A SaaS business’s success relies on acquiring and keeping users in your product.
And while an amazing product will attract customers—it's a great customer experience that'll keep them coming back.
To provide a brilliant SaaS customer experience, you need to assist your customers at every step of their journey. This article will look at aspects of the customer experience (CX) of SaaS businesses: the journey, touchpoints, interactions, and engagements that matter to and for your customers.
Follow this seven-step process to create a great customer experience for your SaaS company and drive business growth.
Summary
SaaS customer experience is your customers perception of their experience with your company.
SaaS customer experience matters because it can help you:
Build a competitive advantage
Optimize revenue, customer acquisition cost (CAC) efficiency, and renewals
Make better product development decisions
Create and optimize a SaaS customer experience by:
Discovering how customers engage with your product
Coordinate CX across departments to break down silos
Create an efficient onboarding process
Reduce customer friction and build delight into your product
Educate customers about your product
Improve your customer support
Track metrics that span the customer lifecycle
What is SaaS customer experience?
SaaS CX is your customers’ holistic perception of their experience with your company. The SaaS customer experience includes every interaction customers have with your employees, brand, messaging, and product across every channel and device. Essentially, it’s anything and everything that affects your customers’ perception of your brand.
A good SaaS customer experience provides users with value by helping them navigate the buying cycle, educating them, and encouraging them to stick with you. Success depends on whether customers can recognize this value.
Why does customer experience matter for SaaS businesses?
Good CX enables SaaS companies to:
Build a competitive advantage
Optimize how they drive revenue, customer acquisition cost (CAC) efficiency, and renewals
Make intelligent product development decisions
Your success as a SaaS business is completely dependent on customer experience. CX is what keeps customers coming back for more, and when they return again and again, you can improve retention and revenue and reduce churn.
Some of the world’s best SaaS companies have achieved long-term success because of their obsession with the customer experience—Slack and Zendesk are great SaaS experience examples.
Slack’s onboarding workflow is a great example of an engaging customer experience. It encourages new users to learn the product by actually using it, with a message prompt from Slackbot.
How to create and optimize a SaaS customer experience in 7 steps
Improving SaaS customer experience is about balancing customer and business needs.
Want to know how? Follow these seven steps to master your SaaS’s customer experience:
1. Discover how customers truly engage with your product
→ Why it matters: in the SaaS world, your product is your bread and butter. And an exceptional customer experience depends on how well you understand user behavior within your product—including why users take certain actions.
Product-led growth strategies like free trials or freemium models can give you a starting point for engaging prospects.
And tools like Session Replays give you early insight into how users explore, navigate, and use your product.
Allowing prospects to sign up and try your product for free improves customer experiences, and provides product teams with relevant behavioral data—the fuel you need to deliver a personalized customer experience, leading to a loyal customer and higher lifetime value.
On the other hand, companies that make it hard for customers to try their product may end up irritating them with a subpar user experience (UX).
What’s more, these companies lose the opportunity to learn about how customers interact with their product. This knowledge gap limits a SaaS business’s growth potential and can affect the CX, business goals, and product workflow.
2. Coordinate CX across departments to break down silos
→ Why it matters: the customer experience encompasses every touchpoint a customer has with your company—which means CX involves multiple stakeholders, with decisions often spread across multiple individuals or departments.
But different departments will likely approach CX with different goals, viewpoints, and information. And too many silos may frustrate your workforce, hurt company culture, and weaken customer experiences.
Here are a few signs that your company has become too siloed:
Customers may complain because their experience with a product or service doesn’t live up to what a sales representative or marketing message promised them
Sales teams may end up trying to sell a customer a product they already have
Users may receive conflicting information from different customer service team representatives
Marketing teams may create content irrelevant to users' current needs
Product teams may release features that add to the customer’s dissatisfaction and begin to erode the experience
To effectively evaluate and improve your customer experience, you have to look into various journeys, as well as countless touchpoints and interactions with users within your SaaS product.
→ Who’s involved: every team within a company—including marketing, sales, product, finance, engineering, and support—should play a role in the customer experience.
