Top 5 customer success best practices for SaaS

Customer Success best practices are critical for your Customer Success strategy, so what are the best ways to create an efficient and customer centric business?

What Are Customer Success Best Practices?

The top five customer success best practices are the following:

• Personalize every customer experience

• Track customer metrics

• Create a Customer Success playbook

• Develop a customer journey map

• Keep in mind retention and churn

Personalize the Customer Experience

No one wants to feel like just another number, especially your customers. Personalizing your service to match an individual’s needs is an excellent way to build trust, increase retention, and make people feel valued.

Start by listening to the customer and the data they generate. For instance, early on during onboarding you’ll want to learn the customer’s goals, expectations, and challenges. You can personalize their onboarding and training experience based on their answers. Use active listening with your customers throughout their life cycle within the product.

Keeping an organized record of your clients, the products they use, and their unique circumstances helps provide a highly personalized experience. Customer success software offers a centralized place to track these details and allows any service representative to immediately cater to that person’s needs.

But sometimes, a legacy tool can get in the way of the human-to-human interaction, since it's more built on the idea of “one size fits all.” Therefore, make sure you have a tool that´s easy to adapt to the unique needs of every client with the help of tracking, filters, triggers, and automations.

A modern customer Ssuccess tool should track customer health by reliably pulling data from multiple sources and transforming that data into actionable insights. For example, if a new five star review comes in, a good customer success tool should use additional data such as CSAT scores to identify if that person is a good fit for customer advocacy.

Track Key Customer Metrics

It’s hard to know if your Customer Success strategy is working without tracking the right metrics. Metrics such as the number of tickets closed or average phone call length don’t accurately track your efforts because they only measure the end result.

This leaves you helpless when answering questions like “How long did it take to resolve the issue?” or “How many times was this ticket reopened?” Missing these details can seriously impact your retention rates and customer satisfaction.

Your metrics will vary depending on your industry. For example, in software-as-a-service, the average churn rate hovers around 5%, with a good churn rate being below 3%. Collecting key insights and building internal key performance indicators will help ensure your success team is on track and make benchmarking your efforts against other organizations easier.

Below are a the most important KPIs you can track to better measure customer success:

• Churn

• Upsell, cross-sell and down-sell

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)

• Customer effort

• Gross revenue retention (GRR)

• Net revenue retention (NRR)

• Customer lifetime value

• Customer health score (CHS)

• Customer support tickets

For more information regarding these KPIs, read our blogpost on the Top 9 Most Important Customer Success KPIs.

Create a Customer Success Playbook

Customer Success playbooks create a concise and repeatable process to move your clients through your products as their needs evolve. Playbooks make it easy for customer success managers to overcome challenges and choose the right solution for the customers’ needs.

Playbooks provide a highly visual centralized space where team members can see what actions work well and what don’t. This helps guide the evolving strategy and prevents new team members from improvising as they learn.

Without a playbook, details could be lost that create friction between your brand and the customer. Without tracking what works and what doesn’t, brands can find themselves struggling to create predictable outcomes for their clients and their own sales goals. Think of playbooks as a simple “if-this-then-that” manual that helps your CSMs be proactive.

Customer success playbooks can help your business by doing the following:

• Reducing the onboarding time for new CSMs.

• Creating a standardized, high quality process.

• Automatically organizing your CSM’s tasks each day.

• Pinpointing problems and improving parts of your overall strategy.

Customer success playbooks have different levels of sophistication and will vary based on each company’s feature set and pricing.

Some companies start out building very basic playbooks, and some build advanced playbooks that are data driven and fully automated.

The four most common ways to build playbooks are as follows:

• Playbooks Triggered by Lifecycle Phase

• Playbooks Triggered by Events

• Playbooks Triggered by Schedules

• Playbooks Triggered by the CSM

Playbooks that use automation rely on customer data to trigger and alert or execute an action. It’s important to review each automation to ensure it's the right step to take for that specific customer.

To build a play in your playbook you’ll need an event and action. Keep in mind that different customers could share the same events but require different actions. Here are a few examples.

• When a customer reaches 1,000 email subscribers, automatically send a congratulations email with a call to action to schedule a 15-minute call.

• When a client begins to outgrow their current plan, initiate a free trial of the next tier and send an email.

• If a customer fails to login after 14 days, send personalized emails asking if they need help.

It's important to continuously review these plays to make sure they sync with your goals of your customer and your company.

Designing a Customer Success Journey Map

Customer success goes beyond simple support and rapport building. A customer journey map guides your clients through each one of your solutions throughout the life cycle stage and helps them maximize their value through your product or service. There are numerous stages in the customer journey, with each stage aligning with the clients goals and pairing those goals with your product.

Refine Your Onboarding Process

Onboarding is critical, as it’s the first real test in the connection between you and the people that you will hopefully establish a long-term relationship with. A refined onboarding process can quickly smooth out any issues early on. Guiding the client through one-time configurations and setup tasks ensures that they don’t get stuck and can start seeing the value immediately.

Communicate Early and Often to Improve Adoption

Customers need to adopt your solution in order to see the value in the product and achieve their goals. If technical problems arise or they simply don't understand the product, they may give up the product entirely. Close communication during the early stages of the customer journey can ensure that they see the value of the product and are using it effectively to reach their objectives.

Understand and Align Your Product with Your Customer’s Goals

In this stage, the customer will decide whether they want to renew their services or stop using them completely. Typically, if there are pitfalls in the earlier stages this can lead to increased churn. You can increase retention by guiding them through your product, understanding their goals early on, and providing prompt responses and resolutions to their issues.

Offer Relevant and Timely Upsells

Ideally, as the customer becomes more successful with your product, they will need additional services to support their success. But the expansion stage doesn’t have to feel like a hard upsell. When you’ve helped people achieve their goals and become heroes on their home turf, you can naturally suggest the next best products to help them achieve their future goals.

For more information and inspiration on how to create the best possible journey for your customer, read our blogpost: Customer Success Journey Map: A How-To Guide.

Planning for Retention and Churn

Churn is an inevitable part of business, but planning to reduce it is well worth your time. It’s between five to 25 times more expensive to get a new customer than it is to retain one. Customer success plays an integral role in reducing churn by identifying pain points early in the customer journey and working to immediately fix them.

Here are a few best practices that can reduce churn:

• Provide proactive support and communication. Even if things go wrong customers will notice that you were quick to respond and make things right. This shows you’re dedicated to providing a quality product and builds trust across your customer base.

• Analyze your data to see where churn exists in your organization. Review each stage of the customer journey for churn. Where do customers first become disengaged? What do recent reviews say about your product?

• Provide personalized support that aligns with your clients needs and goals. Identify their goals early and create a plan that puts your product to work for them.

• Create a collaborative culture, where you work together with your customers and align on their business goals. Also, make sure your software supports a collaborative way of working.

• Make sure all departments have access to the same data. The information about your clients that is within your software is as relevant to sales and marketing as it is to your customer success team.

How Planhat can help

Planhat connects all the customer data, gets actionable insights, and drives actions to manage renewals, reduce churn, and boost expansion.

Planhat also provides a unified view of your customers all in one place, identifies risks and opportunities, creates clear, repeatable processes through the customer life cycle, and offers multi-channel communication as well as customized inboxes for teams.

With Planhat Portals, it is possible to share success plans, playbooks, dashboards, goals, and documents, and you’re able to align on business goals with your clients in a branded Customer Portal.

Altogether, Planhat is a complete customer success platform that lets you track the KPIs that matter the most for the future growth of your business.

For more customer success best practices check out our customer success analytics post, or get started with our free Planhat demo.