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The Complete Guide
to Customer
Success for SaaS
Companies
The Complete Guide to Customer Success for SaaS Companies
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Index
01.
What is Customer Success?
02.
Why is Customer Success important?
03.
What is Churn?
04.
How to Calculate NPS
05.
How to Shape Customer
Retention Strategies
06.
A Smart Way to Manage SaaS
Customer Support
07.
Enhance Your SaaS
User Experience
08.
How (and When) to Automate
Your Customer Success Process
09.
What Customer Success Managers
Actually do all day?
The Complete Guide to Customer Success for SaaS Companies
01.
What is Customer
Success?
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The Complete Guide to Customer Success for SaaS Companies
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What is Customer
Success?
An introduction for SaaS Companies
When you sell a coat or a bar of chocolate, customer success isn’t
necessary.
Those are simple, self-explanatory products that everyone knows how
to use.
Even with things like a new vacuum cleaner, customer success isn’t
required. A user manual and a hotline is as far as most things go.
With your SaaS product, however, it’s not going to be so easy. Complex
analytics platforms, SEO tools, and landing page creators can be set up
and used in a variety of ways, solving different problems for customers
from marketing agencies, e-commerce stores, factories, and farms.
For software companies, the golden days of unbreakable contracts
and technical lock-ins are gone. The industry has diversified, and
there are a lot of companies your customers could be choosing over
yours, with more attractive branding, master salespeople or better
customer success.
When your product needs follow-up and guidance to ensure the customer
gets full value, that’s when customer success becomes a must-have.
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This is because a customer who speaks to your sales team or reads your
landing page is sold on the benefits, not the features.
The customer knows your product can solve their problem, but not
exactly how to get that value.
What is
Customer Success?
According to Lincoln Murphy, at its most basic level, Customer
Success starts out as an aim, not a department of people or a group of
processes— what he calls ‘lower-case customer success‘.
It starts by recognizing that your customers need more than your user
manual, your automated onboarding flow or email drip campaign for
your app to live up to the promises made on your landing page.
Keeping customers close, and working with them 1-on-1 is a customer
success style known as concierge onboarding. While startups and SaaS
companies are starting to focus on it only now, the early results are
promising — Customer.io doubled conversion rate to paid and Mainstay
reduced churn by 50%.
I’m going to talk more about the benefits later, but for now it’s
obvious that a customer who is staring at the configurable dashboard
of your product and wondering how they can set it up for their own
company is likely to cancel their recurring payment and go look for
something they understand — something that it’s easy to see the
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value of straight away.
Customer success is a system, run by people whose only goal is to help
customers get the best out of your product. It happens straight after a
sale is processed, as shown below:
To define customer success, you have to know what success looks
like for your customers. The definition will be different for each
customer, and the method of achieving it will be different for every
company. The first thing about customer success you have to know
is that it’s not customer support: it’s a way of proactively working with
your customer
If your customers aren’t constantly getting value from what they’re
paying you, you can understand from a business perspective that they
will stop paying.
The Process Leading up to
Customer Success
marketing
sales
customer success
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The Features of
Customer Success
Customer success is a mindset before it’s a department. It takes an
analytical approach towards retaining existing users and draws on great
communicative skills to forge long-lasting relationships with customers.
It’s part client onboarding.
Customer Success — with initial capitals — is still in its early days as an
official department. Google Trends shows that its popularity has been
steadily increasing from zero since mid-2012.
Boaz Maor, VP of Customer Success at Mashery, divides Customer
Success teams into 3 groups by function:
•
Professional Services: Project management, initial
implementation, and setup of any add-ons required.
Google Search Volume for
‘Customer Success Manager’
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•
Technical Support: Resolves technical issues, freeing up the
manager’s time to work closely with customers.
•
Customer Program Success Management: At Mashery, Customer
Success Managers are responsible for 20 customers each. The
full-time job of these managers is to be the face of the post-
sales operation and the person the customers build strong
relationships with. They also coordinate the efforts of the
professional services and support groups.
Additionally, Customer Success teams take part in the customer
onboarding process which is the vital initial setup of the product in line
with the customer’s vision.
Customer Success Department
Goals and Responsibilities
•
Turn customers into advocates
•
Increase customer retention
• Optimize customer lifecycle
• Manage customer support
• Up-sell / cross-sell
• Generate referrals
•
Increase customer lifetime value
• Monitor product usage
•
Track success metrics
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A Brief History of
Customer Success
The history of Customer Success is pretty short. It only really became
recognized recently.
As products increase in complexity at a rate faster than customers can
use them, Customer Success as a department has come to the forefront.
In the past, sales operations were sometimes divided up into Hunters
and Farmers, with Hunters taking on the responsibility of modern
sales teams — turning leads into sales — and Farmers acting as what we
would now call Customer Success Managers: nurturing customers to
make sure they keep on paying their subscriptions, making referrals,
giving references and providing data for case studies.
In a field like SaaS, where products require implementation and setup
before they can offer full value, the Customer Success department is
no longer a nice-to-have but a must-have.
It also helps salespeople focus on their job, and not having to continue
nurturing customers after the deal is closed.
Sales consisted of:
Pre-Customer Success
“Hunters” (concentrate on
making sales from all leads)
...is brought in after Sales closes
the deal and a payment is recieved
“Farmers” (work with existing
customers to ensure up-sells)
Sales concentrate on hunting
Customer Success does the farming.
Post-Customer Success
Customer Success...
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02.
Why is Customer
Success important?
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Why is Customer
Success Important?
A Guide for SaaS Companies
Tomasz Tunguz, venture capitalist at Redpoint, says customer success
is ‘equal in importance to sales and marketing and engineering and
product within SaaS companies’. But why? Technically, it didn’t exist 10
years ago, so why do we need it?
We need it because products are developing faster than our capacity to
understand them, we need it because competition in the SaaS world is
harsh and we need it in place to reduce churn and keep users sticking
around for the long haul.
Let’s take a closer look at these points.
Customer Success
connects promise to reality
Here’s a theoretical situation to explain.
Pretend I just signed up for an analytics product because I know I need
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to start tracking user activity in my mobile app. The landing page copy
told me that’s what I can do with the app, so I bought it. I go in, and
within 2 minutes I’m confused and wondering exactly how I can load it
up with my app’s data or set conversion goals.
In an ideal world, the platform’s customer success manager should have
been on the phone to me the same day of purchase, guiding me through
the steps to get it set up and teaching me everything I need to know.
Analytics platforms and CRMs are just two examples of complex
products that can be configured in numerous different ways — for these
products, a user guide or support ticket system isn’t always the best
thing to offer.
You don’t want your customer having to work harder to get what was
promised by the sales team because your product should be easy to
implement for all customers and deliver value from day one.
Your product’s initial setup, or even basic use, won’t be obvious to
everyone. Not to mention how businesses grow and their needs
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change over time — every time the monthly bill for your product comes
through, the customer is questioning whether they really need it.
With every month an opportunity to cancel, it’s obvious that the
customer success process doesn’t stop after the initial set up. Customer
Success teams need to be constantly available to stop customers
falling out of love with the product, no matter what.
According to Outreach CEO Manny Medina, customer success should
be ‘uncomfortably close‘. While an exaggeration, it’s a good way of
imagining how easily reachable and responsive your service should be.
Your competitors will
steal your unhappy customers
Disgruntled customers who didn’t get the support (or even
explanations) they wanted will seek out your competitors.
If your competitor is smart, they’ll have a great Customer Success team
who will get them set up with the product the same day the bill goes
through. They’ll make certain that the customer is happy, and set up to
get the most value they can out of the product.
Since 2009, the popularity of customer success has increased 800%.
It’s not becoming something which differentiates a great company
from a good one — it’s becoming a requirement.
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It doesn’t matter how good your marketing is or how many deals you
close, if customers experience the disconnect between promise and
reality and it isn’t patched up by a Customer Success team, you’re going
to get a high rate of churn.
Successful customers
don’t churn out
In an earlier article on concierge onboarding, which I excitedly wrote
when first discovering customer success, I note that customer success
is a method of making customers happy and keeping them that way.
If a customer is happy with your service, there’s no need for them to
stop using it — what’s known as ‘churning out‘. The amount of customers
you lose each month is known as your monthly churn rate, something
Google Search Volume for
‘Customer Success Manager’
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I’ll explain fully later.
For now, it’s enough to know that customer success isn’t just about the
unscientific art of making people feel warm and fuzzy. Like all business
processes, it’s about making money.
