You’ve heard it all before. Customer Success for SaaS startups is NOT about creating happy customers. Customer Success is about helping them use your product well and derive value from it. You need to be there every step of the way…yada yada yada.
What all these lists don’t tell you is that the value chain for a customer to successfully use your product is long and keeping them engaged is a process filled with a combination of
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- highly efficient and effective tools
- implementing proven and experimental strategies
- making your product and services better
- following best practices for success
- research and reading to understand the ‘bigger picture’
- trials
- and of course, error
We decided to do something that would make this process easier. We took every step of the Customer Success Lifecycle for SaaS startups as broken down by Lincoln Murphy in his incisive and thorough piece on the Definition of Customer Success and built on it with links to the best strategies by CEOs and award winning bloggers, tips, case studies and the free/paid tools that you will need along the way.
Whether you are bootstrapping or have a budget to spend, think of this as an essential reading list. Here, you will get an idea of the various ingredients involved in creating Customer Success magic for your SaaS startup. The best part? You can dip into and find use for every step of the way. Here goes!
The SaaS Customer Success Lifecycle
- Customer Development
- Customer Acquisition
- Sales Process Engagement
- Billing and Payment
- Customer and User Onboarding
- Initial Engagement (Activation)
- Functional Support
- Technical Support
- Customer Feedback Loop
- Ongoing Engagement
- Customer Driven Growth
- Customer intelligence
- Customer Expansion and Renewal
- Customer Retention
- Post-Churn Follow Up
Customer Development
Before you even have customers, you need to know who your ideal customer is and figure out the best way to reach out to them and get their attention. This doesn’t mean you do customer development only before you launch. When creating a new product or entering a new market segment, finding customers who are enthusiastic about your product is the right start to win at customer success for SaaS startups.
The Expert Tip: Ray Wu’s 3 step guide on how to do Customer Development right. (Spoiler Alert: He says creating the right customer profile might not always be possible)
Read more of this post on our blog.
