8 progressive tips on how to never lose SaaS clients (part 2)

The second part of the article about effective work with clients for SaaS resources.

4. Improve your most important features.

As your SaaS evolves, you will realize that some features are more important to your customers than others. Once this becomes apparent, make sure that you are improving the quality and strengths of these characteristics.

If you can make your SaaS even better, you can keep customers from wanting to refuse your services.

Forentrepreneurs calls these characteristics sticky. The main sign of a sticky characteristic is that it grows into the daily work of the client. The client becomes not only extremely involved (remember the first point), but also dependent on this characteristic, thereby reducing the outflow.

5. Improve your customer experience.

It is a mistake to think that your SaaS clients use it only for software. They came to you also for the sake of impressions.

To make sure of this, consider how much your SaaS is part of the service. This includes the software interface, its functionality, speed, characteristics, cost, purchase process, update process, correspondence, customer service and everything else that at least somehow interacts with all SaaS. This is the impression. All this.

In a CMS article, the authors discussed "Optimal SaaS Support Features." The topic of the article was to pay maximum attention to the impressions of the client. Negative experiences can quickly scare away a customer, while positive experiences keep that customer.

By paying more attention to impressions, you can keep customers who are already on the edge.

6. Provide upgrades, discounts or various rewards

One way to increase the desire to use your service is to provide a sensation based on surprise or expectation.

Surprising a customer is a sure-fire way to increase customer satisfaction. In a random test, researchers found that when a waiter brings a small gift to a customer (for example, mint candy), customers who were surprised by such a gesture left an average of 23% more tips (source).

A leading journalist at Peter Economy magazine reports that “the secret to providing superior customer service is to surprise the customer — to do something for them that they did not expect. These are the very unexpected impressions that leave in the customer’s memory the stories that they want to tell. ”

How can you surprise them? Choose something that applies to your product, but make it meaningful. Here are a few options:

• Free features
• Additional memory
• Month of free use
• Discounts for a year subscription Surprising and delighting

customers is an important business strategy. According to Salesforce executives, “SaaS companies must delight their customers every day so they want to come back.”

7. Keep things open

Many users are skeptical of SaaS companies. And that's why.

The average client sees software that is expensive, but doesn't look like the vendor put a lot of effort into it. Of course, there are development and marketing costs, but where does all the hard-earned money of the client go? In addition, the skeptical client raises an eyebrow in surprise, reading about possible security breaches and encountering an incomprehensible language of the contract.

There is one thing you can do to change the customer’s skepticism: do things openly.

Recent security breaches have taught the general public that they should not be trusted by large data companies. From this point of view, they cannot trust any SaaS. If credit card information and a social security number are just one click away from the public, then why put yourself at risk?

Transparency is the only way to overcome skepticism and renew confidence. Here are some special measures with which you can achieve transparency:

1. Notify users about breaks in work
2. Notify users in advance of changes in prices or terms of the contract
3. Explain to users what their money is going to
4. Answer all questions that arise with potential customers
5. To provide customers with the simplicity of refusing services.

Once you begin to achieve complete transparency at every level of the business, then you will begin to gain the trust of existing and potential customers. When you reach a tipping point, your customers will not even think about leaving.

8. Focus on optimizing customer retention (rather than customer conversion)

Despite much attention to optimizing customer conversion, there is another significant optimization object that is right in front of your eyes - customer retention optimization. Instead of traditional A / B testing, retention optimization uses indicators such as user tests, customer surveys, and other user-oriented data.

It must be recognized that optimizing customer retention is not a separate science, which is CRO. Tim Ash calls this the “post-conversion CRO,” and explains that failure to optimize retention is a huge missed opportunity. At SaaS, it is vital that you review your retention strategy.

Retention is not so much in optimizing the product as in the understanding of the user. The Customer Success Association writes that “This is something you don’t know about the relationship with your client, and that can lead to you losing him.”

New users are good, and users who were able to keep are even better. Most of the growing revenue stream is created by existing users. Just look at this gap:

Minor discrepancies in retention rates have a cumulative effect. SaaS-Capital presents the following case study, described in the Customer Success Association. The scenario is that two SaaS companies sell only software subscriptions. Given that all other conditions are the same, this example proves the power of retention:

The only difference between them is that one company has a customer retention rate of 95%; the second - only 80%. After 5 years, the difference in the total value of the two companies was $ 15 million. During this time, the company with a customer retention rate of 95% also increased its current profit to $ 24 thousand per month.

Simple improvements in retention rates can seriously affect your business.

Conclusions The

Venture Beat describes a subscription-based business model as follows:

From a customer perspective, a subscription links them to the best brands, products, and services that they love and need for a while. These brands should really resonate with customers, which is why they want to persuade them to make regular payments.

Did you understand? "... the best brands ... the services that they love and that they need."

The end result of the above points is that your brand is credible. This level of brand confidence supports itself. You become the "best brand" from the point of view of the client. You become SaaS, "which they love and what they need." This type of customer loyalty, in turn, further enhances brand confidence.

A brand you can trust is a brand that inspires confidence in its customers. They respect him. They do not cheat on him.

Successful SaaS companies create more than a great product. They create a strong and reliable brand. This in itself is reason enough for users to stay.