As you can see, a small adjustment to churn rate can have a huge
effect on overall revenue. It can make the difference between an MMR
(monthly recurring revenue) of $700,000 and one of $2,700,000
with an adjustment of just 8%.
In fact, while we’re on the subject of money, Gainsight’s Jason Lemkin
says “customer success is where 90% of the revenue is”. It doesn’t just
mean that customers keep paying their monthly charge, it also means
that they will be inclined to promote the product to others in their
company and buy the more expensive packages.
With SaaS, successful customers compound your revenue massively
because they are the ones who encourage their companies to pay for
more users, give you referrals and are promoters of your product.
Churn’s Impact on Revenue Growth
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Once your product becomes the go-to solution for a large company,
that one customer could be paying your entire Customer Success
team’s yearly salaries every month.
Once again: why is
customer success important?
Let’s look over the key points again and wrap up this chapter.
Customer Success teams help connect your new customer’s
expectations with the promises made by your marketing and sales
teams. By offering a go-between for your product and customers, your
customers always have someone to turn to who will be willing to work
closely with them to solve any issues.
Software is complex. If you offer a product that can work in a different
way depending on who uses it, you need someone to work with your
customers and get it set up for them right from day 1.
Your competition is doing it! They’re holding onto the customers you
lost and killing you with kindness.
A watertight customer success process reduces churn and increases
your revenue. Even a churn reduction of 4% can double your MMR.
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03.
What is
Churn?
The Complete Guide to Customer Success for SaaS Companies
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What is Churn?
An Introduction for SaaS Companies
Churn is the enemy. Churn is the sickness that will kill your SaaS
company.
Redpoint VC Tomasz Tunguz showed us just how damaging churn is
to the MRR of SaaS companies and how an adjustment of just 5% can
make a massive impact.
Churn is the rate your customers are cancelling their subscriptions to
your product.
One of the key outcomes of any customer success strategy is to reduce
churn by helping disenfranchised customers continue to get value from
what you’re offering them.
The pricing model of SaaS lends itself well to being extremely
profitable. But as David Skok says in his post about achieving negative
churn, there are massive risks.
The nature of subscriptions mean that your customers are paying
you regularly which brings in recurring revenue, but also puts you in a
precarious position.
Every time your customers get the bill for your product through on
their statement, they’re asking the question: This month, did this
product save me more money than it cost me?
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Over the past two chapters, I’ve answered two questions: What is
Customer Success? And Why is Customer Success Important? Now
I’m going to answer the question ‘What is churn?’. It all boils down to
one thing. Customer success teams and strategies are in place to stop
customers cancelling.
They exist to reduce churn. Let’s look at this in more detail.
How is churn calculated?
Churn is a notoriously difficult thing to calculate properly. In 2004, four
shareholders sued Netflix over its self-interested calculation of churn
rate, but the case was thrown out on the grounds that there simply isn’t
one solid way to calculate churn.
Churn is the inverse of your renewal rate. If you have a renewal rate of
80%, you have a churn rate of 20%.
Churn is most often expressed as a percentage, but can be talked
about in whole numbers. You could say, for example, that 10 customers
churned last month.
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To calculate your churn rate last month, take the number of customers
you had at the start of the month, subtract the number who cancelled
their subscriptions then express it as a percentage. (Here’s a handy way
of doing it from RJMetrics if you don’t like calculators or math.)
For example, Jim’s SaaS company, Salesdrive, had 9618 customers
at the beginning of October. At the beginning of November, this had
dropped to 8119. That’s a churn rate of 15%. Oh dear, Jim.
On the other hand, Helen’s SaaS company, Pipeforce, had 2055
customers at the beginning of October, which increased to 2184 by
November. That’s a negative churn rate of 6.3%. Nice.
A better way of
calculating churn
There is, however, another way to do it. A way that shows churn in
more useful and realistic way. A way that takes into account the fact
that every day a customer uses your service is an opportunity for them
to churn.
Instead of looking at a month as a single, measurable period, you look
at it as a culmination of customer days. If you have 10 customers in
September you have 300 customer days in that month and 300
opportunities for churn.
Let’s apply this to Helen’s company, Pipeforce, to make some sense of it.
Credit to Recurly for this fantastic info.
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Why is churn about customers,
not revenue?
Good question, Benjamin. While churn gives you a good overall idea
of the health of your business, it doesn’t take customer value into
Customers at the start of October
2055
2184
129
Customers at the end of October
Net gain
Customer days in month
65705
(2055 * 31)
+ (0.5 * 129 * 31)
Total churns in month
312
312 / 65705
31 * 0.4
0.4%
12.4%
Churns per customer day
Monthly churn rate
Days in October
31
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consideration — something that is arguably more important than
customer value. Let’s turn back to Pipeforce for another fictional example:
While Helen’s just found out that Pipeforce has a churn rate of 12.4%
this October, Helen’s surprised that her monthly recurring revenue
(MRR) is going up. As it turns out, everyone who churned out was on
the $2/month plan. A bunch of smaller companies with less users, all
paying below average for the most basic version of Pipeforce.
If Microsoft cancelled, then she’d be in a pickle. Those guys account for
a good chunk of business since they’ve got 500 seats on the Enterprise
package. But the companies that cancelled in October? Small fries.
For churn to have real financial meaning, it should also be applied to
customers. After working out the monthly churn rate by breaking it
down into customer days, Helen looks at what percentage of her total
MRR those customer made up. She found that those 312 customers
were collectively only bringing in 0.5% of her MRR, so weren’t all that
valuable anyway.
So, what’s the message here?
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For one, it’s that churn rate can be extremely deceptive. You have to
calculate it in a meaningful way and account for customer value.
The second point is that low-value customers are more likely to churn.
They aren’t paying much, so aren’t getting the full use out of your
product. They haven’t made a full investment in your product, so can
drop it if they need to and cut their losses.
Here’s what RevenueWire has to say about it:
Customer success strategies reduce this problem by ramping up
the unsure ones into loyal power users who spread the word about
your product to their team members, other departments and other
businesses. By getting your low paying customers to the point where
they want to be high paying ones, you’ve created a successful customer.
“ Compare this to the customers you may have attracted
with a higher price. They are looking for more value and
are usually willing to pay for it. They are more likely to
have researched their options and are more committed
to sticking to a high-value, higher priced product.
Alternatively, price-sensitive customers will likely place a
lower value on your product and be more likely to churn
as soon as they feel like they are not getting sufficient
value, especially if there is a price increase.”
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I calculated my churn rate.
Now what?
How’s it looking? If it’s low, you’re in a position so many SaaS owners
would love to be in. Just make sure you’ve calculated it in a way that’s
representative to the manner customers use your service, and takes
into account the revenue created by those churning customers. Keep
up the good work!
Is your churn high? Over the coming chapters, I’ll be taking you through
the way to construct a customer success strategy to reduce churn and
increase the MMR of your SaaS company. For a rough guide, check out
high-touch customer onboarding for SaaS companies, a checklist guide.
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The Complete Guide to Customer Success for SaaS Companies
04.
How to
Calculate NPS
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How to
Calculate NPS
with the Perfect Customer Happiness Survey
Customer Happiness is a metric unlike any other.
It’s not founded on principles of revenue, bounce rate or any other
traditionally mathematical ideas.
Customer Happiness is based on emotions, not data. And while these
emotions can be formulated as data, one of the first steps is to work
out how.
In this book we’ve already covered the definition of customer
success, why customer success is important and churn for SaaS
companies.
Have you ever
received this email?
Chances are, you’ve got an email at some point that looks like this:
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The outcome of this question is used to formulate your Net Promoter
Score (NPS), one of the metrics that measures the health of your
company and the effectiveness of your Customer Success strategy.
Some companies will ask for your response on a scale of 1-10, some
in a series of phrases like the Microsoft example above. I’ve even
seen :) and :( as options. How do these responses translate to a solid
representation of customer happiness?
Calculate NPS to determine
customer happiness
Whatever the form of the survey, you can be sure it will be converted
into a number between 1-10, and then you will be separated into 1 of
3 groups.
We value your Opinion!
How likely are you to
recommend us to your colleagues?
High Likely
High Unlikely
Somewhat Likely
Somewhat Unlikely
Neutral
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•
Scores between 1 and 6 are Detractors. These are the
customers unlikely to buy more, refer and promote the
business to those around them. If the customer base is filled
with detractors, the company is in trouble.
