Top SaaS Companies That Have the Best Customer Success Teams

Relationships are based on mutual trust, and business relationships are no exception. When an employee joins an organization, they must share common ideas and beliefs to work towards achieving the same goals. When an organization works with a client, it promises to deliver something, and in return, the client gives their trust. Confidence and trust are the basis of customer relationship management. Everything your company does should be aimed to earn your customers’ trust and to prove that your company is reliable.

Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses and other service-oriented companies know how important trust is, and they can measure it by measuring client retention. In turn, client retention depends on several factors, and one of the most important factors is customer success. According to statistics, 70% of successful companies note that customer success is very important for their business, while 51% of declining or stagnant companies disagree with this statement. When it comes to customer success, SaaS companies demonstrate an example of its influence on revenue and customer retention.

Customer Success: What Is It?

The concept of customer success has been around for a while. Businesses started to use customer success to fight churning. The main aspects of customer success are continuous customer engagement, data-driven presentations, and improved technology. Simply put, the customer success model requires teams to focus on helping customers get the best out of their product or service.

Customer success as a client retention system begins right after the sale. Effective customer success models are based on effective communication that focuses not on the features of your product but on how customers can benefit from using your product and how it can help them achieve their goals. In this case, the value of your product becomes crucial. You should drive value to your customers and emphasize it in communication.

The concept of customer success is quite simple: your business succeeds when your customers succeed. Businesses can define success in different ways, based on the objectives set by their customers before purchasing a product or service. You can teach your customers to maximize the value of your products or services to help them succeed and to show them how they can benefit from partnering with you.

Why You Need Customer Success

The customer success model enables companies to approach customer satisfaction in a more systematic and effective way. The concept of customer success connects SaaS account management, marketing, and sales, creating the necessary environment for building a more transparent engagement with your customers. This model enables you to build long-term relationships with your customers. Such relationships are more profitable. Besides, compared to client acquisition, long-term relationships with customers cost less to maintain.

For example, successful academic writing websites to a large extent rely on recommendations from their existing customers that bring the new ones. Besides, this industry is very competitive. Therefore, these companies need to provide an outstanding customer experience to make sure that customers will leave their positive reviews online, which will positively affect the company’s ratings.

Building strong relationships between businesses and customers is the main feature of the subscription economy so customer success is also crucial for any subscription-based business. SaaS companies are businesses with recurring revenue, and their margins for profit grow as customers stay with them. 70%-95% of revenues for such businesses come from upsells. The existing customers are much easier targets for upgrades and upsells, and the main factor in such strategies is continuous customer engagement.

Customer success is a growth strategy that offers great rewards while having minimum risks. The core of this strategy is upgrading customer management and improving the already existing structures and practices. This is a reason why many experts agree that customer success will become a mainstream practice. Now let’s take a look at SaaS companies with the best customer success strategies.

Top SaaS Companies With the Best Customer Success Teams

• Ambition - This is a SaaS company that offers a productivity monitoring system aimed to help millennial employees reach their highest potential. To make clients stick with the company, Ambition has chosen the self-service approach. The adoption of the company’s services is a continuous learning process, and its clients can find all the necessary help on the company’s website. Ambition also analyzes the data collected by its software and recognizes the most productive employees, organically integrating itself into the workplace and maintaining effective communication with its clients even if the sale happened a long time ago.

• DoubleDutch - It’s not easy to convince people to use your solution. DoubleDutch is a company that focuses on making event apps so they should do it as quickly as possible because their products only have value for a short period of time. The company managed to address this problem thanks to careful planning and dividing its client services department into two different divisions: the Customer Success division and the Implementation division. The Implementation division makes sure that the product works properly and helps with any technical issues, while the Customer Success team focuses on communication and convinces people who attend events to subscribe to the app.

• Insightly - This is a CRM software provider that focuses on building strong long-term relationships with its customers. The company pays particular attention to the onboarding process. Every client gets a customer success specialist who helps them use the software in the most effective way. The specialist is always ready to answer any questions. Insightly also has many instructional materials on its website and offers free trials to help leads familiarize themselves with their services.

• Unbounce - Unbounce is a landing page optimizer that helps digital marketers. This company has more than 10,000 users, which is a very impressive number given that the company has been around for less than a decade. The success of Unbounce is due to its strong client retention strategy which is based on customer success. Their customer success program includes Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for every stage of the process. The customer success team constantly develops new creative solutions and is looking for new ways to maximize the value they bring to customers.

• Totango
  This company knows everything about customer success because it’s a customer success software provider. It helps clients with customer success management, providing them with the necessary metrics, tools, and various cloud services. The main goal of this company is to provide clients with data that can help them make clients more successful and boost customer engagement. Instead of aggregating every insight and data point, the customer success team only focuses on the data that can be used to improve the customer journey.

Final Thoughts

SaaS businesses exist to help customers achieve their goals. It’s not enough to just sell a product. You need to provide value consistently, building strong relationships with customers, and customer success is an effective model that can help you. Many successful SaaS companies have already appreciated the benefits of this approach so we recommend that you adopt customer success as the basis for your account management and marketing tactics.