SaaS Companies Live or Die by Customer Success

Why giving your customers the royal treatment is the key to driving business success — for both you and your customer.

While SaaS is incredibly pervasive in today’s technology landscape, it hasn’t always been the dominant business model. Before SaaS was mainstream, legacy software vendors interacted with customers on a perpetual transaction basis and focused on relationship management with decision makers and lacked the visibility into how the customer was benefitting from the software.

This created a completely disjointed experience between legacy enterprise software vendors and customers. The common method for interfacing with customers was periodic in-person visits. When a vendor has thousands of customers, this meant seeing a given customer once every few years. Video conferencing technology was incredibly challenging, and with the lack of smooth telecommunication capabilities and the one-and-done transactional nature of business operations, the feedback loop was very slow.

Understandably, this affected business performance for these customers as well as how they were using the software and their overall experience.

SaaS created an opportunity to develop a one-to-one relationship with the customer, now with visibility into how she is using the vendor’s software stack. This enabled a new function now commonly known as Customer Success with companies like Salesforce and NetSuite trail-blazed the way. Later, companies such as Gainsight and Totango came along and applied a new methodology and discipline to the Customer Success profession, building a software solution to manage the entire customer lifecycle.

The fundamental difference is that SaaS companies have to earn the customer’s trust and business with every new software version, every renewal, and realize that it’s an ongoing relationship — or you will go out of business quickly. It requires a unique DNA to understand this new paradigm of one-to-one interaction and the value we, software vendors, should provide.

This is the experience we wanted to design at Samanage. The customer experience starts the moment anyone lands on our web properties and continues into how they use and interact with our products. Their usage profile and the actions they take help us to understand their needs, their pain points, and how they realize value from our solutions. We live in a culture that not only values but demands instant gratification. Imagine a prospect sitting at his or her computer, waiting for the answers they need. Our goal is to provide those answers instantly — we’re always online and available.

Luckily, thanks to the one-to-one nature of customer relationships and our ability to measure customer and prospect interactions with us throughout their journey, we’re able to create a feedback loop that takes minutes or in some cases is instantaneous.

What are the main considerations of the customer journey?

Prospects are able to self-qualify. Will our product solve their pain point? The sales process helps to facilitate this upfront assessment. Assuming a mutual fit is identified, and the prospect becomes a customer, it is essential that the customer implement the solution using best practices.

At Samanage, we have an amazing Implementation team that has taken thousands of customers through the value creation process. Its sole focus is to work with new customers to get them up and running quickly in a way that best suits their needs, and to do it based on our best practices. We’re talking days to take customers live and realize success, not months or even quarters like legacy on-premise vendors. The quicker a customer can start running on your solution, the quicker they are able to see value in the product.

Once the customer is up and running with our solution, the next step in the journey is to identify opportunities to go beyond the adoption of existing features or functionality. From new capabilities they may not be aware of to matching an existing solution to a new need they’re trying to solve, sharing best practices, and educating customers on ways we can better service their organization. As you continue to develop the partnership and trust, this requires a deep understanding of the customer’s needs — and devising a plan to deliver the best solution to meet the customer’s needs, continually.

As SaaS vendors, we must continuously earn our customers’ business every single day. If we fail to do this, there are plenty of competitors ready and willing to pick up your slack when the customer choose not to renew.

You earn the business on an ongoing basis by providing customers with the continuous value from your solution. Per step 3 above, it’s our responsibility as vendors to constantly communicate with our customers. From a technology standpoint, using tools like Intercom and Gainsight, we have deeper insights into how customers are using our technology so that we can more easily identify opportunities to reach out and provide value based on their usage. From a relationship standpoint, earning the business again is based on the value, trust, and partnership we continuously build with the customer.

At Samanage, our guiding motto has always been, “The Customer is King.” and it’s what we should all be thinking about day in, day out.

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