•
Scores between 7-8 are Passives. These are the kinds of
customers who are just fine. They’re getting what they paid
for, and think the company offers a passable service. They
have enough gripes with it not to scream your praises from
the rooftops but aren’t too dangerous. Companies with lots
of Passives aren’t in the best position, but it’s better than
having lots of Detractors.
•
Scores between 9-10 are Promoters. These are the sorts you
see retweeting product updates, commenting on every
blog post and publically enthusing about their favorite
companies. A company full of Promoters is like a great viral
marketing campaign all by itself.
As hinted in the image above, your final NPS score is the net percent of
your Promoters, minus your Detractors.
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Since NPS scores fall inside a range of -100 to +100, you need to work
out category scores as percentages.
For example:
•
You have 493 customers. 286 Passives (58%), 173
Promoters (35%) and 34 (7%) Detractors.

Discount the Passives, as they are effectively 0s, and
subtract the % of Detractors from the % of Promoters. This
leaves us with 28% (or +28).

To give you an idea as to what this means, any positive
score is a triumph. Companies with a score of +50 or greater
are considered to be doing amazingly well.
How to survey NPS data
from your customers
The quick way is to send a survey. You can use something as simple
as SurveyMonkey or even Google Forms to gather responses in a
spreadsheet and work out your NPS.
The long way involves optimizing this process. It has quite a lot to it, so
I’ll go through it bit-by-bit.
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Option #1: Use a form provider
To make a good decision, answer the following questions.
•
How many entries am I expecting?
•
How is the collected data presented to me?
• What kind of reports should be generated?
• Where can it be embedded?
•
Does it look professional?
•
Can the form be branded/customized?
•
Does it integrate with the apps you use?
Zapier has already put together a full blog post series on choosing a
form provider, so I’ll leave that here for you to help make a decision
after answering the questions above about your needs.
At Process Street, we use Typeform because it has a modern,
professional look, allows customization and integrates with apps we
use, so we can collect the data inside our existing SaaS stack.
Option #2: In-email surveys
To reduce the friction and make it more likely you’ll get a response,
embed the survey directly into an email. This means that when the
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recipient clicks their response, it’s directly logged and they don’t have to
jump through hoops for you.
You can set this up in email marketing programs, including
CampaignMonitor, use Google Forms to embed a survey into your
email directly or use trusty MailChimp, which lets you set up polls and
gather the data in an easily-digestible way.
Option #3: In-app surveys
This doesn’t have to be an alternative to an email survey, you could do it as
well to maximize the amount of responses. There are a few solid options
for in-app surveys, which are best for SaaS companies and mobile apps.
One choice is to use Intercom’s Auto-Messaging system which comes built
into their Engage package — that’s what we use here at Process Street.
Other options include a specific NPS survey that lives in your all —Bluenose’s
Pulse, and FeedbackLite which you can get with a 14-day free trial.
Time it right
Make sure to send your NPS survey at a time where your product
is fresh in your customer’s minds. This could mean setting up an
automated email which triggers when a support ticket is closed, an
account is upgraded, or, as Genroe’s Adam Ranshaw puts it: ‘soon after
the service or transactional interaction’.
Finding the best time for your customers which gets the highest
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response rate is something specific to each company. You’ll have to test
and find out what works for you. Adam says that the average response
rate for a well-timed NPS survey over email should be 20-30%.
Optimize the style of your survey
Making changes to the way your customers enter their data and the
layout of the survey could boost your response rates and give you
more data to work with. This is definitely something worth A/B testing
so you can find out whether your customers prefer a set of phrases,
emoticons, a scale of 1-10, etc. Here are some examples of NPS
surveys to give you inspiration:
Quickbooks (with a contest as an incentive)
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GrasshopperHerder Blog
Mention (original and follow-up)
1.
2.
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Baremetrics
CustomerThermometer (example)
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Load the template into
your email marketing software
At Process Street, we use MailChimp to manage our email marketing.
It has great reporting, A/B testing and is easy to create and edit
templates with. Chances are, you’ve already got one picked out, but if
not — you need one! That’s because you will have to track the opens
and clicks to determine whether your NPS survey is working.
Here’s a list of quality email marketing software to check through if you
haven’t got it set up yet:
MailChimp has everything you’ll need for
designing, sending and tracking NPS surveys.
Complete email marketing platform.
Slightly more expensive than Mailchimp.
A little on the expensive side, but full of
useful features including a complete email
marketing platform and CRM.
Inexpensive — featuring A/B testing
and forms.
Intuitive, flexible editor. A much cheaper
option than AWeber or MailChimp.
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To send or to schedule?
Once you’ve got your survey, your email, and software to send them
out to your customer base, it’s time to make another choice.
Are you going to blast the survey out to your whole list, or have it
trigger based on events?
You can send the email out at a few key moments in the customer
lifecycle:
•
Before/after subscription renewal
•
End of free trial
•
After the customer onboarding process
•
After X interactions with customer success, customer
support, etc.
To get the best results, this option is preferable because it ensures your
customers remember you which means you’ll get a better response
rate and more objective data.
What’re you going to do
with all that data?
Provided you have a way to collate the responses (this will be easy if
you’ve done it through a form service like Typeform or Wufoo), it should
be easy enough to calculate your NPS score. Just follow the formula I
gave you earlier. In case you’re in need of a refresh, here it is again:
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Your final NPS score is the net percent of your Promoters (scored
9-10), minus your Detractors (scored 1-6). Discount any other data.
Since NPS scores fall inside a range of -100 to +100, you need to
work out category scores as percentages.
Subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of
Promoters to get your NPS score.
Remember, any positive result is a good NPS score. Any NPS over 30 is
considered good, over 50 is great, and over 70 is excellent.
Take action to
make improvements
Over the coming chapters, I’ll be writing about how to optimize your
customer success strategy with concierge onboarding, by improving
user experience and by getting a support team running round the clock
to solve your customers problems and build relationships.
Once you know your NPS score, you know how urgent this will be. To
know where you’re going, you need to know where you are right now.
Stick around and we’ll continue this guide on customer success for
SaaS companies.
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The Complete Guide to Customer Success for SaaS Companies
05.
How to Shape
Customer Retention
Strategies
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How to Shape SaaS
Customer Retention Strategies
that Beat Churn
Earlier in the book, I wrote about what churn is, and how to calculate it.
Now, I’m going to cover how to beat it.
This is part 5 in an ongoing series on customer success for SaaS
companies. Here are the previous 4 parts if you need a solid
introduction to customer success:
• What is customer success?
• Why is customer success important?
• What is churn?
•
How to calculate NPS
If you’re ready to beat churn, read on and we’ll get started.
The long road to churn,
and why it’s so disappointing
It took months of preparation. Nick learned about your product through
your content marketing, where you helped him with his problems and
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even provided a bit of lunch break entertainment.
He saw your product’s name over and over again thanks to your
PPC ads, social media presence, and content promotion. Respected
influencers are buzzing about your product on Twitter, and he heard
the other marketing team in his company were getting on well with it.
After reading the copy on your landing page, he didn’t bounce. He
stuck with it through the signup form, the activation email, and the
onboarding tour. He even invited the rest of his team to try it out.
Over the course of the first week, Nick was engaging with the product
less and less, and ignoring emails from your customer success team.
Before the first month was over, he did something heartbreaking —
canceled his subscription and churned out.
There’s Nick. Most people in the world won’t make it as far as him. He
had hundreds of chances to lose interest before he visited your landing
page, he clicked the activation email or finished your user onboarding
tour.
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You never found out why, so you can’t help him or users like him. He
was out as quickly as he came in, churning before he could become a
valuable customer.
In this chapter, I’m going to look at the reasons customer churn and
how you can stop them with customer retention strategies.
Voluntary churn:
it’s not me, it’s you
According to LessChurn (a service for SaaS companies that helps them
keep customers around and gathers feedback from those who leave),
churn can be divided up into two types. The first is voluntary churn.
Voluntary churn is what happens when the customer decides your product
isn’t worth their time, money or attention. Maybe they’re wrong and can’t
see the value, or maybe they’re right and your product isn’t a good fit.
