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

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

4. Improve the most important features.

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

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

Forentrepreneurs call these characteristics sticky. The main feature of the sticky characteristic is that it grows into the daily work of the client. The client becomes not only extremely involved (remember point one), but also dependent on this characteristic, thereby reducing the outflow.
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5. Improve customer experiences

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

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

In the CMS article, the authors discussed “Optimal SaaS Support Capabilities.” The subject of the article was to give maximum attention to the impressions of the client. Negative impressions can quickly scare away the client, while positive impressions hold this client.

Paying more attention to impressions, you can keep customers who are already on the verge.

6. Provide upgrades, discounts, or various rewards.

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

Surprising a customer is a reliable way to increase satisfaction. In the course of a selective trial, the researchers found that when the waiter brings a small gift to the customer (for example, peppermint), customers who were surprised by this gesture left an average of 23% more tips.

Leading journalist for Peter Economy magazine reports that “the secret to providing excellent customer service is to surprise a customer — to do something for them that they did not expect. These are the most unexpected impressions that leave stories in the memory of customers that they want to tell. ”

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

• Free features
• Additional memory
• Month of free use
• Discount subscription for a year

To surprise and delight customers is an important business strategy. As stated in the Salesforce Guide, "SaaS companies should make their customers happy every day so that they want to return."

7. Do business in the open

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

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

There is one thing you can do to change a client's skeptical point of view: conduct business in the open.

Recent security breaches have taught the general public not to trust big data companies. From this point of view, they can not trust any SaaS. If credit card information and social security number are just one click away from public access, then why put yourself at risk?

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

1. Notify users about interruptions
2. Notify users in advance of changes in prices or contract terms
3. Explain to users what their money is spent on.
4. Answer all questions arising from potential customers.
5. Provide customers with the ease of cancellation of the service

As soon as you begin to achieve full transparency at every level of business, then you will begin to gain the trust of existing and potential customers. When you reach a turning point, your customers will not even think about leaving.

8. Concentrate on optimizing customer retention (not customer conversion).

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

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

Retention is not so much in product optimization as in the user's understanding. The Customer Success Association writes that "This is something you do not know about the relationship with your customer, and that may lead to the fact that you lose it."

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

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

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

Simple improvements in retention rates can seriously affect your company.

findings

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

From the point of view of customers, the subscription connects them with the best brands, products and services that they love and need for a certain time. These brands must really resonate with customers, and that is why they want to persuade them to make regular payments.

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

The end result of the above points is that your brand inspires confidence. This level of trust in the brand maintains itself. You become the “best brand” from the point of view of the client. You become a SaaS, "which they love and need." This kind of customer loyalty, in turn, further strengthens the credibility of the brand.

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

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