8 progressive tips on how to never lose SaaS clients (part 1)

Losing customers is always sad. Losing customers is losing money. In SaaS, we call this customer churn. Customer churn is defined as "the percentage of service subscribers who unsubscribe from this service for a certain period of time."

Most of the banal reading on this topic will tell you "make a great product!" Or "excellent customer service." I do my best for an excellent product and excellent customer service, but I also assume that you are familiar with basic concepts. The time has come for more progressive tips.
Below you will find eight progressive tips. You will get acquainted with the strategic and methods to avoid the outflow of loyal customers, causing losses. Here is what you need to do:

1. Work on engagement

Retaining your SaaS clients is not an easy task. The list of "hacks" and "tricks" on this topic will not help here. Therefore, I want to start with a progressive technique built on the concept of engagement.
In SaaS, engagement occurs when a customer uses and benefits from SaaS. Apptegic defines customer engagement as the relationship between customer time and attention to your product.

Lincoln Murphy proposed a broader definition:
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Involvement is when a client understands the value of your SaaS

In doing so, you choose whether involvement matters. Why? Because a customer who does not use your product is not going to continue to pay for your product. Think about it. If you pay $ 90 a month to subscribe to cable TV, but no one in your family uses it, you will most likely refuse it. In the same way, if your customers are not involved - do not use the service for which they pay - they will refuse it.

Rough statistics confirms this view. Totango surveyed about 1 million SaaS customers. Almost all failures "followed a period of non-use." Rare use is the main outflow engine, according to Bluenose research. If the customer is actively using your product, he is unlikely to refuse this service. On the other hand, if the user does not use your product, he will simply turn off.

To prevent customers from churning as a result of not using, you need to measure engagement. One way to measure engagement is to track product usage information. If a customer uses your product regularly, you have nothing to worry about. If the level of customer use of the product falls, you need to find out why he fell and what can be done about it.

Each SaaS has its own methods for tracking customer engagement and usage. Look at the illustration below. For Acme, reducing SaaS usage led to an alarm. The account is currently under threat of cancellation, as the data on the use of the service by the customer showed a significant decrease.

One of the easiest ways to measure engagement is to log in regularly. If a customer does not log in to their account within three weeks, their level of use drops. This is a kind of information that can be valuable when analyzing the outflow rate and determining measurement methods that correlate with reduced involvement.

Based on your engagement data, you need to make changes. The idea here is to encourage engagement. You can and should change the properties and functions of your product, but a more valuable way to keep a customer is to contact him personally. Whether an automatic email or a personal phone call, your goal should be to attract the attention of the client. When you seek the time and attention of a client, and re-attract him to your product, you increase engagement. And as soon as you increase engagement, you will lose significantly fewer customers.

2. Be able to prevent subscription expiration or cancellation of credit cards.

Involvement is a vast area. There are dozens of ways to track, measure or suggest engagement. I want to divert your attention from an extensive field of engagement to a narrower field to prevent credit card cancellation due to expiration.

If your SaaS uses constant credit card billing, then this is an important point for you. First of all, you should know the following about credit cards: most credit cards expire every three years. This means that on average 3% of your credit card subscriptions expire every month, or 36% of subscriptions per year.

Given these numbers, you will regularly come across overdue credit cards. Information about the expiration is part of the data necessary for working with the card, so you have this information.

Let customers know that their card will expire before this happens. Send an email or call a few weeks or months before the expiration date and remind them that the card will be expired soon. This function can be performed by some reminder services.

Often, credit cards may be rejected due to the fact that these cards were canceled, and not just expired. Many credit card providers have rather sensitive mechanisms that mark (and cancel) the card as a result of a seemingly minor reason. On this occasion, Healy Jones writes:

I realized that the greatest threat to software startups as a service is not something intimate and mysterious. This is the ugly fact that a huge number of credit cards are canceled without the user's fault.

One company that invests in enterprise software, Bessemer Venture Partners, says that "most of the customer churn is canceled credit cards." Whether cancellation, blocking, expiration or other problems with credit cards, it is important to maintain control over the situation.

3. Always sell

If you still do not understand this, being a SaaS - a company you should always sell. Venture Beat explains this problem right:

SaaS companies almost always sell, as they need to keep customers from wanting to click on the "Cancel" button every month. What does “always sell” mean in terms of SaaS?

- Create superior customer service. I promised you that I would not go into simple details in this article, but I must say this. Your customer service is an equally important part of SaaS than the software itself. After all, this is why it is called “software as a service”.

- Provide prompt deployment and quick configuration. Most SaaS sales cycles are really short, and this is exactly what the supplier and customer want. Customers who choose SaaS do this to save time, quickly deploy activities and work with a continuous stream of business operations. Your ability to provide them from this point of view is part of the overall method of selling a product.

- Have the ability to expand. As your client’s business grows, grow with it. Do not try to reinvent the wheel when a customer needs to add users or functionality. Create an interface that harmoniously matches the changing needs of clients.

- Make more simple improvements. One of the easiest ways to always be able to sell is to sell more. According to Insight Squared, “Overselling is the holy grail of SaaS companies.” Despite the fact that this may seem an exaggeration, keep in mind that SaaS companies that grow the fastest rely on super-sales to fuel growth (up to 35% of the total goods from super-sales).

Garrett Moon wrote correctly: “If our number one goal is to help our customers succeed, we have already developed the most successful sales strategy we need.” Here it means “sell wisely and avoid card cancellation”.

Let's just make sure that we do not forget about sales. The minute we move away from sales, we will start losing what customers are returning for.

Part 2