Churn can be your fault, or it can be out of your control. If your product
doesn’t appeal to everyone, that’s likely a good thing because it’s highly
targeted at a certain type of person. As Seth Godin says in his Inbound
2015 keynote:
“ Crappiness is sanding all the edges off to make
everyone happy. ”
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You don’t have a crappy product, right? Well let’s focus on the areas that
are your fault — the areas in your control, such as:
Confusing user onboarding
User onboarding is a ridiculously expansive topic, and it’s hard to
condense into an entire book, never mind about a subheading. To get
you started, I’ve written before about both the user onboarding process
and empty states (the first thing your user sees when they go into your
app). But these articles aren’t 100% focused on churn, so I’ll apply the
ideas here.
•
Reinforce the value of your product during the user’s first
session
I say ‘reinforce’ because the user understands the value since the
signed up in the first place. Go and look at the promises made on your
landing page, and connect them to the actual user experience of your
app. If your user doesn’t understand the relationship between what
they saw in your marketing material and the real thing, that’s a big
problem for you.
•
Design your app’s empty state
The empty state is what your user sees when there is no data to show.
This could be because there’s been an error, they’ve cleared out the
example content, or simply haven’t created anything yet.
Here’s an example from Basecamp:
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Make sure your empty states are helpful, not actually empty, and make
sure they tell the user how to fill them up.
I’ve written a big article about exactly this, so if your users drop off after
their first session, go here to read about a fix for this problem.
•
Clarify your app’s features with an onboarding tour
What’s the first thing you expect to see when you start using a new
app? It’s probably an onboarding tour. A small box with several slides,
each explaining a key element of the app and the benefits that come
with it. Here’s what it looks like:
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While I’d bet a chunk of people skip them completely, it makes more
sense to explain to users than to leave them to figure it out alone.
Your app’s too young
At Process Street, we have an app a ton of users love. It’s right for
a lot of people, and many stick around for the long haul. We do,
however, get the same feature requests over and over. Things like
task-based assignment, forms, and task-snoozing. We know that
when we get those features built, we’ll hook the kinds of users
that previously churned because we didn’t have the features they
needed.
By keeping a close eye on what your users ask from you, you can reduce
churn while building your product naturally. You can survey your users with a
tool like Typeform, or keep a Trello board of features your users most want.
You’re charging too much (but this kind of
churn is great for your support staff)
SaaS pricing is an interesting topic there are far more arguments in
favor of raising pricing than lowering it. But, with this said, high prices
are a common reason for churn. How does this work?
Well, it’s quite simple. Founder of WP Engine, Jason Cohen reported
that the churn amongst users who bought his software with a coupon
was much higher.
Low prices attract unloyal customers. The kinds of people who choose
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your platform because it’s the cheapest, but still have a bunch of
problems they think you should address or risk losing their $5 bill on
your doormat each month.
Low-quality customers wonder why the software doesn’t do what
they expected it to do because your more expensive competitor
does it. They give your support team more headaches than any other
group, and you’re better off without them. That’s what I’d call positive
churn (ha).
Involuntary churn:
it’s not you, it’s me
Involuntary churn is what happens when a user can’t continue to
use your product because of reasons out of their control. It’s not
worth dwelling on ways to stop this because it’s not your fault, but
understand that a lot of the time, users don’t choose to quit.
1.
Their boss decided to go with another product. (This could
be related to your app’s features, but it’s a gatekeeper’s
choice, not your customer’s).
2.
They ran out of money (see ‘You’re charging too much’ to
realize it’s not worth doing anything about that).
3.
Their company went broke.
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First steps for patching up
your leaky product
The next 5 parts of this blog post series will be about reducing churn, so
I’m not going to dive into a 10,000-word lecture just yet.
David Skok came out with a really interesting post on lifetime value on
ForEntrepreneurs recently— while is something of a sidenote, it’s going
to be extremely important as part of your long-term customer success
strategy. That’s especially true when you consider how that a company
with negative churn can have a customer lifetime value (LTV) of infinite.
That sounds broken, right? David suggests a better way to handle it in
this great post.
By the end of the chapter, you’ll have learned the fundamental aspects
of customer success, how to reduce churn and how to provide the right
support for your customers. The closing articles will be all about how to
create and refine your own customer success process so you can train
your team and launch into action with a foolproof strategy.
But for now, here are some prerequisites.
1. Gather customer feedback
This is monumentally important. For starters, it can be as simple as
attaching a survey to your automated email that gets sent out when
a customer cancels. See last chapter about NPS surveys to learn how
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you can embed surveys in emails or set them up using something like
Wufoo or Typeform.
While this is one way you could do it, Groove recommends asking an
open-ending question like this:
2. Work out what your app’s Aha! Moment is
As we saw at the start of the article, the journey from awareness to
long-term use is a rocky one.
You need to get your user from their first few seconds inside your app
to their moment of first value as quickly as you can. When I think about
the ways you can do this, my brain boggles at how many different
strategies there are.
One good way that straddles the UX and customer success disciplines
is analyzing what today’s power users did in your app when they signed
up. For example, Twitter’s Josh Elman found that the users who stuck
around had a common trait:
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The same goes for Facebook. Its VP of growth, Chamath Palihapitiya,
said that he noticed that repeat users had one thing in common: they
had mostly made 7 friends in 10 days.
What do your best customers all have in common? How did they start
out with your app? Answer that, and you’ll know what to emphasize
during your app’s first-time use.
“ It turned out that if you manually selected and
followed at least 5-10 Twitter accounts in your first day
on Twitter, you were much more likely to become a long
term user, since you had chosen things that interested
you. And if we helped someone you know follow you
back, then even better. As we kept tweaking the features
to focus on helping users achieve these things, our
retention dramatically rose. ”
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Looking at user flow in Google Analytics can help you pinpoint the step
with the most friction — where the majority of users drop off.
3. Start targeting the right kinds of customers
Let’s take Process Street as an example again. Process Street isn’t
designed for a vertical, like HR teams or lawyers. It has a horizontal
appeal. It works just as well for advertising agencies as it does for real
estate agents, healthcare professionals, and retail executives.
But let’s say we take a look at our data one day and find that from our
best customers, 90% of them are marketing professionals. That means
that there’s something particularly appealing about our app to that
segment, even if we don’t know what it is.
So, what would we do? Probably get in touch with them for a start. Ask
them what they like about Process Street — have a chat with them or
send them a survey.
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Then, we’d gear our marketing material towards marketing teams. We’d
start writing content they’d be searching for, and maybe make a custom
landing page targeting a keyword they’d come across. From the survey
responses we’d get back we’d know which features are most important
to them, and we would be able to emphasize them early on, develop
them further and make the ultimate marketing operations tool.
Maybe that would mean we’d not be so widely appealing, but
remember the Seth Godin quote about crappiness?
Crappiness is what happens when you try to be the best product in the
world for every customer. Being the go-to product for marketing teams
is definitely sufferable and it’s not like there’s not enough money in that
world.
If it means reducing churn, don’t worry about going after what you
thought was just a subset of your customers.
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06.
A Smart Way to
Manage SaaS
Customer Support
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A SaaS Owner’s Guide
to Managing Your Customer
Support Process
While your blog is the external face and voice of your company,
your support team is the internal one. According to Jason Lemkin of
SaaStr, SaaS companies — especially startups — should be using their
company’s product, even if the teams don’t strictly ‘need’ to.
In Jason’s article, he recounts how PayPal president David Marcus
ranted ‘use our app or quit‘ to his employees. While it could be argued
that David Marcus is being an angry egotist and going a little too far for
an app that everyone may not have a use for, he says that the reason
he wants everyone using it regularly is so that PayPal can ‘get better,
and better’.
That brings up an interesting issue — by putting every single employee
on support in some capacity, you’re tackling several problems at once.
You’re lightening the load of the dedicated support teams in busier
times, teaching employees about the product they may well be
advertising or marketing and gathering vital data from users on how the
product could be improved.
Over the several past weeks, I’ve looked at the definition of customer
success, why it’s important and how to reduce churn. Now we’re going
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to get into the nuts and bolts of customer support for SaaS companies,
including strategies, workflows, and tips for getting set up.
Let’s get started by looking more closely at the support model briefly
described earlier.
Everyone should do customer support
in your SaaS company
How product-focused is your SaaS company? Look at the individual
teams and gauge how much engagement with your product would be
necessary for them.
•
Engineers built and tested it — they know their shit.
•
Salespeople should have an intimate understanding of
the product so they can be at their best when talking to
prospects.
•
Marketers also should know the product inside out (along
with the target buyers) so they know how to position it.
•
Customer support and customer success should be nothing
short of power users. They need to know the answer to
every question thrown their way.
Everyone else? Not so much.
