In the increasingly competitive world of Software as a Service (SaaS), customer retention and recurring revenue are interrelated in importance. SaaS companies must ensure that their customers are continuously satisfied and engaged to generate income and growth. Churn must be kept to a minimum as much as possible, and one of the primary ways to achieve all this is through driving customer success in SaaS.
Customer success is an invaluable investment for brands that run the SaaS model. Since they rely heavily on continued client subscriptions, SaaS brands must continuously make an effort to increase customer satisfaction and know how to measure customer experience.
According to a recent Forbes study, increasing customer retention by 5% can lead to an up to 95% improvement in revenue.
As a key driver of customer retention, SaaS customer success should be a priority for such companies. But what is it, exactly? Let’s define the concept.
What is customer success in SaaS?
Customer success in SaaS is the process of ensuring that clients achieve their goals through the use of a software service. Its main objective is to assist customers in completely utilizing all the features and reaping the product's full benefits.
Easily mistaken for customer support or account management, SaaS customer success—unlike the other two functions—is proactive and is more long-term oriented. For example, it means regularly reaching out to the client—even if the client didn’t ask or need any help—to ensure they are satisfied with the software and getting what they need from it.
SaaS customer success usually involves various initiatives such as onboarding, proactive customer service, training customer self-service, and up/cross-selling, all of which aim to increase customer loyalty and satisfaction.
SaaS providers must:
- Work closely with their customers to achieve customer success
- Know and understand the client’s goals and provide the best possible support in maximizing the use of the software
- Clearly identify the types of challenges or issues customers encounter when using their products and guide them accordingly
Providing exceptional customer experience is crucial in achieving customer success in SaaS.
The importance of customer success in SaaS
Recurring revenue is the lifeblood of SaaS brands, continuously driven and defined by customer retention. When Hubspot started monitoring customer success, it retained 33% of previously unhappy clients. Aside from increased customer retention, customer success is a key part of the SaaS ecosystem for many reasons:
 Higher Revenue |
When your clients achieve the results that they want or expect from the software, they will continue to use the product and possibly avail of add-ons, upgrades, and even additional services. Happy customers can also be a source of second-order revenue, the income generated when a client refers the product to others or brings it to their new organization. |
 Better Products and Services |
Through SaaS customer success, a provider can gather feedback from customers who use the software and use this information to improve their product. They can identify common issues and find out what works and what doesn’t, gleaning insights into how to improve the overall customer experience. |
 Competitive Edge |
The SaaS space is extremely competitive. A McKinsey study found that SaaS brands with a yearly growth of 20% or lower have a 90% possibility of going under in a few years. By achieving customer success in SaaS, a business will have an advantage over competitors and increase its reputation among clients and prospects. |
How TaskUs Achieves Customer Success in SaaS
For SaaS companies, designing and delivering effective SaaS products isn’t enough. They need to achieve customer success through customer-centric strategies and initiatives proactively. These efforts can involve tedious processes, labor-intensive tasks, and specialized hiring of people. By partnering with a proven and reputable provider of CX services and other related solutions, you can scale your business and focus on core objectives.
For example, with the help of TaskUs, a rapidly growing B2B SaaS organization built a comprehensive database of company attribute information to complement their extensive list of nearly 2 billion IP addresses. Their clients were able to implement B2B behavioral targeting strategies with the company’s web content personalization platform.
With the power of the company’s platform, B2B marketers are able to create unique and highly optimized web experiences for each site visitor that improve engagement, increase conversions and drive revenue 5x. As a third-party provider, TaskUs was able to achieve and deliver the following:
- 92% data accuracy rate for all supplied data
- Average of 8,000+ companies researched per week
- 600,000 total data points researched
CASE STUDY
Back Office Support: Data Research & Verification for a B2B SaaS Company
Download Case StudyAs the company’s client base continues to grow, it maintains agility as its data process has become reliable, cost-efficient, and most importantly, scalable.
Recognized by the Everest Group as the World's Fastest Business Process (Outsourcing) Service Provider in 2022 and with glowing reviews in Gartner Peer Insights Review, TaskUs continues to support companies in providing technology support services, achieving SaaS customer success and delivering excellent results.
- 2^The Ultimate Guide To Customer Success For SaaS