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It's important for team members to know what other team members are working on (in detail) so that they don't waste their time duplicating tasks or using the wrong tools. This encourages efficiency by eliminating wasted movement and double handling.
Ryan Fyfe
COO, WorkPuls
→ How to optimize it: to succeed with this approach, your SaaS company needs to align different departments around relevant product goals and metrics.
Team leaders should work together to develop a plan to improve knowledge sharing and encourage employees to adopt collaborative processes and technologies.
For example, product managers should align more closely with those in customer support, and use data and CS learnings to improve product development. This includes refining enhancement requests, sharing UX research, and tracking customer satisfaction progress.
Leaders also need to equip their teams with the tools and data to deliver customer experiences that advance prospects and customers from one stage to the next.
Becoming a truly collaborative organization takes time, but the effort improves productivity, ensures happier employees, and produces better customer experiences.
Pro tip: don’t just train your team to understand your customer—give them tools and a tone of voice they can rely on.
A customer-centric approach to every step is a must. Instead of looking around to see what’s happening, rely on listening to the needs of your customers and creating your own trends. That way, you can seamlessly spread the experience around different channels and make the customer feel they are talking to one strong brand.
Here are a few ways for your team to understand and empathize with your users:
Hold 1:1 user interviews. Hotjar by Contentsquare’s Engage tool lets you host and conduct customer interviews.
Review UX reports and on-site survey results
Make time to watch user screen recordings
Stay updated with customer feedback
3. Create an effective onboarding process
→ Why it matters: SaaS companies that understand customer experience and expectations are shifting to a new customer acquisition process.
The goal is to reduce the time it takes, as well as the friction involved, for a buyer to try the product. The way to do it is to implement an effective onboarding process—which is the time when new customers learn how to use a new product, ask questions, and resolve initial doubts.
A personalized onboarding plan is an absolute must-have for building long-term relationships with your users. If a user experiences a poor onboarding process and ends up confused or frustrated, it can be detrimental to your growth—especially considering it sets the tone for future purchases or interactions with your business.
→ Who’s involved: building long-term relationships with your customers starts with a good onboarding plan. That should come together as a collaboration between the customer success team—taking care of user data—and the product team—taking care of operations and administration.
→ How to optimize it: onboarding new users can be tricky, but it isn't magic—it's engineered. The most successful SaaS experience examples—like HubSpot and Trello—put processes in place that streamline onboarding and reduce the time from when a prospective customer lands on the website to the time they start to use the product.
To engineer a great onboarding experience for your customers, you can (and should) implement, optimize, and test your way toward the ideal product experience.
Use surveys to collect feedback on your onboarding process, and then lean into the survey insights to refine it.
Some tips:
Remove any unnecessary steps or fields from your signup flow
Don’t show your users more features than they need to see to activate
Build contextual, interactive walkthroughs instead of linear product tours
Create experiences for different user personas
Keep it simple. You won’t be able to teach the customer everything during your onboarding process. Instead, empower your customers to find additional information on their own.
For example, it can be helpful to have a customer-facing knowledge base or help center that allows them to easily find the training materials, FAQs, and tutorials they need to succeed with your product or service. Make sure the information you are sharing is:
Comprehensive so users have all the information they need at their fingertips
Accessible from anywhere and at any time to help customers succeed with your product or service quickly, efficiently, and painlessly
Pro tip: when’s the last time you went through your own onboarding process?
Becoming your own customer is one of the best ways to find and solve issues or gaps in your customer experience. Eat your own dog food, as they say.
Going through your own onboarding puts you in your customers' shoes to see what improvements you can make moving forward.
4. Reduce friction as much as possible and create customer delight
→ Why it matters: the revolutionary SaaS business model is already a truly modern user experience. But the secret to delighting customers—and making sure they come back for more—is enabling an effortless end-to-end experience.
Companies that provide an effortless user experience are rewarded with increasingly higher conversion and retention rates, loyalty, and reduced customer service costs and decreased SaaS churn rate.
Reducing customer effort with products that are remarkably easy, quick, and enjoyable to use also creates a sense of goodwill and connection between your brand and your customers.