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So, what’s the solution? In order to improve your product, train your
employees and have a backup support force if your help desk is
overwhelmed, every employee should chip in.
At Process Street, we recently started dividing customer support
between every single employee, with Peyton (our front end engineer
and support manager) training each of us to train each other. Peyton
trains Kate, Kate trains me, I train (the other) Ben, and so on.
By dividing support up between all of us and training each other, we
can let Peyton get back to doing the job he was hired to do, avoid
hiring a dedicated support team to manage the not-so-overwhelming
volume of tickets and all learn to use the product better.
Even larger SaaS companies with dedicated support can benefit from
this structure, but it’s especially useful for startups which don’t get
enough tickets to call for hiring a specialist.
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Develop a support procedure
document that works for you
As you might have guessed from the product we sell, Process Street
is super-focused on processes. Since getting support set up is a
collaborative effort, and none of us have a solid background in support,
we first collaborated around a shared document in our app to hash it out.
Here are the subheadings in our support procedure document:
Scheduling: We decided to work in pairs over 1-week cycles since
we have an equal number of employees in Europe and the US. For
example, I cover support with Peyton this week. I answer tickets when
he’s asleep, and when it’s time for me to clock off for the night, he
covers support instead.
Saved replies: Support is an analytic job — by that I mean you have to
analyze the tickets that come in and see if you can answer quickly
with a saved reply or if it’s too complex for that. Alongside the process
document, we also gathered together our most answered questions and
wrote saved replies for each of them then added them into Intercom.
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Response time: What’s your response time goal? Does this differ
between free and premium users? Often, SaaS pricing works in a way
that allows paid users to get priority support as part of the deal.
Answering tickets: Employees still being trained for support don’t reply
directly to the ticket. Instead, they go into Intercom as the first priority
in the morning and look at the unassigned tickets. Then, tagging the
person that’s training them in a note (not a direct reply), they submit
an answer for approval. This way, the trainee knows what is acceptable
and what isn’t before they get in direct contact with the customer.
The tone of voice: Process Street isn’t Microsoft, a telecom service or
a company that puts its customers through a labyrinthine trial to get
a response from a support agent. We’re a customer-centric startup
with a friendly, helpful tone and a drive to close the gap between
our customers and ourselves. That’s reflected in how we talk to our
customers, too. The process we put together outlines the important
components of this including useful phrases and the right attitude to
take.
Follow-up procedures: We always end our support tickets with a
question. This helps us forge a better relationship with our customers
because it provokes conversation. Looking at our Intercom history, I
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can see that sometimes we even end up having a friendly chat with a
customer after the ticket is resolved. Since we ask a question and want
to form relationships and ensure the issue was resolved, it’s standard
procedure to follow up with customers who haven’t responded in 48
hours. One follow-up is enough unless it’s an important ticket from a
user bringing in a lot of money. For those customers, we want to be
extra sure that they’re getting on well.
Ticket escalation: While engineers should be trained for support, it
doesn’t mean that support agents need to know how to fix coding
issues in your app’s backend. For bugs, the aim is to gather as much
information as possible and then escalate the ticket to an engineer for
resolution ASAP.
Feature requests: Feature requests make up a sizeable chunk of the
support tickets we receive. For now, while we’re still young and foolish,
we’re tracking these on a Trello board with one card for each request.
We tag them according to their nature, which is UI request, UX request
or technical request. Every 2 months, we compile a list of the most
popular requests and push that to the engineering team to make it so.
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Evaluation: At the end of the week, trainees evaluate themselves and
are evaluated by their manager. Trainees answer:
1.
What was the most popular issue people were having? Is it
an outstanding bug?
2.
During what periods of time did we receive multiple
requests?
3.
What are other patterns your notice?
Managers analyze:
1.
Your average turnaround time on tickets
2.
Your volume of tickets answered in a day
3.
Conditions that affected inquiries coming in.
You can use these prompts to create your own procedure document
and help to systemize your support operations and ease the support
employee onboarding process.
Create a support workflow
(and make sure it gets followed)
Like I said before, we’re mad about processes. If we were a terrible stock
photo, this is what we would look every time someone mentioned
them.
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We’ve seen first hand how processes help us and many other
businesses increase their efficiency and reduce busy-work. Currently,
we’re drafting a support workflow which will eventually be set up in
Process Street as a template for agents to run as a checklist for each
conversation. Here’s what it looks like, at a glance:
1.
Check Intercom for unassigned issues.
2.
If you’re in training, leave them unassigned. If you’re not,
assign them to yourself.
3.
Parse the inquiry and decide if the ticket can be answered
with a saved reply or not.
4.
If you don’t understand the ticket, politely as them for more
information instead of telling the user that you don’t get it.
5.
Escalate any UI/UX/technical bugs to the engineering
team.
6.
If it’s not a bug or a ticket that can be answered with a saved
response, write a response as a note, tag your support
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manager and suggest it as an addition to your collection of
saved responses.
7.
Always finish conversations with ‘did that help?’, ‘was that
clear?’ or another direct question.
8.
If the customer becomes frustrated, immediately tag
your support manager in a note and mention them in the
support Slack channel.
9.
If the customer has a complex issue, you have provided an
answer but they ‘saw’ the message and have not responded,
send a follow-up after 24 hours.
10.
If the customer does not respond at all after 5 days, even
after ‘seeing’ the message, close the ticket.
Process documents will always be evolving as you change your other
systems, tools or workflows, so keep in mind that they are never set in
stone. For more pointers on writing process documents, see this article
on business writing tips.
Segment your support tickets to keep
engaged with the customer
As our support process evolved, we found we needed to segment
support tickets according to the request and the team that should be
dealing with it. Right now, we divide tickets into 3 groups so we can
track and act on them more easily:
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Marketing: Marketing requests are tickets relating to guest posts
submissions for our blog, featured writer requests or other marketing
operations tickets.
Development: Tickets grouped into Development are bug reports and
feature requests. We individually contact customers who request
features or report bugs to let them know that the feature has been built
or the bug has been fixed. For non-urgent items, we process these each
week. This might mean adding features to the Trello board, or sending
out ‘hey, we fixed it!’ emails.
Sales: People who are interested in buying, request pricing or want to
know more about discounts are segmented into our Sales group. By
keeping all of our interested buyers in one place, it’s easy to follow up
with them and get them booked in for a demo. We only tag tickets with
Sales if they require a follow-up email.
Unassigned: The Unassigned group is for tickets which need action,
haven’t been answered yet or need processing by whoever is being
trained at the time. New support staff being trained don’t assign tickets
to themselves or reply, they leave a note tagging a manager and keep
the ticket unassigned.
Individual assignment: When you reply to a ticket in Intercom, it
automatically is assigned to you. If a manager has assigned a ticket
to an individual, it’s taken care of with top priority. We keep tickets
assigned to us if we’re personally testing a bug report or having a more
in-depth conversation with a customer. Also, we assign tickets to
team members who can answer the question with their specialized
knowledge.
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Create a recurring checklist
to run for each ticket
We’ve found that the best way to train new support agents is to have them
run a customer support process checklist each time they reply to a ticket.
Peyton recently put together this checklist guide which helps us to:
1.
Determine the type of ticket
2.
Write a quality response
3.
Escalate it if needed
4.
Categorize it properly
It’s important to note that support (and most other processes) are
always evolving. We’re still a young company and this is our first
attempt at what I’m sure will be a long and ever-changing customer
support process.
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How to start this customer support
process for every employee
The first step to implementing company-wide support is to find the
person in your organization with the most grounding in support,
managerial experience and who is in a position to devote some time
to training someone else. This might be someone on the product team
who has an intimate knowledge of the app but isn’t constantly fixing
backend bugs or furiously building new features.
The idea is to have them train just one other person to do the job
well enough so they could a third support agent in the same way. I
couldn’t find a buzzword for this, but I guess if I had to create one whilst
shuddering at the thought of it, it’d be ‘viral training’.
The training should include the manager introducing the trainee to
the procedure document and workflow, then reviewing each support
ticket before it goes out. In Intercom, this is done by adding a note and
tagging the manager.
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07.
Enhance Your SaaS
User Experience
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Improving Your SaaS
User Experience
for Customer Success
I’ve talked at length in the past about the user onboarding process, the
difficulties of first-time use and how empty states can solve some of
these problems.
While this is all well and good when you’re trying to tackle user drop-off
after the first session, what about the later stages?
