When it comes to running a successful enterprise, a company’s most prized asset is its relationship with its customer base. After all, a business’s customers are its lifeblood, and this is especially true in the SaaS sphere. In an industry where businesses’ revenue is often subscription-driven, establishing and maintaining an unbreakable with customers is always a top priority for stakeholders.
So, how is it possible to achieve this? Well, when you’re offering software as a service, the key lies in CX, and more specifically, how you use personalization to elevate your customers’ experience.
Understanding the Customer Mentality
Thinking from the point of view of a customer, we can identify three main factors that contribute to how CX is perceived and judged.
The first factor is effectiveness – whether your product fulfills a customer’s needs, and whether they can use your product to achieve their desired result. The second is usability – whether can a customer use your product successfully without any undue difficulty or stress. Finally, there is engagement – whether or not a customer identifies with your company and trusts your product.
According to research, customers are likely to spend up to 140% more after a positive experience than a negative one. The factors mentioned above are integral to how customers judge a positive experience, so implementing personalization throughout the customer journey can have an immense impact when building fruitful relationships with clients.
First Steps
Counter to what one might be inclined to think, personalization can be implemented as early as the marketing phase of the customer journey. In the SaaS sector, it is especially important to do this, as SaaS business models typically rely heavily on establishing a long, stable relationship with customers. That means that the earlier your company can begin crafting a personalized experience, the better.
Personalization can take a wide array of forms in marketing. For instance, such as carefully curated email content, suggested actions based on viewed website pages, or customized landing pages advertised in response to specific keywords. The options are numerous and varied, but there are helpful email marketing applications that prove useful in forging new relationships with potential customers. Ongage is perhaps the most comprehensive email marketing platform on the market at current, but there are other alternatives available as well, such as Mailchimp, Moosend and Salesforce Email Studio.
Personalizing at this stage of the customer journey is highly effective because it sends an important message – your organization recognizes the circumstances and needs of potential customers, and is willing to make an effort to reach out to them. Demonstrating such a level of attentiveness and commitment helps your company to begin building the foundational trust that underpins the whole customer experience, and this trust that will grow ever stronger as you nurture it.
According to Gartner, 72% of customers claim that prior experiences with a company are mainly what influences their expectations, so setting a high standard of personalization from the outset is key.
In-Product Personalization
Once you’ve attracted prospects to your product, you begin a new phase of the customer journey, and implementing personalization within the product itself becomes the focus. In-product personalization plays a pivotal role in how customers perceive their overall experience, so it’s paramount to cater to the needs of the individual user as much as possible here.
Personalized greetings, for example, can make a tangible difference. It might seem simple, but greeting users by name can significantly boost customer engagement. In-product personalization can be so much more, though. A truly personalized application recognizes the status of the user and demonstrates its value in a way that appeals directly to their specific needs. First-time users, for instance, can be taken to a section of the UI or dashboard where they can learn about the features most relevant to their needs, rather than receiving a lengthy tour that covers all of the platform’s minute functionalities.
Personalizing media content can also help to drive engagement and improve CX for your product. Thanks to the wide array of software solutions on the market, it’s extremely easy to customize video content intended for us in onboarding processes, for example. This could involve the provision of a standard video with a personalized introduction, or in the case of larger clients, it could be a bespoke video that has been created from the ground up to serve the specific onboarding needs of your client. Implementing personalization in this way deeply impacts CX by increasing customer engagement and product activation, increasing ROI long term.
The Follow-Up
A major component of the customer’s experience with a company is the aftercare and service they receive once they have decided to use their product. Given the continuous fashion in which customers typically use SaaS products, substantial resources must be attributed to customer support.
These resources can be wisely invested in the appropriate tech, which can reduce staffing costs by rapidly routing customers to relevant support pages according to their queries. However, on the rare occasion that they do experience genuine friction while using a SaaS product, customers should receive personalized support from the service provider, rather than being directed to an automated service.
According to Qualtrics, 94% of customers who give a “very good” CX rating to a company are likely to recommend that company to others, and personalizing customer service is a major part of achieving this kind of rating. Consequently, not only does improving CX drive engagement and boost customer loyalty, but it can also help a company to attract new customers more easily.
Summing Up
Personalization is a key aspect of how SaaS enterprises create a CX nowadays, and it’s easy to see why this is the case. In a time when businesses can contact thousands of clients at the touch of a button and manage multitudes of subscriptions with automated processes, customers are looking for a company that can provide some extra assurance. They want effective, streamlined products that are crafted just for them.
Personalization in SaaS empowers businesses to provide a product that more easily embeds into customers’ day-to-day operations. Driving CX in this way empowers customers to achieve their objectives more efficiently while enabling you to increase engagement and loyalty to your company.
Simply put, it’s a win-win situation.