→ Who’s involved: reducing customer effort requires cross-functional product and support teams, and a customer-led approach to gathering feedback and putting it to use.
Consider the talent you need to communicate with while remaining agile. This could mean Product Managers, developers, QA resources, as well as representatives from customer support and customer success departments—all working together to identify points of friction, understand the user experience, customer behavior, and the why behind it.
→ How to optimize it: make it easy to do business with you by reducing the customer’s effort wherever they are on their journey:
Gather and analyze customer behavior and feedback: when it comes to reducing friction, understanding customers and improving the user experience is a great place to start. For a SaaS product, this is where behavior analytics and product experience insights tools—like Session Replays, Heatmaps, and Voice of Customer—can help you understand user behavior and reveal their likes and dislikes, points of friction within the customer experience, and their blockers and pain points.
Redesign and improve their product based on feedback: now that you have the data you need to optimize your product, it’s time to start working on solving problems and providing your customers with the best CX possible. Identify the areas that need improvement, as pointed out by the customers themselves, and deliver what your users actually need and want from your product.
Make it easy for customers to self-serve: in the same way content marketing empowers prospective customers to self-educate, self-service allows them to evaluate a product. Provide efficient, friendly customer service and spend time optimizing those touchpoints, but also allow customers to self-serve where they want to. Focus on ensuring customers have what they need, when they need it.
Provide a user-friendly website experience: your website is the first impression of your SaaS company that your users experience. If they face difficulty navigating it or have to contact your company repeatedly to get an issue resolved (for example, needing to call after trying unsuccessfully to solve a problem through the website), it can impact their perception of the SaaS customer experience.
These elements are critical to your SaaS company, and therefore your customer experience. By optimizing elements that bring on these types of hurdles, you’ll be on the right path towards a smoother customer experience.
5. Educate your customers about your SaaS product
→ Why it matters: providing free educational resources creates additional value for customers, and is something every SaaS company should be doing to improve the customer experience.
Helping customers learn and grow using your product or service will make your brand memorable—and make customers more loyal.
→ Who’s involved: product and customer success teams should collaborate to make educational and product-related content more accessible to prospective and existing customers. Inputs from marketing and sales can also help shed light on various customer needs.
→ How to optimize it: here’s how to make sure you spend time creating content that’s useful to your customer experience (and your own objectives):
Keep it relevant: identify pain points and analyze what your customers need to be successful when using your product
Make your customers’ voices heard and taken into account: generate content to communicate your solutions clearly to them
Provide a self-service customer portal: empower customers with a knowledge base or learning portal where they can educate themselves on your product, find troubleshooting guides, and discover product-related information whenever they need it
6. Take your customer support to the next level
→ Why it matters: CX involves and affects every department within a company—but customers often interact with customer support more than other teams. With that in mind, SaaS companies should aim to enhance the support experience.
→ Who’s involved: in addition to their own research, product teams should look to the customer support and customer success departments to understand how customers feel about certain parts of the product experience, and help them identify new features and fixes to prioritize.
→ How to optimize it: here are a few tools that you can consider to take your customer support to the next level:
Self-service knowledge base: this allows customer support representatives to find answers to customer questions quickly, which will reduce customer frustrations and increase trust in your SaaS company. Additionally, a knowledge base can help customer support representatives build their knowledge and skills even when they’re not interacting with customers.
Surveys: on-site surveys let you collect feedback from users who are currently in your product, giving you insights on specific aspects and elements of your product or site. Capturing in-the-moment details and experiences from real users helps you be proactive with your support experience—anticipating the needs of your customers ahead of time and taking action, which prevents small issues from becoming big ones.
Chatbots: using omnichannel chatbots and virtual assistants lets you support your customers 24/7. You can even enable live chat on your website and application to help customers resolve their queries. By offering 24/7 support and immediate assistance, you can recognize customer needs and offer a more satisfying customer experience.
Feedback widgets: when placed throughout the product, a feedback widget lets customers express frustration and delight by highlighting specific elements of a page, rating how those elements make them feel with emoticons, and adding written feedback. That feedback helps you address and remove blockers, and identify and repeat what works.
