How to Increase Customer Satisfaction in SaaS Businesses

“Every company’s greatest assets are its customers because without customers there is no company.” – Michael LeBoeuf

Customer satisfaction continues to take over the business world. In a survey conducted by Microsoft, more than 95% of consumers said customer service is an important factor in their choice of loyalty to a brand. In addition, the percentage of customers who have higher expectations for customer service today compared to one year ago has grown to 54%.

Business owners are starting to realize the importance of maintaining good relationships with their clients. Gartner has predicted that by 2019, more than half of the companies will redirect their investments to customer experience innovations.

How to Measure Customer Satisfaction?

According to 1st Financial Training Services, more than 95% of unsatisfied customers don’t complain, they just never come back.

Besides losing revenue and clients, low customer satisfaction levels can also harm your brand image. This is why it is particularly important to reach out to your customers and begin asking questions.

Luckily, there is a great number of tools and strategies you can use to measure customer satisfaction. Here are a few:

Net Promoter Score (NPS)
CSAT score
Customer Effort Score (CES)
Social and community listening
Case deflection rates

You could also come up with a survey template. Surveys are a great tool to measure customer satisfaction. If you practice social listening (i.e. check social networks, forums, chat sessions, etc. to see what people are saying about your services), you should be able to identify the critical points. Make sure they are included in your survey.

Once your template is ready, take some time to think about timing. Timing is crucial as people will be completing the survey as a favor to you. Some companies choose to survey after the onboarding process, others after a significant cycle is completed. Bottom line is, picking the right moment to conduct your survey will help you get more answers to your questions and most of them will be useful.

Take action based on survey results. Collecting and analyzing the data from your survey is pointless if you aren’t going to act on it. Keep reading to find out how you can improve customer satisfaction.

How to Improve Customer Satisfaction?

There’s no single answer to this question as each business niche is different. The key is figuring out what works best for you.

Here are a few ideas that will help you improve customer satisfaction.

1. Acquire New Customers

Finding customers and providing them with your service is a good starting point for making them happy. But how to attract new customers? If you’re a new business, customer acquisition can be a challenging process. Here are a few tactics you can try:

Email marketing. Targeting the right audience with the right service and message can prove to be a very powerful customer acquisition tool. Come up with a catchy subject that will attract attention and make people open the email. Make sure your emails are short and concise and don’t forget to include a call-to-action-button so that the reader can make the first step right away.
Inbound marketing. Create high-quality tutorials and learning materials will increase your chances of finding people who are interested in your service. But producing great content isn’t enough. You also need to promote it.

2. Customer onboarding

Make sure your onboarding sequence is easy to follow so that nothing stands in the way of the user’s first impression.

Create a welcome email that contains links to valuable resources to help users figure out how your service works and find everything they need.
Create sign-up forms with core questions that newcomers will fill. You can use the information from these questionnaires to become better acquainted with your users and adjust the system according to their needs. Make sure the sign-up form is properly designed to allow users to answer the questions quickly and smoothly.
Educational tutorials (especially videos) will help users to figure out how to make the most of your service, decrease their confusion, and prevent them from leaving.

3. Identify Opportunities to Build Customer Loyalty

Customer experience certainly doesn’t stop with onboarding. Make sure that you’ve addressed all critical points and think about ways to strengthen customer loyalty at every touchpoint. Here are some ideas you could use:

Recognize who your customers are when they revisit your page and welcome them by name on your site.
Recommend contextually relevant information that would further contribute to improve their experience.
Thank them for their business via email or social media. In fact, use social media to build a consistent relationship with your customers. Let them discuss, comment, and ask questions about your services and your industry in a private group with your employees (something like an open forum). Engage in Twitter chats to help inform your customers about your brand and service.
Ask your customers how the experience was for them and how it can be improved.
Provide outstanding customer service. Nowadays, customers expect excellent customer service on every platform. In fact, 70% of them said they had already chosen to support a company that delivers great customer service and more than 50% said they had made an additional purchase from a company after a good customer service experience (MTD Sales Training). Poor customer service translates into a loss of customer loyalty and decreased profits.

4. Get Feedback

Who’s better to tell you what your customers need than customers themselves? Here are some efficient ways to collect feedback:

Surveys. As mentioned before, surveys are indispensable when it comes to gathering information from customers. Make sure your questionnaires contain the right questions in order to gather the info you need.
Analytics. Use tracking tools to monitor user behavior and figure out which features are popular among users.
Direct contact. Use chat messages or phone calls to reach out to your users and ask them questions.

5. Get Referrals

High customer satisfaction often generates great word-of-mouth referrals. And getting new customers via referrals is awesome because you don’t have to invest money in their acquisition. Once you start getting referrals, you know that all your previous efforts are starting to pay off.

Still, that doesn’t mean you should sit back and relax. Create a referral program to encourage your customers to invite new customers. You can offer freebies, money rewards, or discounts in return for paying users.

Final Thoughts

If you want to improve your customer satisfaction, you mustn’t let your strategy go stale. It needs to constantly evolve in order to meet your customers’ needs, the ever-changing SaaS landscape, as well as the constant innovations by your competitors.