What Is SaaS Customer Success?

In the SaaS industry, customer success refers to assisting your clients in using your software to accomplish their set objectives. This means understanding what they need, offering advice, making sure the product is adopted, and delivering value over prolonged periods of time.

Customer service resolves technical issues and provides answers.

On the other hand, customer success ensures your software users achieve their objectives. This means offering additional instruction to ensure customers make appropriate use of the app. 

Although both are important, customer success looks at the wider picture, making sure that clients will continue using your product.

Customer success teams play multiple roles, including:

• Onboarding: They handle the transition of new customers onto a product or service
• Adoption: They ensure the product is integrated into their day-to-day tech stack.
• Retention: They focus on user experience and address different areas that could have an impact on it.
• Expansion: They identify opportunities to upsell additional features or services to existing customers.
• Advocacy: Through ongoing assistance, they ensure clients continue using the product and build a solid reputation.

To ensure customer support and success, teams must collaborate well together. Here are ways on how to do it:

• By sharing a knowledge base: Both teams should share a big database containing customer information and insights. This helps both teams know everything about each customer, including their past, what they like, and their problems.
• Clear communication channels: Both teams should establish clear communication channels, including a dedicated community. This helps in ensuring teamwork and meeting customer requirements.
• Aligned goals: Both teams should align their goals to focus on the overarching objective of enhancing the customer experience. To determine whether we’re doing well, we can use numbers like how many customers like us, how many stay with us, or how much they spend their whole time with us.

Here are five ways on how you can measure customer success

• Churn rate: This method is about figuring out how many customers stop using a service within a certain time period. Here’s an example: If a software company had 1000 subscribers in January, and 50 of them stopped subscribing by the end of February, the churn rate for February would be 5%.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): This is a method for measuring how likely customers are to talk about your product or service. You ask them if they would recommend it to a friend or colleague, and they rate it from 0 to 10. Based on their score, they’re put into groups: promoters, passives, or detractors. NPS is figured out by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters.
• Customer lifetime value (CLV): This method involves calculating how much money a customer spends with your company over the time they stay. For example, if customers spend $100 monthly for three years, their CLV would be $3600.
• Product adoption rates: This method involves calculating how many customers actually use your product’s main features. For instance, if your software has 1000 people signed up but only 500 use the essential features often, your product adoption rate is 50%.
• Time to value: In this method, you survey how fast customers reach their first goals or start benefiting from your product after they start using it. For example, if a team starts using a project management tool within a week, they can organize their tasks and work well together, then the tool shows its worth in just one week.