Wat is SaaS-klantensucces?

In the SaaS industry, customer success refers to proactively helping your clients gebruiken 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.

The goal of customer success is to reduce churn; if 50 out of 1,000 customers leave in one month, the churn rate would be 5%. Customer success does not only exist in SaaS; a study conducted in 2023 proves otherwise.

Customer support is reactive: it resolves technical issues and provides answers once customers raise them.

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

While both are essential, customer success is more focused on the bigger picture in ensuring that your product remains relevant to the client.

Customer Success Teams, whose klantensuccesmanager (CSM) is there to maintain the client relationship, play multiple roles, including:

• Onboarding: Ze begeleiden de overstap van nieuwe klanten naar een product of dienst.
• Adoptie: They ensure the product is integrated into customers’ day-to-day tech stack.
• klantenbinding: Ze richten zich op de gebruikerservaring en pakken verschillende gebieden aan die daarop van invloed kunnen zijn.
• Uitbreiding: Ze identificeren kansen om extra functies of diensten te verkopen aan bestaande klanten.
• Pleitbezorging: Through ongoing assistance, they turn satisfied clients into advocates who recommend the product and build a solid reputation.

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

• Door een kennisbank te delen: Beide teams moeten een grote database delen met klantinformatie en inzichten. Dit helpt beide teams om alles te weten over elke klant, inclusief hun verleden, wat ze leuk vinden en hun problemen.
• Duidelijke communicatiekanalen: Both teams should establish effective communication channels, including a toegewijde community. Dit helpt bij het waarborgen van teamwork en het voldoen aan de eisen van de klant.
• Gemeenschappelijke doelen: Both teams should align their goals to focus on the overarching objective of enhancing the customer experience. To determine whether the teams are doing well, they can use numbers like how many customers like the product, how many stay, or how much they spend over their lifetime.

Customer success is measured with metrics such as these:

• 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 at the start of February, 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 recommend 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): Deze methode berekent hoeveel geld een klant in totaal besteedt bij je bedrijf gedurende de tijd dat ze klant zijn. Bijvoorbeeld, als klanten drie jaar lang maandelijks $100 uitgeven, dan is hun CLV $3600.
• Adoptiegraad van producten: 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 measure 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.
• Customer health: A score that is measured by the analysis of data such as relationship performance, product usage, and value generated, to help in managing B2B relationships (Hochstein et al., 2023).