Helpdesk: resolving technical difficulties is easier with a live or automated helpdesk, especially with the extra input of an omnichannel AI-powered solution.
Remember: you may not immediately get to everyone's problem, but you should create a culture of caring that your customers can trust. This shows customers that you are invested in their success, which leads to improved loyalty, and helps them evolve into advocates of your brand.
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Simply practice patience, empathy, and consistency. Fantastic customer service is all about continuous learning from past experiences. Always listen to your customers and communicate with them clearly for a faster resolution.
David Miller
Project Manager, ProProfs Project
7. Track metrics that span the customer lifecycle
→ Why it matters: the key to offering intrinsic value to your customers while operating in a competitive SaaS market is delivering an engaging experience throughout the customer lifecycle.
Customer experience used to be measured based on metrics like adoption and customer satisfaction. Today’s greatest customer experiences are based on metrics that provide insights that span the full customer lifecycle, unify customer data, and track customers’ personal journeys through the products they’re using.
Measuring CX should start during the sales process and extend all the way through the client lifecycle. This can ensure that the customer experience doesn’t end at adoption, but continues through to renewal and expansion.
By measuring your customers’ experience and analyzing the results, you can use the insight to improve your CX strategy.
→ Who’s involved: measuring CX involves everyone from the customer success team, who’s running customer experience surveys, to the CEO and other execs, who should sit in on interviews (or listen to recordings) to better empathize with customers and have a stronger appreciation for what you’re trying to accomplish.
→ How to optimize it: one of the best ways to improve your customers’ experience is to determine their end goal and define milestones to achieve it.Focus on long-term CX metrics that ensure customers achieve their desired outcomes from your product:
Customer Effort Score (CES): measures the effort required for a customer to achieve a goal (e.g. fix a problem, place an order)
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): whether a customer is satisfied with a specific element of their experience
Net Promoter Score® (NPS): measures customer engagement by analyzing the likelihood that customers will recommend you to friends or colleagues. Contentsquare’s NPS Surveys help you calculate (and quantify) customer engagement.
Having these goals in mind beforehand will help create and set customer expectations, which will in turn enhance customer service and satisfaction. By setting goals and KPIs, it will become easier for you to track the progress of your SaaS company.
Your ticket to a better SaaS customer experience
With a good CX strategy—and the right CX tools—you can provide the most exquisite SaaS customer experience throughout the entire lifecycle, resulting in satisfied and secure customers (which eventually leads to strong, long-term relationships).
Great customer experience is built on the values of your business and honed by what your customers want. It’s hard to replicate by competitors, and so gives you an edge that you can maintain throughout your business’s life.
FAQs about SaaS customer experience
What is SaaS customer experience?
SaaS customer experience is defined by each customer’s perception of your company, brand, and product. CX includes every touch point with the user, across every medium and device, including:
How you price your products
How you market your SaaS product
How you use the customer data you collect
How you support the customer
Simply put, a good SaaS customer experience means you are holistically helping your customers do what they came to your company to do (aka their job-to-be-done, or JTBD).
What is involved in a SaaS customer experience?
SaaS customer experience involves customer service, customer satisfaction, customer success, customer engagement, customer interactions, and much, much more. Some specific CX touch points include:
Product pricing
In-product UX
User feedback analysis
Marketing materials
Website browsing experience
Customer support
Up-selling
Product iterations
Why should you care about SaaS customer experience?
Attracting initial users is one part of running a company, but SaaS businesses also need to prioritize customer retention. Since SaaS products are membership- or subscription-based, keeping customers is a critical part of generating recurring revenue.
The customer experience serves as a huge differentiating factor for SaaS companies, and ultimately gives them an edge over their competition.
How can you improve your SaaS customer experience?
Essentially, every tangible and intangible element associated with your SaaS has potential to shift the customer perception and shape the experience.
Your strategy for identifying and achieving a better customer experience should revolve around continuous and detailed communication with our customers, both existing and potential.
Use a combination of quantitative and qualitative data to enhance your product, release and test new features, and create empathetic customer delight opportunities throughout the customer lifecycle.