In 2017, Sujan Patel, a marketer and entrepreneur par excellence, coined the term “customer engagement is the new marketing”.

With the current development in SaaS, this statement couldn’t be more accurate.

During the global pandemic, many fence-sitting companies were forced to lead with empathy and genuinely address customers’ needs, and for a good reason — to help strengthen business-to-customer relationships.

According to a 2021 survey report, nearly 84% of global customer success practitioners and stakeholders say customer success will shift from defense to offense in the next two years.

This means more SaaS businesses will channel their budget toward increasing customer engagement and conversions. They’ll focus on building and maintaining a loyal customer base.

If you’re not initiating significant changes to your customer experience as a SaaS-focused business, this is the right time.

This guide provides tips on measuring customer success and the best ways to increase customer engagement for your SaaS business model.

But first…

Why Does Customer Success Matter More Than Ever?

Most SaaS businesses either focus on the sales or marketing aspect of the business. But how many focus on their customers’ needs?

While every department in a company wants to leave a lasting impression, neglecting the customer success team seems justified as they’re “just an extension of the customer service or support.”

Customer service or support is short-term, and its main aim is customer satisfaction. Conversely, customer success is long-term, proactive, and relationship-focused, and its main aim is to increase customer value.

In both methods, customers need more attention.

The clear distinction between these two means that the market has significantly changed. And power shifted from sellers to buyers.

In short, customers have a (louder) voice. And they’ll find it easier and cheaper to seek an alternative software solution to solve their problem.

That’s the downside of neglecting your customer success team.

The upside is that if you do it well, you might hit your revenue projections or even surpass them. That’s because 86% of customers are willing to spend more for a great customer experience.

Customer success is a growth engine businesses should pay attention to, and nearly 87% of leaders agree with this fact. Remember, your company’s success relies on your customers’ overall success.

So the more value you give your customers, the faster your product grows.

Happy customers can drive new leads through word of mouth. Or better yet, they can write epic reviews of your products, give insightful customer feedback, write positive testimonials, and increase social shares. 

That said, here are customer success tips to improve your engagement rate.

1. Use the Right Customer Success Tools

Thousands of customer success tools sell themselves as the ideal option for online businesses. Capterra, a free online marketplace vendor, has almost 10,000 products listed on its platform.

Source: Capterra

You can have a strong customer success team but if your tool fails to match your goals? You’ll encounter challenges that affect your team’s performance.

So, before searching for “best customer success tools,” consider these factors:

• Integrations: Get a tool that seamlessly integrates with third-party tools and metric integrations and can synchronize all your data to help you work efficiently without jumping from one tool to another.
• Scalability: Look for a tool that supports your business and can scale with you as your needs grow. Many SaaS startups make the mistake of using an enterprise customer service tool. They end up paying more while only a few customers are in their pipeline. 
• User Interface: This cuts across representation and ease of use. You want to work with a Customer Service tool with rich customer data history that’s easy to access. 
• Metrics and Analytics: The ideal tool should assimilate data and develop reports that strengthen your customer success efforts. For example, it should predict future customer growth or signal red flags based on data related to interactions, inquiries, and payments.

2. Communicate More with Customers

Of course, using the right customer success tool isn’t the only step to increasing engagement. Ensure to communicate more with your customers as they interact with your SaaS products throughout the customer journey.

That means regularly checking up on them to see how they’re faring and find out where they need help. Avoid the usual “Hey, how’s everything going?” type of communication. Add value to your customers instead.

A good case in point is to provide short training videos, hints, or product tips on how your customers can best use all your products’ features.

When it comes to communication, Jeff Gardner, Intercom’s director of customer support, says it best:

• Be easy. Make it easy for your customers to use your SaaS products without jumping through multiple hoops.
• Be effective. Know your product well, including its core weaknesses.
• Be authentic. Ensure everyone understands your cultural values and aligns with them for exceptional results. 

Another communication strategy is to offer personalized support to your customers through one-on-one calls. 

