Customer success is the strategy that you use to ensure your product is helping your customers alleviate their pain points so that they stick with you for the long run. It’s the key to customer retention and subscription renewals.
We’ll cover the SaaS customer success best practices to improve your retention and renewal rates.
Customer success retention best practices
Let’s look at three best practices for customer success and retention for SaaS companies:
1. Improve onboarding, content, and training
Your customer success strategy for retention should start as soon as you onboard a new user, and the key is understanding what they want. You don’t want to simply sign them up for a contract only to lose them once it’s up—you want your customers to engage with your business for years to come. Better onboarding processes let you gather data about your customers’ expectations upfront.
One of the best customer success strategies is to provide useful content like how-to articles and videos that walk your new users through each aspect of your SaaS product. By becoming part of the customers’ learning experience, you can build a better relationship with them and secure their loyalty.
2. Start upselling and cross-selling
At its core, maintaining a long-term relationship with your customers is the number one customer success retention best practice. Keeping them engaged and subscribed to your service over time means that you need to identify your customers’ pain points not solved by your product and work toward pushing updates, adding new features, or offering additional services that address them.
By providing solutions for all of your customers’ pain points, it shows your commitment to your relationship with them and is one of the best ways to secure customer retention.
3. Implement customer surveys
Asking your customers for their feedback is the first step in finding gaps in your SaaS products. Customer churn often happens not because you’re not solving a problem for them but because the service either isn’t taking care of enough of their pain points or handling them in the way they expected. Design customer exit surveys with both closed and open-ended questions to gain valuable insights into why they’re leaving.
While this feedback may not bring back a customer that cancels their subscription with you, it can help improve your future customer retention.
Customer success renewal best practices
Next, let’s discuss three customer success best practices for SaaS subscription renewals:
1. Optimize your offboarding
Your offboarding practices aren’t just to help customer retention; they’re also about reducing churn and increasing renewal rates. During offboarding, you should show your customers that you care about the experience they had with your company and products and take the time to learn what was of value to them and what was not.
Other than exit surveys, there’s a very important aspect of offboarding—making the process easy. When many SaaS companies think about customer success, they often think about how to encourage their customers to renew at any cost. However, if you make it complicated for them to cancel their subscription, your chances of getting them to renew in the future drop significantly.
2. Find the friction points
Friction points are what cause your customers not to renew their subscription to your service—they describe how and where your product isn’t meeting their needs. More friction points mean more customer churn, which means fewer renewals. There are a few ways to improve your customer success strategies by reducing these friction points:
- Monitor your customer success metrics to find out what’s expected by your customers so that you can continue to meet their needs.
- Have a framework for quality inspection so that you can identify issues before they inconvenience your customers.
- Perform a service gap analysis to determine customer expectations versus what your product delivers to create a better customer experience.
3. Focus on product improvement
Being proactive and finding ways to improve your product is one of the best ways to optimize your customer success initiatives and SaaS renewal rates. Showing your customers that you prioritize continuous improvement to provide a better service is an irreplaceable customer success best practice.
Improving your product means identifying which features tackle the highest amount of your customers’ pain points, analyzing what’s causing the most customer churn, and understanding your customer journey and lifecycle to gain insights into their interests and how they use your product to solve their problems.
Final tips for SaaS customer success renewal & retention
We’ll leave you with some final tips for customer success best practices to improve your retention and renewal rates:
- Focus on retaining the right customers. Your service won’t solve everyone’s problems—focus on the customers that you can impact the most.
- Set realistic onboarding goals. Be honest about what your product delivers—overpromising and under-delivering is a great way to lose customers.
- Prioritize your follow-ups. Follow up after each customer interaction to resolve any potential problem as quickly as possible.
For more best practices to improve your SaaS company’s longevity and profitability, check out more of our insights at VeryCreatives.