Assuming that everything else has clicked into place for your user and
they’ve made it all the way up to the purchase, you must have made a
good first impression! Unfortunately, it’ll be all for nothing if your app
is hard to use, awkward, inflexible or disappointing over the long term,
or if your premium plan’s onboarding isn’t tight.
Post-sale UX optimization isn’t something I’ve looked at before, or even
heard about. But writing a guide about SaaS customer success is not a
small task and UX is definitely a big deal, especially because good UX
makes it easy for Customer Success to do their job.
In fact, a good SaaS user experience takes the weight off customer
support, too. Overall, you don’t want to put a barrier between your
users and your app and most importantly for revenue, you don’t want
to put a barrier between your paying users and your app.
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Here are some SaaS user experience optimization pointers to think
about which will make the lives of your Customer Sucess team easier.
Don’t create a disconnect between
the product and the packaging
I’d bet that the disconnect between product and packaging — or
marketing material and in-app experience — is a huge reason for drop-
off both in the early usage stages and when upgrading. Since premium
versions of products will often have new features and your landing
pages will emphasize these features as incentives to become a paying
customer, it’s important not to overplay it.
While the image above is an extreme example, we’ve all experienced
something similarly disappointing. The solution is to be honest — it might
be that you’re getting conversions based on your features, not your
Expectation
Reality
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design. But when the design doesn’t match expectations, users can feel
cheated — especially if you made the paid version look infinitely cooler.
A neat trick some apps implement, such as WorkFlowy and Wunderlist
(above) — both of which have subscripion pricing structures — is to offer
visual personalization of the app in the premium version. This gives the user
ownership over their design, and makes them feel like it’s ‘their’ product.
Design for the full,
unrestricted app
SaaS is extremely young, but UX as a thing people care about or speak
about is even younger. It wasn’t until around 2002 that it was even in
public discourse, with the publication of The Elements of User Experience.
What I’m getting at is that SaaS and UX should have grown up together,
hand in hand. That’s because the nature of SaaS is that when you buy
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a product (unless you buy the most expensive edition) you only see a
fraction of it.
When a user upgrades, parts of the app which were previously hidden
reveal themselves. The user will need re-onboarding with these
elements in mind or could get buyer’s remorse.
Since this guide looks at concierge onboarding (otherwise known
as high-touch onboarding), you’re probably going to be giving 1 on 1
demos of these features instead of in-app, self-service tours. With
that in mind, you still want to make sure that the transition isn’t jarring,
overwhelming or hard to commit to memory after the demo (see the
next tip for more help with that).
This post on UX tools from Usability Geek starts out with tools that
help with research and includes app like UsabilityTools, Woopra, and
Usabilla. These tools are designed to monitor usage and collect user
feedback, which is great for a more self-service approach. However, a
big benefit for you when working closely with customers is being there
to hear feedback first hand and have a dialog with your users.
Use little hints to
introduce new features
As I’ve looked at before, Slack is fantastic at getting users onboarded — not
only during the first session but also for new features. While Slack certainly
has a customer success team helping its big customers set the app up
properly, it helps every user to get a subtle note about new features.
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Slackbot pops up in direct messages during the first run, but the What’s
New notifications appear as new features are introduced. Inside the
menu, here’s what it looks like:
Slack has a whole host of in-app and external help material, including a
huge database of support articles and feature announcements on their
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blog. Onboarding existing customers with new features is a process
of making users aware and having information available on several
channels.
At Process Street, we send out emails announcing the features so we
can alert existing customers to the cool stuff incoming and reactivate
users that are in danger of churning out.
Additionally, for regular app users, we have a popup conversation box
powered by Intercom to announce the feature and see if users have
any questions.
Here’s our latest announcement for Search, appearing in the app’s
support area:

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Throw a party for your
successful user
If a user has grasped a concept, made a leap in learning your product or
just completed the action you can strongly link to conversions, it’s time
to celebrate.
Samuel Hulick‘s Help Scout post on user onboarding mistakes points
out how that MailChimp’s success screen that it shows when you’ve
sent an email is an actual high-five — which is what it should feel like
when a user succeeds with your app.

Now, we know that for SaaS products with several thousand users,
things like 1 on 1 contact for everyone isn’t possible.Even though it won’t
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scale, being directly in touch with your high-value customers is vital.
Even though it won’t scale, being directly in touch with your high-value
customers is vital.
For example, you could call or email high-value users directly to let
them know you saw they reached some kind of milestone with a new
feature and see if they need any more help.
Alternately, if it looks like they got stuck while playing with it, call to see
if you can offer a helping hand.
What’s the link between SaaS user
experience and customer success?
The idea behind improving user experience with customer success in
mind is this:
1.
If you can make it easier for your customers to interact with
your app, they will achieve success more quickly, firmly
and… long-lastingly.
2.
Users should be primed for success from the moment
they discover your app. This means that they should know
what to expect by reading your copy and seeing your
screenshots. It means they should have great interactions
with the sales team who should try and teach the users
about every feature they’ll need.
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3.
User experience — how it feels to use your app — should be
optimized to make sure your users want to stick around,
learn the new features, interact with your customer success
and support staff
We’re getting close to the end of our customer success guide for
SaaS companies! With the chapters so far, I’ve gone through the
prerequisites for setting up customer success. Now, we’re going to look
at automation, and setting up a process.
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08.
How (and When)
to Automate
Your Customer
Success Process
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How (and When) to
Automate Your Customer
Success Process
Customer Success isn’t something you do once or someone you hire to
make magic happen. Unfortunately for those who are shy of putting in
the effort, it’s a process.
A customer success process should include many of the functions
we’ve talked about so far in this guide, such as customer support
and NPS surveys, but also routine ‘check-ups’ on the health of your
customer base.
There is, however, some good news about this. Since customer success
is a process, it means a few things:
1.
Part of it can be automated.
2.
It can be rationalized and broken down into steps.
3.
It’s easy to train a group of people to execute it.
4.
It’s easily tracked and documented.
What does a customer success process look like, exactly?
In this final sprint of our guide, I’ll be telling you exactly that.
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This week, we’ll look at the ingredients of a watertight process and how
to set it up.
Next week, we’ll study how to refine and optimize processes, and in the
last part of the customer success guide, we’ll look at something just as
important as starting: keeping it up.
But now, let’s start with what a customer success process might
include.
What’s in a Customer
Success process?
Obviously, in the eye-rolling and unhelpful words of me, all the time:
your customer success process depends on your business.
I’m saying that because I can’t promise to cover everything with this
guide and to encourage you to go look at what your product lends itself
to and what it needs.
Maybe it’s a mostly self-service SaaS product like Trello, where
Customer Success may only be brought in for huge enterprise setups.
But maybe you have a product that needs the high-touch approach
of concierge onboarding. Companies like DoubleDutch — who create
custom apps for industry events — have no choice but to work closely
with customers.
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DoubleDutch has developed a highly effective Customer Success
process which allows them to give every customer as much care and
attention as they require and deliver high-quality apps on a tight
schedule.
Chances are, you fall somewhere between the two categories of self-
service and high-touch. It might be possible for customers to use your
service whilst never interacting with a human, whilst also possible( and
sometimes necessary) for customers to get a little more guidance.
From what I’ve learned from the processes in place here at Process
Street, my interview with Aaron Lapierre (Vice President of Client
Cervices at DoubleDutch) and research from companies like Totango,
Zendesk and Zapier, I’ve put together a list of systems and events which
can come together to form the customer success process.
•
Kick-off call
•
Data gathering
• Webinar training
•
Training articles
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•
Follow-up sequences
•
NPS surveys
•
Feedback loops
•
Customer support
•
Ensuring renewal
As you can see, some of these events or systems can be fully
automated (follow-up sequences) while some need human interaction
to work (kick-off calls).
Figuring out which it would be possible to automate and which will
need a person or team assigned to is the first thing to do.
Kick-off call
The kick-off call is the first phone call made post-sale. The salesperson
hands off to the designated Customer Success rep who calls the
customer to find out more about their situation.
For a complex product (like an analytics platform, for example), this
helps the Customer Success reps figure out how the product can be set
up and implemented for the customer.
For DoubleDutch, the kick-off call is focused on letting the customer know
the process and familiarizing them with what’s going to happen next.
As the first point of contact between a customer and someone who
isn’t trying to sell something, it’s a time where the customer feels
valued and looked after.
