→ 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:
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.