Blog by: Priyadarshini Natrajan
SaaS organizations are growing every day. 99% of businesses in the United States use at least one SaaS solution. And by 2025, 80% of businesses aim to convert all their systems into cloud-based SaaS. These are the growth stats that give all SaaS companies hope. Yet there is huge competition in the marketplace for an enterprise SaaS solution. Hence, enterprise SaaS organizations need to rebuild their strategies that can help with customer retention.
There are two important parts in an enterprise SaaS business that can help prevent customer churns. They are customer onboarding and implementation. Customer onboarding is the first step that your customer makes a judgment on your brand. It should be as smooth as possible.
Next comes the implementation part. Once the customer gets familiar with the product it is time for you to get into work with them and help them achieve their goals with no major hiccups.
Implementation in a SaaS Enterprise
Once the customer gets acquainted with your product they are ready to work with it on a day-to-day basis. And it is your job to ensure that the customer uses your product. Your job in implementation begins by training your customers to make sure that they reach their short and long-term goals with the help of your product. It is a never-ending process that helps you to retain your customers for the long run.
Here are some of the best practices that you can adopt into your implementation process for enterprise SaaS companies.
Work with insight
Rather than over-promising and poor deliverance, you can focus on simplifying the initial delivery. Show your customers what you can achieve in a week. This proves that you are a skilled team and can help you gain confidence quickly.
Your customer would have clearly defined the requirements during the sales or onboarding stage. Remember that during the implementation. Prioritize the customer’s needs and provide solutions for that first. Then you can show off or add any extravagant features.
Customers never lose track of their needs and so you shouldn’t too. Once you solve their problems and satisfy their requirements they’ll be happy to check out your other features. But if the initial problem isn’t solved then your product is not much use to them.
Automate your accounts
You may already have hundreds of customers and keeping track of each customer and their implementation processes might be hard for you and your team. Instead of using silos of tools to keep track, automate your onboarding and implementation process that helps to loop in all the team members and notifies use cases, and reminds the delivery dates.
This can help you assign work to each person separately and monitor their deliverance. Automating can also help you prioritize your customer’s needs and the value that they add to your ARR.
Vendor-customer relationship
Define and have a clear relationship with your customer that adds value to both of you. Your existing customers might renew your service after the term of the contract gets over. If that is the case, you can just give them a quick recap of your product and instill knowledge about new features.
If your customer is entirely new then it is your duty to train them before letting them take over. At times, your customer may want to handle everything on their own without getting acquainted properly. It is your job to make them understand that this might actually hinder or slow down the implementation process. You should collaborate with a technical person from your customer on a day-to-day basis until the technical person is ready to take over.
Assign a SPOC to each customer. Of course, cross-functional teams need to work on the onboarding and implementation process to achieve higher success. However, if your customer has to communicate with multiple people each time to resolve an issue it might irk them. Hence, assign a single point of contact to each customer and let them be responsible for communicating and resolving that particular customer’s issues.
Start early integrations
Imagine your customer is using multiple SaaS solutions for their business and they want to integrate it with your product. Your customers may use silos of tools for data management and it might take an ample amount of time for you to discover them and then integrate them.
Apart from the SaaS products used by your customers the information that is stored by different teams in a variety of tools is also to be integrated. Hence, using an SSOT tool can help you save time and quicken the implementation process.
Training your user
The more time and effort you invest in training your user the more your customers trust your product. Many customers don’t use SaaS solutions because they lack the knowledge of how to use them. Some customers look at your product as an overload of work rather than easing their work. Hence, it is your duty to give utmost training to your customer.
It is also your job to track whether they are using your product. Regular check-ups and follow-ups will instill trust and brand loyalty among your customers.
Collaborate with cross-functional teams
Automating your implementation process will minimize confusion and help in cross-functional collaboration. Sales team might have onboarded the customer after knowing their requirements. This information might not be transferred fully to the tech or product team. Each team uses silos of tools to store information that may or may not be communicated to the other team members working on the same project. Hence, having a single central platform for cross-functional collaboration, retrieving data, prioritizing important tasks, and track deliverance would help you know the progress of the project. Automated implementation can also notify your customers about the progress of the tasks. Being transparent with your customers will help you gain trust and retain them.
Wrap it Up
There’s no wrapping up in the implementation process. It’s a continuous process that ensures that you care about your customers and their satisfaction. Only genuine concern about your customers will reduce customer churn.
