When you are striving to run and grow your SaaS business, you make every effort to attract new customers to the business. But the success of your business is not solely dependent on building new clients. It depends more on retaining your existing clients by meeting their needs and expectations.
But when you fail to meet the customers’ expectations and are not able to provide them with a high level of satisfaction, customer retention lowers down and it leads to customer churn. Customer Churn is one of the most common problems that businesses face and it is costly for your business. Studies suggest that acquiring a new customer is almost five times costlier than retaining an existing one.
SaaS is a competitive industry with easy free trials and the ability to easily switch to any product. New products come into the market and lure the users with new features, services, competitive prices and subscription plans. In such a situation, it is vital to take care of the customers’ needs and ensure high satisfaction. And how will you do it? The answer is through Customer Feedback.
Collecting SaaS Feedback is the best way to gauge customers’ experiences and measure their satisfaction with your products and services. In this article, we will learn some great ways to reduce SaaS churn by collecting and using Customer Feedback.
Ways to Reduce SaaS Churn by Using Customer Feedback
Let’s learn the ways to improve Customer Experience and reduce churn by collecting and utilizing Customer Feedback.
1. Collect SaaS Feedback regularly
Your customers may seem happy with your products and services at some point of time, but it may not be the case forever. So if you want to keep a track on customers’ perceptions and prevent churn, it is essential to build proper SaaS Feedback Strategy and collect Customer Feedback regularly through SaaS Feedback Surveys.
Relationship Surveys are the best to collect feedback regularly and track your ongoing relationship with your customers. With the help of a good SaaS Feedback Tool, you can trigger Relationship surveys on a regular basis like monthly surveys, quarterly surveys, and annual surveys. These surveys will help you ensure a good relationship with your customers and let you know about any possibilities of churn.
2. Follow up on Every Feedback
Merely collecting feedback will not work unless you do something about it. Respond to every feedback and follow up with your customers to work on the feedback. Thank the customers with positive feedback for appreciating your efforts.
To the customers who shared neutral feedback, ask them how you can make your product and services better for them. Their suggestions will bring out the reasons why they didn’t give a full rating. Apologize to the customers who shared negative feedback and ask them where the things went wrong. Their insights will help you improve Customer Experience and reduce churn.
3. Use CX Metrics and Identify at-risk customers
Customer Success Metrics like NPS, CSAT and CES are a great way to collect Customer Feedback and measure customer satisfaction, loyalty, and their perceived efforts in quantitative form. These metrics help you identify the at-risk customers.
Using metrics surveys like Net Promoter Score, you get to know your Promoters, Detractors, and Passives. Detractors are the ones that are considered to be the most dissatisfied customers and can be treated as at-risk customers. Similarly, you get to know about the most dissatisfied customers through Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Surveys.
When you are able to identify the at-risk customers, you can take action at the right time to improve User Experience and prevent customer churn.
4. Work on Closing the Feedback Loop
Closing the Customer Feedback Loop is as important as collecting feedback in the first place. Closing the Feedback Loop involves responding to customers’ feedback, taking action on it, and informing your customers about the actions you have taken to improve their experience.
For closing the Feedback Loop effectively, you should never leave the feedback unattended. Respond to every feedback. You can even trigger automated responses on the feedback to acknowledge the received feedback and to show gratitude to the customers for spending their time on sharing their valuable feedback.
You can also reward your loyal customers with small freebies like discounts, extra validity of their subscription, or an added feature to their plan for some days.
You can seek suggestions from the customers who shared neutral feedback. Although, all suggestions are not possible to follow. So for the ones which you cannot follow, you should still thank them for the suggestions and politely deny. For the suggestion you follow, you must personally inform the customers that you have followed their suggestion and have made changes to your products and services. This will induce a very good feeling about you and your business.
Take action on high priority on the negative feedback. Apologize to the customers for their bad experience and do everything that you can to resolve their issues and improve their experiences. When you are taking action, keep them updated about every progress. When you are done, inform them and close the feedback loop on a good note. Taking appropriate action on feedback at the right time and closing the feedback loop effectively can even change a negative feedback into a positive one and establish strong relationships thus improving Customer Retention and reducing churn.
5. Create Product Roadmap in line with feedback
Great products are not developed in isolation. Customer Feedback helps you get the necessary information about the customers’ choices, their likes and dislikes, and insights about their experience with your product. You should utilize this information to build effective Product Roadmaps that are in line with the Customer Feedback.
This will help you develop better products and services for the customers and achieve your business goal of better retention and reduced churn.
6. Use Feedback to improve your product
Customer Feedback helps you know where your product is lacking behind in satisfying the customers to the full extent. When you get to know the shortcomings of your product, utilize this information to work in the direction of improving it and creating better products for your customers.
Adopt the strategy of continuous improvement and keep upgrading your product to better versions.
7. Collect and utilize Onboarding Feedback
Onboarding Experiences create lasting impressions on your customers and can make or break your business. So when we talk about using Customer Feedback to reduce churn, Onboarding Feedback is one crucial feedback that you must not miss. Send feedback surveys to your customers after onboarding them to your product to ask how their Onboarding Experience was.
This will let you know about loopholes or shortcomings in your Onboarding process (if any). And if you get to know some of them, take action to eliminate them and make your Onboarding process better for the other next customers to create better onboarding experiences and prevent churn.
8. Collect and utilize Customer Support Feedback
A better product attracts more users to your business and a great service helps you retain them. To ensure great customer service and support, always collect Customer Support Feedback. Send feedback surveys to your customers after every interaction with your customer success teams to know how their experience was with your team.
Utilize this feedback to take action and improve your customer support services wherever you find a scope of improvement. This will ultimately make your services better for the customer thus preventing churn.
9. Collect and utilize Churn Feedback
Even if you make your best efforts to prevent churn, some customers end their subscriptions and may switch to other brands. You may not stop them from leaving, but do collect SaaS Churn Feedback from them to know the reasons behind their churn. You can use effective Exit Surveys for this purpose.
The responses will give you customer insights about what went wrong for them and enable you to prevent such situations in future. This will help you create better experiences for your still existing customers and prevent further churn.
10. Use an Effective SaaS Feedback Tool
Always use an effective SaaS Feedback tool to create surveys and collect feedback from your SaaS users. A good SaaS Survey Software will help you not only create and send powerful surveys through multiple channels, but also utilize feedback to improve customer experience and reduce churn
Zonka Feedback is a great SaaS Feedback Tool that you can use for this purpose. It has powerful features that help you create logical and dynamic surveys and share them with your customers through multiple channels. Features like real-time feedback alerts help you get notified in real-time about the every feedback or the ones that fall in the criteria set by you so that you can take instant actions on priority and improve customer experience to prevent churn.
It also provides a free trial. You can Try it for free for 7 days and see how it helps you collect and utilize Customer Feedback and thus reduce churn.
Summary
In this blog, we have covered the top ten strategies that one can follow to ensure that their SaaS product does not have any friction that can push the users away. After all, customer retention is a more cost-efficient business strategy than acquiring new customers. It explores different strategies such as regular feedback collection, proactive follow-ups, leveraging CX metrics, closing the feedback loop effectively, aligning product roadmaps with feedback, and utilizing feedback across various touchpoints.
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