Every SaaS business lives and breathes by reducing churn and increasing recurring revenue. Monthly Recurring Revenue is a SaaS metric that you should be tracking in order to see where your SaaS business stands. SaaS investors prefer to invest in companies where most of their cash flow and total revenue come from recurring revenue. This blog focuses on the excellent customer success techniques that will help you improve your recurring revenue.
If you’re tired of watching the constant value of that metric without any growth, then probably it’s high time you should start thinking about it. This blog will walk you through some genuine reasons why you should not miss out on investing in Customer Success. Covering some solid customer success strategies that can help elevate the customer retention process of your SaaS business thereby reducing churn and increasing the recurring revenue.
Why you should invest in Customer Success?
Number one growth driver
Customer Success is a core growth driver. It helps companies keep up with the accounts they’ve closed, and maintain, retain, and expand them. In order to keep your edge in a competitive market, CS has to be leveraged to nurture relationships with your customers. Happy customers lead to increased revenues, and a positive word-of-mouth campaign advocating on behalf of your company.
Easy retention via customer success
Additionally, companies need Customer Success teams because they provide value, and a lot of time, even up to five times more than the new leads from Sales. This eventually means that sustaining the existing users is easier than acquiring new customers. Thus making a conclusion that customer retention is the key.
8 proven Customer Success strategies to increase your recurring revenue
Monitoring User Engagement
User engagement strategy forms the foundation of customer success management, and this user engagement journey continues throughout the lifetime of the customer. Post-sales, as you begin defining the customer success journey. For example, onboarding becomes the first test of the user engagement strategy. Robust onboarding sets the tone for how engaged your customers will be. Your onboarding strategy should fundamentally lie in your own product and the service you want to offer.
Suggested Read: The Ultimate Guide To Onboarding
Here are a few strategies to boost user engagement-
- Monitor the usage level of the product. Like, as to how often users log in and actively use the product. Track the key features defined in the user journey. If they have been able to achieve milestones or not.
- Measuring Product Stickiness- You can use DAUs and MAUs to measure “stickiness.” This metric represents how happy your customers are with your product or service based on how frequently they are returning. It’s an effective way to predict how likely users are to stick with your brand and eventually give signals for renewals and lead to customer advocacy.
Increasing renewal rate
Increasing the renewal rate by 5% can lead to exponential growth for the company. And it is much easier to retain existing customers than to find new customers. High renewal rates in SaaS provide a stable revenue source every month which helps you to focus on upsells, advocacy, and acquiring new customers. From monitoring your customer’s product adoption to focusing on the customer experience it all eventually nurtures your clients to make them renew your product. Know more on “How to ensure SaaS renewal rate ?”
Here are a few Customer Success strategies to increase your renewal rate –
- Monitor Customer Health regularly and track customer problems to fix them right away.
- Keep tracking your SaaS retention metrics to success in the churn and retention game.
- Send personalized tips to customers when they complete a milestone, this will add value to customers’ efforts and will encourage them to stay. Thus eventually boosting customer engagement.
- Understand customers by talking to them and learning their features and understanding their needs. Through personalized renewal conversations, you can keep your customers as much as possible.
- Identify the sticky features for each customer segment to further nurture them.
Check out for 10 Best SaaS retention strategies here.
Providing proactive customer support
According to Groove, for every customer who complains there are 26 customers who don’t say anything. Instead of vocalizing their frustrations to your support team, they simply stop buying from you and/or cancel their subscription.
Proactively reaching out to customers is a great way re-engage customers that are potentially unhappy or on the verge of quietly disappearing, never to buy from you again.
Being proactive in business always pays off, especially when it comes to customer feedback. Companies often start collecting feedback from customers when they see a downfall in specific metrics.
Instead of waiting for warnings and signals, companies should proactively engage and ask customers about their opinions and experience. Make customers part of your product team and not mere end-users who come to you with support tickets.
Upselling the right way
Upsell to existing customers, which is more or less the direct window to the Recurring Revenue for your business. Tracking SaaS upsell metrics can be a major boon to your business.
SaaS upsells have to be engineered as they are not going to happen on their own. You need to figure out a process to find out a path. Check out SaaS upsell strategies. When your customers start seeing value from your product or service they will be more open to an upgrade. But for that matter, identifying the account which is ready for an upsell is a task that cannot be nailed without using a tool. CustomerSuccessBox’s upsell signal features could make your job extremely easy. Here, you can create upsell segment to track accounts for upsell signals. You will be able to monitor product usage to determine the engagement level of an account. Thus your job of mining the account ready for an upsell is sorted quickly.
Ensure a guided onboarding experience for your customers
Providing a guided onboarding experience will ensure early value to the customers based on their use case. This could be done with the help of a Customer Onboarding playbook that comes in handy to track product adoption and progresses the account through the onboarding process. The more you personalize the onboarding experience for your customer, the better it helps drive success for your clients. Clarify their goals upfront, and then provide them with training that is specific to their goals.
Creating “aha” moment for customers
Customer engagement is a gateway to customer advocacy. Providing a great customer experience using monotonous methods might make the customer engagement process feel sterile which should be polished from time to time. The solution is to drive those ‘aha’ moments with customer success. The CSMs can come up with innovative ways to aha consumers, from providing free gifts to special invitations to product upgrades. Aha moment help translates regular customers into becoming top clients. A simple “aha” moment for a customer could do wonders and result in client referral, account renewal, an upsell, etc.
Segmenting customer base to identify your valuable customers and enable repeatable growth
Start to organize your customers into specific segments. Since different segments will require different levels of support, you can use this data to refine your customer success strategy and allocate resources more effectively.
Involve your customers in your product development
Sometimes your greatest source of ideas for new products and/or product features come directly from your customers. For that reason, it’s important to have a way to collect, organize, and prioritize incoming suggestions from your customers.
Let your customers know that you appreciate their suggestions. When your customers see that you actually follow through on creating products and/or features that they have asked for, it helps to instill within them a sense of pride and ownership for your product, knowing that their feedback contributed to its development.
Finally, look out for a Customer Success tool
It all boils down to the fact that growing the recurring revenue is not an overnight task. It is altogether a journey and a process that has to be strategized in the best way possible to provide customer success to your clients. To achieve this you need to take the assistance of a Customer Success Tool. That will help you manage and identify your upsell signals, monitor user engagement, and analyze product stickiness and every essential that will drive the recurring revenue of your SaaS business. Check out our extensive guide to know the top customer success tools.
P.S: The featured image is from pexels.com.
