by journey stages or customers by industry.
The platform will typically integrate with financial systems like Chargebee and usage tracking softwares like Segment to bring in all the data that you would need to understand the health of the customer in one simple view. The advantage of customer success software is not that it does everything, but integrates with other products that fulfill vital functions.
You can quickly see whether credit cards are expiring and identify when there is a reduction in active users, with all the information together in one place. It’s no longer necessary to switch between more than one app and or gather data from different sources into a spreadsheet.
4. Identifies opportunities to cross-sell and upsell
As well as tracking and preventing the risk of churn, customer success software also provides you with insight into upsell and cross-sell opportunities. It can alert your CSMs to when customers are reaching the end of their free trial with your software and increase your trial to paid conversion rate.
Your customer success software will also tell you when customers have fully implemented your solution and are taking advantage of all the features you have to offer. These customers are ripe for an upsell to one of your higher-paid plans.
It tracks customers through the customer journey from onboarding to adoption, to renewal and upsell, letting you add tasks, activities and milestones. Never miss an opportunity again for cross-sells and upsells to happy and satisfied customers.
5. Enhances customer onboarding
Churn is most likely to happen early on in the customer lifecycle when customers don’t understand how to use your product and fail to find value in it. 63% of customers think that onboarding is key to deciding to subscribe to a product. That’s why a vital benefit of customer success software results in improvements to the customer onboarding process.
Using customer success software, you can define the onboarding process as it fits in with your business and assign tasks to particular CSMs and customers, which will increase the likelihood that the onboarding phase is as smooth as possible.
This is where you’ll especially want to keep of customer health score and monitor the plays, tasks and milestones that tell you when a customer has become stuck. You’ll be able to spur your CSMs into action, allowing them to understand where the bottlenecks are and propel customers forward on their journey.
6. Streamlines workflows for CSMs
With customer success software, your CSMs have access to their own personal dashboards. In the dashboard, they can discover all the information needed to fulfill their daily activities and meet their goals, such as upcoming tasks, calendar, emails from their customers and support tickets.
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When CSMs don’t have to switch between multiple third-party softwares to manage their activities, their work is streamlined and they can achieve more in less time. The right customer success software will provide you with a broad overview of every customer so that CSMs have necessary context each time they interact with an individual.
CSMs understand exactly what they have to do when your business uses plays to automate your customer success processes, in the course of which tasks are automatically created for CSMs. These automated tasks, along with tasks that are manually created by the CSMs, are all available in one place in the workspace so your team always knows what they have to do.
7. Enables you to manage high volumes of customers
Without customer success software, your CSMs have to manually track and interact with each individual customer. This is time-consuming, and totally unnecessary when you realize there is software available that can automate many customer actions with plays and automations.
Many parts of your customer success process can be automated so that CSMs don’t have to manually perform many tasks. You can create tasks and meetings, and send personalized emails at scale so that every customer feels important.
In customer success software, plays enable CSMs to define milestones, activities and tasks that will implement your Customer Success processes. You can create plays for various processes like onboarding, renewal, low health score revival, and more.This makes it much easier for them to keep track of their high-priority tasks and intervene with customers at the right time.
Wrapping Up
Even if you’re a small customer success team, you can’t get along without specialized software to enhance your processes. You can truly benefit from low touch automations, even if you are a team with only three members. Your growth will be restricted if you don’t invest in powerful customer success software that allows you to automate many tasks and manage high volumes of customers.
Software like Churn360 will enable you to achieve all these benefits and more with a system that has been specially developed to cater to B2B SaaS companies. You can take your customer success team to a more professional level and support a team that can proactively reach out to customers.
