For SaaS businesses, customer loyalty is the holy grail.
Retaining customers protects SaaS revenue.
Making customers wildly successful and therefore loyal, allows companies to also drive additional revenue out of the install base.
The reason Customer Success exits is to drive loyalty, and thus protect and grow revenue.
By extension, Customer Success is a critical SaaS business function.
The fact that Customer Success is key to business is not lost on anyone, yet strategically constructing amazing customer experiences is often overlooked.
Companies will in good faith develop all the constructs that make a healthy Customer Success program only to focus on the adoption of their own product, failing to consider the customer’s perspective and what they are experiencing.
SaaS companies with the best customer retention rates and revenue expansion success have figured out that the secret to customer loyalty is aligning their Customer Success program with the experiences of their customers.
Simply stated, to keep customers loyal, you need to give them a really good customer experience.
Sounds obvious but what does a really good customer experience mean?
Companies often tend to shy away from truly understanding this as customer experience is often thought of as something fuzzy, a feel good feeling, something undefinable and which businesses should not waste their time on.
Customers feeling positive about the company’s brand is a prerequisite to loyalty and can of course be subjective.
However, defining what experience is right for your customers and building operations to consistently deliver it, is actually quite a scientific approach.
It is about analyzing data and looking at what your most successful customers do in order to derive value out of the product.
The common trends to success make themselves very visible in the form of a customer journey.
The customer journey is a very effective vehicle in defining the corresponding business model that supports a consistently deliverable and amazing experience.
Thus companies that have figured out how to drive the experiences customers will have, are very strategic in ensuring that those experiences deliver successful results for the customer and drive loyalty.
A well define customer experience is therefore not something to disregard as being too fuzzy for business to define, but rather a secret to customer loyalty and SaaS success.