Removing Friction in the SaaS Customer Journey

The first year is crucial in every SaaS customer journey — not only for customers themselves but also for your customer success team. This is because it has many points of friction (and thus failure), any of which has the potential to dampen value, discourage the achievement of outcomes, and, ultimately, lead to churn. Customer success teams looking to dependably deliver on customer outcomes, increase renewal success rates, and grow revenue from existing relationships must identify and tackle these friction points in year one with greater sophistication.

Examples of Customer Friction Points in SaaS Relationships

• Setting and Clarifying Expectations — Communication during the early stages of a new relationship is essential. Initiating that communication (and ensuring it’s clear and effective) upfront while also clarifying what is expected of the customer and the customer success team will ensure all parties benefit from greater collaboration, which helps move the customer closer toward achieving their desired outcomes.
• Securing and Delivering Business Reviews — Connecting periodically with customers during year one to review progress on outcomes, discuss needs, and tackle concerns tees customer success up for a successful partnership. However, business reviews can be challenging to schedule and time consuming to prepare and deliver well; investing in them upfront provides the best opportunity to deliver on customer outcomes, which keeps the relationship growing.
• Sharing Important Information — Ensuring key contacts, influential users, and decision-makers know about new features and other aspects of your SaaS platform tells them that you’re listening. However, getting this information to the people that truly need to hear it is often difficult. It’s important to tackle these audiences in the right way so they hear what you have to say.

Good News is Often at Risk of Falling on Deaf Ears

The above examples are just a few of the many customer friction points that can arise during the year-one SaaS customer journey. There are many others that can put your customer relationships at risk. However, the first year will be filled with more than just challenges and friction. Your CS team will accomplish meaningful work for customers — work that’s important to share with those who need to hear it. But this is where another problem arises: communicating those results and the value that you’ve created. 

All too often, getting time with key contacts at your customers’ businesses — to say nothing of key decision-makers — is difficult, especially if it’s outside of a regular reporting call or check-in. Even if you were able to do so, how do you communicate the right information that each type of contact needs to see?

It’s likely that your primary contact is focused on solving a specific problem and continuing to iterate on that improvement, whereas decision-makers want to see bottom-line impact and value creation. Those are two different deliverables — and messages.

Your primary contact is more likely to have a bit more time to spend reviewing performance figures and project statuses, whereas executive decision-makers will have less and don’t need a high level of detail. To get the right message in front of the right person, CS teams must modify how they interact with their key contacts.

Take a Different Approach to Your Communications

Right now, your CS team likely uses a mix of typical communication mediums and channels for reporting, project updates, onboarding, account management, and so on. One-to-one emails, automated email workflows, direct phone calls, conference calls, and even texts are all valuable ways for sharing information and coordinating actions. However, in today’s hectic world, they’re not right for delivering the key messages that CS teams need to deliver in order to be successful.

CS teams should consider new technologies and tools that enable them to deliver more engaging messages in a strategic way that increases the chance of their delivery and absorption. One solution to consider is AirDeck — a document narration and sharing platform helping businesses deliver personalized content at scale. It helps to bridge the gap between live meetings and offline attachments.

As a SaaS leader, you’ve undoubtedly been on a call in which an existing or prospective SaaS provider was presenting a process or set of features, or perhaps even a report. Time drags on, people ask questions and interrupt the delivery, and other distractions get in the way of you and your team fully receiving the information. The SaaS provider fails to communicate what it wants, and your team is unable to absorb and make decisions.

Tools such as AirDeck allow SaaS companies to present their information audibly — a huge differentiator in how people engage with information. It’s different from just recording a video of a presentation because the audio is tied to specific pages, slides, and other materials and is more digestible than a single video. It gives you viewer insights, enables tracking of how recipients engage with your content, and provides a single resource for your contacts to revisit time and time again. And the best part is that you can break up your AirDeck audio segments to reuse elsewhere, enabling you to better use your time and prevent excess work.

Streamline the Year-One Customer Journey with Carema Consulting

Helping B2B SaaS leaders eliminate customer friction points is a significant part of our work at Carema Consulting. Our scalable customer success framework enables you and your CS leaders to maximize the performance of the customer success function, with two avenues based on where your organization stands right now:

• 90-Day Scalable Customer Success Framework — Accelerate the development of frameworks, processes, and playbooks configured for your business to create and execute on a scalable model for your organization.
• Customer Success Consulting — For organizations with limited internal resources, leverage our experienced professionals to act as a catalyst for the development of a scalable customer success model optimized for your organization.

Get in touch with us to learn more about our customer success solutions and how we can help.