This strategy works best if you boast a relatively small customer base or a dedicated customer success team.

If that’s hard to achieve, set up an automated email campaign. Then embed different video tutorials in your campaigns for good measure. It works.

3. Improve Customer Onboarding Process

Customer success begins when a visitor immediately converts into a buyer. And this is the best time to improve your customer onboarding process.

Start by educating your customers. Introduce them to your product by covering all the details and how best to use it. Be clear.

Ensure they also understand how to use the product’s key features. And how they can reach customer support when the need arises.

Customers who achieve the initial value of your SaaS product during the onboarding process are more likely to become long-term customers. Those who lose interest or get confused undoubtedly leave.

Spend extra on your onboarding process (if possible). It’s a worthy investment that retains customers. Just automate your onboarding process until your customers succeed with your SaaS product.

Wrike did this. They automated their onboarding process by creating simple tutorials, reducing onboarding time by 70%. That’s nothing to sneeze at.

Another great way to improve the customer onboarding process? Create a customer onboarding course. Online courses can enhance retention rates, increase adoption of your SaaS product features, and boost engagement.

If creating an online course seems like a stretch, personalize introductions to your SaaS products to fit each customer. Digital courses work best for those running a small online business or are solopreneurs.

Some methods you can use to improve your customer onboarding process include (but aren’t limited to):

• User guides
• One-on-one video calls
• Automated email campaigns
• Evergreen webinars
• Video tutorials

There’s no better way to help customers get comfortable using your SaaS products than setting up an onboarding process. Get it right, and you’ll improve customer success for the longest.

4. Setup Feedback Loops for Customers

Want to know what to do to support your customers effectively? Create a customer success feedback loop. That way, you’ll collect essential information (positive or negative) from your customers.

Getting positive customer feedback is good. But if it lacks a specific focus on customer success, it’s challenging to know what needs improvement. For example, a customer’s feedback after a survey might go like this:

“Your platform is great. It helped me create my first SaaS product. Unfortunately, I’ve not made any orders yet.”

Such feedback comes from a satisfied customer and not a successful one as they’re yet to achieve their objective with your SaaS product (which is to sell products to their customers).

To create a successful customer success feedback loop, find out what’s exactly going wrong. And where your customer’s problems lie. For better results, delve deeper into the “but..” portion of their feedback.

Dan Steinman, a former CCO at Gainsight, warns against collecting feedback en masse. He says specific customers give the best feedback.

To get the right feedback:

• Find out what’s essential to your customers.
• Communicate your entire customer process to your customers.
• Handpick customers you believe represent the future of your business. Communicate your entire customer process to your customers.

When customers feel more involved in the feedback collection process, they become more loyal. In turn, enhancing your customer satisfaction strategy.

5. Monitor Key Customer Success Metrics

To improve customer success, track and measure your efforts. Doing so helps you get a clear picture of what’s happening in your business — all your customers’ pain points and where they’re doing well.

So, which are the key customer success metrics to monitor?

• Customer health score. This metric represents the number of product features your customers use, the time they spend with the product, and the number of product renewals they’ve initiated.
• Repeat buying rate. The percentage of customers making repeat purchases of your SaaS product.
• Customer lifetime value. This is revenue generated from a customer over their entire relationship with your business.
• Customer retention rate. This metric shows the percentage of customers loyal to your business over a specific period.

The only way to tell whether customers derive value from your product is to monitor your crucial customer success metrics constantly. This ensures your investment pays off. And that customers successfully adopt your product.

However, the best metrics for your business largely depend on your goals, business model, and specific products and services you’re selling.

Conclusion

Customer success can do so much for your SaaS business.

You may have quality products or services, but it’s the experience they provide to customers that matters the most. In fact, customer experience is what gives you an edge over your competition.

But to keep your customers happy all the time, you need to master the best customer success strategies. And they cover the whole cycle: customer journey, onboarding, feedback, and even mastering human communication.

There’s no better way to deliver maximum value to your customers.