As almost every SaaS domain and niche gets crowded with multiple options, one thing that can set you apart is how you treat your customers. Customers, when satisfied with your offerings and treated well, become the biggest promoters of your brand while continuing to buy from you.
Hence, SaaS brands need to invest generously in building customer relationships for the continued success of their business.
However, it is easier said than done.
For instance, you have to deliver a consistent experience, track usage metrics, be proactive when issues arise, and much more before you earn the loyalty of your customers. This is even more challenging for small businesses that already have a lot on their plates with limited budgets and human resources.
In this article, let’s look at four actionable tips that you can start following right now, with corresponding tools to put them into practice, to turn your customers into raving fans.
1. Centralize your customer data: HubSpot
A customer’s journey with your brand begins when they hear about your brand and visit your website to learn more about your offerings. Since that point, you interact with your (potential) customers in a variety of ways such as emails and demo calls.
Even after conversion, your customers provide you with feedback and let you know if they are facing any challenges while adopting your solution.
All of these interactions, unfortunately for most SaaS brands, are stored in different tools and formats making it difficult for you to gain an in-depth understanding of their requirements — something that you need to deliver them a world-class experience.
HubSpot, a well-known CRM tool, makes it easy for brands by integrating marketing, sales, and support solutions in one package. This gives your team members complete access to all instances of communication with the customers, empowering them to help them better and ultimately improving customer relationships.
To take it a step further, you can also integrate Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solutions with your HubSpot account. HubSpot CPQ allows you to personalize your customers’ experience even further by billing them uniquely, based on how they use your products.
2. Monitor your revenue pipeline: Revlitix
Consider a situation when one of your customers is renewing their subscription with your product and their payment doesn’t go through due to some issues with the payment gateway.
Apart from directly affecting your bottom line, it is a terrible experience on the side of a high-intent customer who actually derives value from your product. Such roadblocks in your revenue pipeline always negatively impact your relationship with your customers.
The revenue pipeline is a complex workflow where different teams run multiple processes using various tools and any glitch, no matter how small, can have rippling effects. This can halt your business operations abruptly while costing you money and driving your customers away.
Revlitix helps businesses map their marketing and sales pipelines to spot leaks whether they originate due to imperfections in the process, malfunctioning of the tools, or an oversight of a team member. This tool integrates with most analytics apps allowing you to get started in no time.
Consequently, brands can proactively tackle issues before they escalate to build lasting relationships with customers.
3. Provide omnichannel support: Kommunicate
When a customer is knocking at your door for any kind of help, they have either exhausted all solutions, including going through your help docs, or need assistance urgently. In both cases, it is crucial for brands to listen to them and provide them with appropriate resolution.
You also need to keep in mind that a customer, when distressed, might want to reach out via any channel that is most convenient to them at that time. This includes everything from their personal messaging app to the floating chatbot at the bottom-right of your website.
Moreover, sometimes, a customer might first reach out to you via email and then want to carry on with that conversation on WhatsApp, necessitating an omnichannel solution.
Kommunicate allows you to build conversational chatbots for various use cases, from user onboarding to support and deploying them on any channel you want. Since it is controlled from one source, your customers can expect a consistent experience.
Such an omnichannel, AI-powered chatbot will keep your business’s lights on 24/7 and can create query tickets if it encounters complex problems it is unable to solve.
4. Engage regularly: ActiveCampaign
Talking with your customers at regular intervals keeps them warm toward and open to you. This is great for brands as it helps them collect detailed feedback through interviews and get their tool rated well on third-party websites.
Engaging with your customers doesn’t just mean sending them occasional emails asking “Is everything okay”, although that is a part of it. Engaging with your customers means delivering them even more value in each interaction in the form of entertaining or educational content.
Email is the perfect channel for this because it allows you to personally connect with your audience while respecting their preferences and privacy. Furthermore, you can collect different kinds of behavioral data such as open rate and click-through rate to refine your messages with time.
ActiveCampaign helps SaaS brands build engaging digital experiences through email while allowing for personalized messaging. The tool is great for creating automatic drip campaigns where the interaction of the customer with the previous email determines what the next message should be.
This nature of periodic engagement allows you to enrich your customer’s experience even further leading to improved relationships.
Wrapping up
To maintain a competitive edge within your domain in the increasingly competitive SaaS world, it is crucial to build long-term and meaningful customer relationships. This enables brands to earn their customers’ loyalty while turning them into ardent promoters.
You can store all their data in a centralized place to deliver them a consistent experience, monitor your marketing and sales revenue pipelines to catch issues before they escalate, provide support on all channels through AI-powered chatbots, and interact with your customers periodically to give them even more value via content and collect their feedback.