As a SaaS provider, you need steady revenue sources to achieve success and take it to the next level. To do this, you will need loyal customers. With time, they are likely to become your ardent evangelists. However, retaining such loyal customers will mean you have to undertake more than basic measures to ensure they remain happy and satisfied. Hence, providing great services or products is not enough.
You need to create viable customer retention strategies to develop a favorable economic environment. This should compel current customers to come back repeatedly. This is vital for all SaaS sellers. With multi-year SaaS contracts and SaaS tools adding new services and features, companies should make it a priority to retain customers. This will help drive consistent revenue.
Top Tips for SaaS Providers to Retain Customer Loyalty
1. Provide a ‘Wow’ experience:
99% of companies are reported to use at least one SaaS provider. It ranges from purpose-built, specific cloud applications to comprehensive analytics services to CMS tools. Your customer should be offered that ‘wow’ experience. It reflects your service quality and clarity while offering new clients a solid start during the onboarding phase. Knowledge bases and tutorials can help them make the correct decisions. They also get to understand your SaaS solutions’ key benefits and derive value.
2. Define clear expectations.
Setting expectations is a vital aspect that you need to establish as one of the most popular SaaS providers. Make it clear what your customers should expect from your business and how they desire to get it delivered. They should also know when to expect responses like product inquiries or service tickets. SaaS selling involves an SLA (service-level agreement) outlining customer and provider responsibilities. It helps in customer retention.
3. Provide connected upsells:
Often, SaaS product development and offerings are popular for their range of potential add-ons. This includes additional software features, enhanced compute capacity, and more storage space. Thus, connecting with various other cloud-based services is easy.
Such upsells ensure retained customers spend more when connected to what companies use. Perhaps a company could be leveraging your solution to manage complex computing processes. Deals can be offered on data storage. This upsell will lack value if the client retains all data in-house.
4. Contextualize the offering:
Find out where your SaaS offering falls. Also, identify your target audience as well as how your solution can help your clients with something that your competitors fail at. Provide context about you and your offerings. This helps sidestep comparisons made with other SaaS providers not operating in similar market spaces. Generate a simple but highly effective contextual value proposition. Communicate precisely what you can and are, not what you are unable to!
5. Maintain the current product:
Software needs to change with evolving business needs and cloud technologies to ensure a viable economic environment. SaaS products developed and offered should be current. Customers should be promptly informed about the changes. This demonstrates your commitment to deploying the latest functions and features. You can also learn about potential service interruptions and downtime, thus allowing you to be better prepared.
6. Communication schedule:
Once the customer is on board and has been a client for several months or years, you can focus more on acquisition. More time can be spent chasing new leads instead of focusing on current clients. However, this should not appear as though you have their money and are no longer interested in their needs. Develop a communication schedule that allows regular interaction with customers.
7. Go beyond:
A single bad experience prompts existing customers to switch to other companies offering similar products. Hence, businesses tend to lose $136 billion annually, something that can be avoided. Quality product development, adequate service, addressing pain points, or tracking down issues will be vital to ensuring satisfied clients.
Developing customer loyalty is of utmost importance to ensuring the success of your business. The journey begins with product creation, implementation, support, upgrade, and maintenance.