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When Zapier was just starting out, CEO Wade Foster would personally
call customers and hack together custom integrations for the apps
they needed to connect whilst still on the phone. Zapier used the
kick-off call as a way to impress customers, secure deals and spread
the word that their company is willing to go the extra mile for their
customers.
Data gathering
The data gathering process is something which can be automated and
might be partially complete before the Customer Success process
starts. Depending on what your staff do pre-sale, the marketing or sales
team may have already gathered data that can help Customer Success
learn more about the company they’ll be working with.
Depending on what your staff do pre-sale, the marketing or sales team
may have already gathered data that can help Customer Success learn
more about the company they’ll be working with.
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Professor of marketing at Baylor university, Jeff Tanner, says that the
biggest mistake in the data gathering process is “asking for too much
at one time and overwhelming your customers”.
Webinar training
We know that webinars generate leads. At least, if you don’t run them
yourself you can tell by the invitations in your inbox every week.
What’s not so well-known, however, is how they can be used to
nurture, train and engage existing customers.
SaaS company Rainmaker — who offer a marketing platform for digital
entrepreneurs — use webinars at every stage of the customer journey,
from awareness through the success process.
CopyBlogger, a company part of the Rainmaker platform, use
their webinars to promote Rainmaker and generate leads for their
membership program, Authority.
This loop of lead generation, customer education, and engagement has
proven to be a powerful tactic for Rainmaker, who use a variety of cross-
medium channels such as podcasts, written content, infographics and
more — all with the customer success and lead generation process built in.
Training articles
Just like webinars, your written content serves more than one purpose.
As well as being effective lead generation, it’s also there as a source
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of passive customer support and a tool for customer success agents.
Teams can link customers to training articles for more information
while explaining 1 on 1 the idea behind it. It’s better to have a reference,
which is why we have the Process Street User Guide as well as working
closely with our customers.
For written content like FAQs, there’s a third benefit which is SEO. Many
SaaS companies keyword optimize their support docs and bring in
customers seeking to solve a problem but not knowing which app does
the job.
Follow-up sequences
There are many, many products that help you automate series of
emails — MailChimp, Rebump and YesWare to name a few. If you use
any kind of software for email marketing or sales as it is, you’ve likely
got the power to automate emails based on events.
For example, a new high-ticket customer could get sent an email
automatically (with you CC’d) that gets them to arrange a walkthrough
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session, and then it’s up to you to engage them. For big deals, it makes
sense to take a hands-on approach with each customer, but that’s
not always possible for every user. For your lower ticket users, you can
automate a string of follow-ups which teach the product, all based on
events and activity.
For a guide on how to create event-based automated emails using
MailChimp, click here.
Net Promotor Surveys
There’s no reason NPS surveys can’t be 100% automated. Like above,
the surveys can be sent using an email marketing automation program
like MailChimp, with a string of follow-ups. As recommended by
Zendesk:
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The best time to trigger an NPS survey is a short time after an
interaction. This might be a purchase, upgrade or a support ticket.
To find out more about the topic, check my previous chapter on
calculating customer happiness with NPS surveys.
“ After you’ve sent your first NPS survey, chances are
you’ll want to send follow-up surveys in order to track
changes in your NPS over time. Plan to send follow-up
surveys on a regular schedule, controlling for events like
product launches or website downtime, which can bias
your NPS score. ” — Zendesk
We value your Opinion!
How likely are you to
recommend us to your colleagues?
High Likely
High Unlikely
Somewhat Likely
Somewhat Unlikely
Neutral
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Feedback loops
According to Client Heartbeat, a Customer Feedback Loop is ‘a system
that you use to gather feedback, learn from feedback and make
changes to your products and service based on the feedback’.
So, how do you make sure to respond, track and act on the feedback
your customers give you?
From NPS surveys to testimonials, there are a lot of ways to gather
information about customer satisfaction. For SaaS companies with a
high-touch approach to customer success, agents are likely building a
relationship with the customer. That means that it’s easy for them to
simply ask:
“How are you finding all of this? Are you getting set up well enough? Is
there anything we could be handling better for you?”
Again, there will be a difference in how you interact with high and low-
ticket customers. For that reason, you’ll want to get systems in place
which automatically gather feedback and index it.
Customer support
I already talked about the customer support process for SaaS
companies a couple weeks back, and detailed how we do it. For us, not
a single part of that is automated. We make sure that we’re reading and
responding to every ticket that comes our way, and we’re working to
make the system more efficient by changing the way we work.
Support is a time-consuming function for companies, especially large
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ones which deal with a lot of customer requests. If you want to give
tailored responses to customers, the best way to automate some of
the process is by providing a quality FAQ and selection of help articles
and make support a last resort.
Find out about our support process and get tips from how a small
SaaS company manages support (without a dedicated department) by
clicking here.
Ensuring renewals
Every day is an opportunity for a customer to churn out — or fail to
renew their subscription. While much of this is in the hands of the
product team to ensure the ‘stickiness’ of the app, there are some
things customer success can make sure they do (both automated and
non-automated) to help reduce churn.
One reason behind churn that’s worth protecting yourself against is
expired payment methods. This is when the customer’s card is declined,
most likely because they have switched their main card or changed
banks.
According to Chargebee, ‘the single largest contributing factor to
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payment processing errors is having an expired credit card on file’. How
do you protect yourself against this kind of churn?
Well, as Lincoln Murphy said, there’s a right way and a wrong way. The
wrong way is that a customer is billed, the card is flagged as expired,
then a member of staff tries to contact the customer to get their new
details.
The right way is to have an automated alert set up which sends an
email to the customer telling them their card has expired and sends
them to a page where they can input the new details. Here’s a look at
the simple email we send here at Process Street:
If you want to create your own version and run it every time you get a
high-value customer, create a Process Street account to get started.
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The Complete Guide to Customer Success for SaaS Companies
09.
What do Customer
Success Managers
Actually do all day?
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14 SaaS Companies
Reveal Their Customer
Success Process
People with ‘Customer Success’ in their job title haven’t been around for
very long. They’re kind of like Sales, but not focused on selling. They’re a
bit like support, but don’t deal with just any old tyre-kicker.
For products like a t-shirt, there’s no need to make sure customers get
success. If they bought it, wear it and like it, that’s enough. SaaS, on the
other hand, can be complex stuff. Customers are at risk of giving up on
things they don’t understand, can’t figure out how to implement or can’t
get the rest of their team using.
Customer Success teams are so vital for the health of SaaaS companies
because, like Lua’s Jason Krigfeld says:
That puts the customer in a position of power, and thanks to the death
of vendor lock-ins, every day is an opportunity for cancelation.
“ We don’t sell boxes anymore. We sell services ”
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What do Customer Success
teams actually do?
On a business level, the job of a Customer Success team is to reduce the
company’s churn rate (amount of cancelations over a period of time).
How is that done?
When searching around for the step-by-step guide, it would seem the
answer is ‘in top-secret conditions’. While it’s understandable that it
could be the secret sauce of companies with high-value customers, the
lack of content in the area is startling. This said, one thing’s for sure:
The days of shelfware are over. SaaS companies don’t sell boxes
because modern customers won’t buy them. Customers buy results,
and it’s the job of the tool plus the guidance to get them.
When it comes to Customer Success for SaaS companies, it’s a young
field and a lot of businesses are only just starting to get to grips with it.
So, let’s take a look at what I found when I interviewed the Customer
Success Managers from 12 SaaS companies with the question: ‘What’s
your customer success process?’
Here’s what the Customer
Success process looks like…
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There’s a lot of variation in the specifics depending on the company,
but there’s a definite structure.
1.
Customer Success launches into action the day a payment
is received or free-trial secured – anywhere between 5-60
minutes after signup. It depends on how ‘qualified’ (read:
rich) the customer is and whether you’re wooing enterprises
or startups.
2.
Next up is the ‘what do you want?’ stage, known as
requirements gathering. Basically, this is getting on the
phone and collating the hard facts of the matter from the
decision-makers of the company. Stuff like ‘What problem
are you solving? What do you want to use our app for?
When is the event?’.
3.
Figure out who the decision-makers are — this will help the
app spread around the organization by getting managers to
onboard their team. That equals more users and money for
you, but also success for their organization.
4.
Find how they currently solve the problem — Tools,
processes, systems used before they decided to go with
your service. Link the features of your app to the problems
they’re having, be tailored and specific — make sure that
they not only get their desired outcome but that you are
able to communicate and demonstrate how you’ve done
that for them.
5.
Send training material (custom PDF documents, videos)
and schedule live webinar training, if necessary.
