Customer loyalty is at an all-time low.
That’s not bad-mouthing customer integrity; it’s purely a sign of the times.
We exist in a hyper-competitive age. Clients are constantly being wooed by offers from competitor products, trying to win over their business.
The SaaS business model is particularly susceptible. Typically operating on a month-to-month subscription basis, customers can cancel these short-term ‘contracts’ at the drop of a hat.
In addition, customers no longer have to worry about heavy-duty migration processes or lengthy implementation periods. This was a feature of legacy software systems, and users would often stay with a provider if only because the process of moving to a competitor presented such a drain on resources.
But in today’s SaaS world, changing software providers has become a streamlined process. Even data in the ‘stickiest’ SaaS platforms can now be extracted and migrated to a new provider with relative ease.
Furthermore, getting set up on a new SaaS platform can be as simple as adding your email to set up your account. With streamlined onboarding processes, intelligent products and free training sessions, getting up & running with a new software now takes days rather than months.
How can Customer Analytics help?
Operating in such competitive industries and managing customers who are always looking for a better offer is a challenge. So how can customer analytics help?
Customer Analytics provides the data to better understand your users and the opportunity to act proactively.
This can be the difference between retaining clients for life or losing them in the first month.
The benefits of Customer Analytics
1) Personalising your customer onboarding experience.
Customer analytics offers your company highly detailed insights into your user profiles. With this data, you can deliver exceptional, personalised onboarding experiences. Even if you are operating at scale, retaining a personal touch with each and every one of your clients increases the likelihood of your customers enjoying and finding value in your product.
By knowing your customer profiles intimately, you understand their aspirations and pain points. Therefore, you can customise their onboarding experiences accordingly to ensure you offer value early and cure their pain points faster than their existing provider. Guide them to the key features of your product you know they will value, and start them on their journey to be super-users of your product.
2) Act proactively to prevent churn.
When a customer displays lagging signs of churn, such as inactive periods, or low NPS feedback, it can often already be too late. No matter how quickly your CS team act, by this stage, they already have a foot out the door, and your competitors are halfway there to claiming their business.
But, with diligent use of customer analytics, your team can be notified of the leading indicators of churn and act proactively to resolve these issues before they develop into problems.
Your analytics could tell you, for example, that a new client has not enabled their key activation features after two weeks of using your product. This can prompt your CS team to get in touch to book a retraining session and guide the client through getting these features set up. Again, this ensures they experience value from your product early on, before their minds start wandering to how your competitors could solve their problems…
3) Identify and nurture super-users into product champions.
Knowing your customer base intimately not only reveals clients at potential risk of churn but also identifies your super-users through segmentation. These are customers who have activated all of your best features and are highly engaged with your product. By knowing who these clients are, your Sales team can reach out and request referrals.
Super-users are the most likely to refer your services, having experienced such value from your product. Rather than spending $1000’s on paid ads to bring in new leads, all these warm leads ‘cost’ is your team’s time to pick up the phone and request the referral. Not only that, but referred users are 3-5x more likely to convert into paying clients.
4) Make informed decisions on product iterations.
Struggling to decide which features to build or iterate? Don’t leave it down to gut instinct; follow the data!
With customer analytics, you can perform A/B tests on your user base to understand how they might respond to future updates to your product. Or, use the analytics event tracking to uncover areas of your product causing friction to the user journey and prioritise these on your product roadmap.
By understanding and acting on customer data, you can ensure you continue to build a product aligned with your customers’ goals, giving them no need to look elsewhere for competitor offerings.
But, it’s not only about having the data.
The future success or failure of many SaaS business will be split by those who understand and act on customer analytics and those who do not.
And note the second step is just as important as the first! It is no good just having the data from your customer analytics; you need to act on it in order to receive the full benefit.
