It’s no surprise that controlling and tracking churn is critical to the success of your SaaS company. According to the 2014 SaaS Metrics Report from our friends at Totango, 40 percent of high-growth companies have churn less than five percent.
One of the most important factors impacting churn is the customer experience. Tweet If your customer has a positive experience, they will keep coming back ensuring usage, repeat sales, and eventually, referrals in a positive upward loop.
Here are four ways to improve your customer experience:
- Learning Before Earning
Providing helpful resources that solve problems and grow businesses will build a positive customer experience before a prospect even becomes a customer. An effective content marketing strategy is just the way to accomplish this. Make an impression by becoming a trusted source of information for the problems that people need answers to.
- Earning While Teaching
Analyze your practices from the customer perspective. Can you streamline the process of making account updates or subscription upgrades through a self-service option? Can you encourage using helpful guides and automated scripts, such as WalkMe, to learn how to do a task more quickly? Think about a combination of technology and people, and encourage your team to engage to help customers get their jobs done.
- Keeping Your Earnings
Building perceived value starts at the very beginning of the customer’s digital lifecycle. How easy is your product to learn? Craft an on boarding process that helps users understand the features of the product from the very beginning. Don’t expect them to intuitively understand the value on their own. Effectively communicate new features, ask for feedback, and encourage engagement.
Design product tours that are easy to navigate, but allow for customization when it’s necessary. Make sure that customers can easily find tips, guides, and success stories from other customers.
When you identify customers that are in danger of dropping, help them realize the value of continuing the service. Some SaaS companies resort to heavy discounts or giveaways to keep customers around. However, these methods are often simply delaying the inevitable. If customers value your product, they will fight to keep it, in spite of budget cuts or competing vendor offers.
- Be Human.
SaaS platforms have revolutionized the way businesses buy and use software. However, human interaction is still the best way to improve the customer experience.
The marketing experts at groovehq.com tell their readers to “out-care the competition.” Reach out in a human way when you identify customers who are struggling or who have not used the software. A sincere attempt to provide personalized assistance is a huge step to improving the customer experience. Tweet
Reducing churn requires more than just creating a product that your customers love. It requires a series of positive interactions, starting from the very beginning of the digital lifecycle. Tweet
Take these proactive steps to improve your customer experience and you will reduce your churn.
Avangate powers modern Digital Commerce, solving the complexity of online commerce, subscription billing, and global payments for Software, SaaS and Online Services companies. Backed by a proven cloud platform, unmatched expertise and a depth of digital commerce services, Avangate helps digital business leaders drive the fastest path to revenue, maximize the value of every customer, and expand global reach. Contact us for more information about how our digital commerce services can help you grow your business.