6.
Stay in touch pro-actively, with early regular check-ins
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and event-based outreach later down the line. Analyze the
effectiveness with automated metrics, manual checks and
surveys.
7.
Send an NPS survey, evaluate and keep an ‘open door’.
Be the first point of contact when any questions or issues
come up.
Stickiness: how Customer
Success makes your
company more money
Since the purpose of having a customer success process is to reduce
churn, SaaS companies have to reassure their customers that they’ve
made the right choice and guide them to first value as quickly as
possible.
This means linking product features to desired outcomes and showing
the customer an overview of what will happen and when.
Ambition takes a self-service approach to adoption by keeping a huge
range of help center content available on its site, whereas Lua actually
creates customer material for each client, whether that’s PDFs, videos
or training webinars.
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The ‘stickiness’ of an app can be a tough thing to perfect, but some
apps are better suited at permeating a company than others because
they are an ‘all or nothing’ system. Take Lua, for example — either
everyone in a team, department or company is using the same
messaging platform or no one can communicate properly.
While this is harder to set up, once it is perpetuated by customers who
love it, the spread and influence is viral, as employees miss out on
their messages by not being part of the system. This makes it harder to
remove, too.
By working closely with team project managers, adoption can be
a natural, internal process rather than something forced from the
outside. “The last thing someone wants is to be surprised by an app”,
says Jason Krigsfeld, Client Success Manager at Lua. That’s why it’s
important to manage expectations right from the start (before your
customer is even a lead).
Make training material easy to digest. The days instruction manuals are
long gone, and Customer Success teams don’t want to bring that back.
By using the same principles of readability you’d use in your marketing,
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you’re more likely to get customers to engage and understand the
product. That’s things like infographics, text in short chunks, videos.
‘Infiltrate’ the organization by working closely with managers to
spread the product. Lua helps the Project Manager write an email
explaining what the app is, giving some social proof and asking them to
make an account and get the app, etc.
Let’s look at some more ideas from Do, Chargify and Chameleon to
reduce churn and increase customer happiness.
Build stickiness into your process
What makes an app sticky? How do you make sure that it’s simply not an
option to switch to another product or revert back to the good old ways?
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Do communicate every day
Do recommend converting customers into power users slowly and gently,
by offering help and demonstrating the value of your product. CEO Jason
Shah says to sow the seeds of success early by ensuring the customer
feels totally comfortable when migrating over from their existing system.
Tip: Be on the top of your customer’s mind by staying visible, keeping
open communication and taking any opportunity to demonstrate value.
Chargify catch customers before
they have chance to churn
Adam Feber from Chargify says they have recently set up a new system
to catch at-risk customers:
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Chargify’s software is all about making sure SaaS companies get
their due payments, so they are uniquely informed about it. They do,
however, realize that churn happens and you can make the best out of
a bad situation.

Tip: Always follow up with users who cancel their subscription. Even if
you can’t get them to come back, you can find out how to improve your
product and its stickiness.
“ We are starting to identify red flag metrics that should
warrant outreach from our customer success team.
Some of these flags include accounts that are past
due (and not responding to our dunning notifications),
accounts that could save money by upgrading (currently
paying overages), accounts where activity has dropped
off, etc. The goal is to reach out and re-engage with
these customers before they churn. ”
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Chameleon add customers to a Slack
channel for direct communication
Still in private beta, Chameleon is in the early stages of setting up a
true customer success process with dedicated staff. Right now, the CEO
Pulkit Agrawal adds customers to the company Slack group so they can
have a chat with the whole team. This helps customers form a close
relationship with the founders, reduces the amount of support tickets
and speeds up adoption.
Since Chameleon is software that lives inside SaaS platforms and helps
with user onboarding, Pulkit takes a typically UX-based view toward
customer success which involves taking your customer from discovery
to their ‘Aha! Moment’ in a few easy steps.
Tip: Users are less likely to give up on something they feel a personal
connection to. By adding them to your company’s Slack channel and
talking to them like friends, you can make deeper connections and find
out what they (and everyone like them) wants from your product.
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Here are some unique approaches
to Customer Success
While a generic process is a good jumping-off point, everyone’s take is
different when it comes to ‘what makes a happy customer’.
Lua acts as a go-between for departments that
refuse to talk to each other
At Lua, there isn’t a hand-off between Sales and Customer Success. The
two departments work interchangeably and coordinate the whole process.
The push to adopt comes from Lua’s customer success team but is
communicated by the client-side Project Manager. Lua helps the
customer’s project manager write an email to their department
explaining what Lua is, which teams use it, and how it will improve
communication. Jason says:
“ Sometimes my job involves helping people from
different departments communicate who aren’t
communicating because they can’t stand each other. It
goes beyond tech. ”
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DoubleDutch teaches its customers Marketing 101
DoubleDutch’s Customer Success process has a short life-span and a
definite end point. That’s because it creates apps for events, and when
the event is over, the app is no longer useful. Essentially, the apps are
disposable yet the customer relationships are the main asset because
they could buy event apps year after year.
Similar to Lua, DoubleDutch’s product (the app created for the event)
isn’t something that is any use if it’s just being used by 3 people. It
needs to be common ground for event attendees and enhance the
experience.
The secondary challenge, after creating the app, is getting customers
at the event to adopt it. The way they do this by teaching their
customers ‘Marketing 101’ — clear event signage, email drip campaigns,
etc. A recent reorganization of the Client Services department into
Implementation and Customer Success means that the most technical
side of the process can be left to Implementation while Customer
Success focuses on ensuring event attendees will actually use the app.
Ambition celebrates customer’s successes publicly
Taking a look at Ambition, reward system doesn’t just automatically
praise great sales teams with their favorite Ambition Anthems. The
Customer Success team themselves reach out to record sales people
and congratulate them for hitting high-scores. Travis Truett says:
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What happens when
the process is over?
Communication dies down
While the job of Customer Success reps is never truly over, the
relationship between them and their customers generally dies down
after onboarding.
Alex Bakula-Davis from Proven says it depends on the customer’s
engagement with the app, and that engagement dictates when the
process is over. There are automated processes in place that tag users
as ‘at-risk’ and notify Customer Success to get in touch because of
reasons like low applicants, posting issues and not using features.
“ We recognize awesome user performance on
Ambition, publicly. Just last week, one of our clients,
Fitzmark, notified us of a new user high score on
Ambition, breaking 600. We broadcast that new
“Ambition Score” record on social media to provide
additional public recognition for that user and for
Fitzmark. ”
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The length of the process ranges between 7-30 days, depending on
how much implementation the app needs or whether there’s a natural
usage lifecycle.
The fact that the customer’s success often depends on an open line
of communication, so while the initial ‘buzz’ of client onboarding dies
down after implementation, the relationship between the customer’s
decision-maker and the success rep is maintained.
Analysis comes into focus
Directly after implementation is the time where success reps start
looking at use data and making sure that it indicates the customer is
using and understanding the software.
Jason from Lua says that he will always send a survey after 2 weeks,
both to collect specific information about that customer, and to
evaluate their customer success process as a whole.
Thierry Schellenbach from Stream, an app that helps you build
activity feeds, handles post-success free accounts support tickets with
StackOverflow – an SEO tactic and a way to get support agents for free
– while paid accounts are checked in with regularly and more closely
analyzed.
A common characteristic between all interviewed companies is an NPS
survey, which asks customers to rate their own satisfaction on a scale of
1-10.
Companies might have several automated processes running alongside
manual check-ins, ensuring that communication is tailored to the
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customer’s situation but also doesn’t take an overwhelming amount of
time or is accidentally missed.
Stay on the lookout for
upsell opportunities
Part of the beauty of having a dedicated Customer Success team is that
you establish an open line of communication with your customers and
have someone who is directly responsible for the health of an account.
While sales teams would traditionally be checking in with customers to
offer them upgrades, using a dedicated team leaves Sales to focus on
closing deals with new customers.
By analyzing the client’s workflow, Customer Success managers can get
an idea of the account usage and offer a higher package at the right time,
or access to an add-on that will make the customer’s life easier. Saas API
ad server Adzerk says the process can stretch on for over a year because
the Customer Success is in tune with the growth of their clients:
“ “We try to establish ways to grow the relationship and
that’s when Customer Success and Sales work together
to identify add ons, new tiers and areas where clients can
upgrade to help them use more of our tools to grow. ”
— Alejandro Sanchez, Adzerk