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Recurring revenue is a wonderful thing. Sell a customer once, and revenue keeps coming — as long as the customer stays a customer. If you have a problem with SaaS customer loyalty, you won’t reap the benefits of a growing recurring revenue stream. In fact, your organization may be operating more like a project-based model rather than Software as a Service.
To make the SaaS model work for your company, you need to turn your attention to building customer loyalty like never before. Here are six skills that successful companies master that those with dwindling customer loyalty don’t:
Always think about the customer’s tomorrow.
Your application may be perfect for your users today, but it’s a sure bet that things will change. Study your industry and proactively address compliance issues, consumer trends and other factors that can impact what your customers will need in the future.
It’s also essential to build strong relationships with your customers, so when they’re ready for a change, they’ll turn to you for answers rather than looking at other vendors’ products.
Make every stage of the lifecycle easy.
Your customers aren’t looking for solutions that require tech experts to use them. Onboarding should be fast and easy, and your solution shouldn’t be complicated to learn. You should also dedicate resources to help your customers scale, foster adoption and upgrade to other solutions in your suite.
Facilitate better communication.
If you have a large user base, it may be difficult to stay in constant communication, but you can build SaaS customer loyalty by making it clear that you welcome user feedback and will take it into account as you plan future releases.
You may also be able to collect user data and identify accounts with low adoption or that may benefit from your help, which can allow you to intervene to ensure a greater degree of customer success.
Build a community to encourage SaaS customer loyalty.
Create ways to educate your users, facilitate networking, and help them run their businesses more effectively. An email newsletter can connect your user based with news,
blogs, white papers, and other materials that will help your customers improve their businesses. You can also consider holding user events, such as webinars, regional in-person meetings or even national or global events. Allow users to network and connect and share their experiences and solutions to business challenges. Also, encourage users to share their testimonials on social media. Users engrained in your community will be likely to remain loyal.
Support. Period.
Not every implementation will go perfectly, and problems are bound to arise over time. You need a skilled team to address issues and the right software solutions to manage tickets and communications. When users need support, you can turn it into an opportunity to build trust and loyalty — depending on how you address it.
It’s vital to choose people from your team with technical expertise but also soft skills that will impress upon customers that your business takes their input and their concerns seriously.
Devise a renewal process that makes sense for SaaS customer loyalty.
Your B2B customers may revisit using your application with each budget cycle, or their subscriptions may automatically renew each month. In either case, touch base at appropriate times to make sure there aren’t any issues that could interfere with renewal. Don’t wait for a canceled subscription to learn your users weren’t satisfied with your products or service.
Source – Mike Monocello
