Customer Success | | Published March 29, 2019

The Future of Customer Success in SaaS Industries

As a SaaS company grows, customer success becomes even more important. Defined as doing everything in your power to ensure customers are successful with your business, creating a thriving customer success program and team doesn’t happen overnight. But, if you’re a SaaS company and you’re doing great without a success team, why should you care?

Let’s look at the future of customer success in SaaS industries and why it’s become a focus for so many companies…

Enriching relationships with customer success is no longer a “bonus” – Many SaaS companies can no longer sit back and collect recurring revenue with minimal customer interactions. Instead, they need to be proactive with their customers and understand when and how to act on issues before it’s too late. Competitors are always looking for new business and are building (and promoting) their own success teams. If you don’t have one and you’re not falling behind, you will be soon.

Success will be more important as software continues to consolidate – While there are many SaaS companies in the market today, integrating multiple specialized software solutions can be a headache for customers. This is especially true if there isn’t a success team to help with implementation, including integration. As a result, more companies are opting for a do-it-all platform as their software “anchor” instead of cobbling together multiple small SaaS solutions in a disjointed manner. A success team for all software companies, large or small, is critical in ensuring a customer success solution fits smoothly into a customer’s software ecosystem.

More companies will have a dedicated technology manager – Having your own customer success employees is important because these new “technology manager” roles at companies need someone to form a relationship with. As businesses rely more on technology in the future – including new software, servers, and much more – someone needs to manage how all these technologies impact a business. SaaS customers need a consistent point of contact to interact with these professionals, especially after the initial customer onboarding stage, and they must be competent and readily available.

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Data expectations will be elevated for SaaS companies – With companies hiring people specifically to work with their own internal technologies, it makes emphasizing the value of your solution even more important. Companies will expect to learn how everything they do impacts their business and what solutions are working the best. This is where a customer success professional, with the right data at their fingertips, can not only add value to your customers but also prove that your company is an asset to their business. The latter is an essential component of reducing customer churn.

 

To summarize, the future of SaaS customer success is growing and evolving. SaaS companies need to understand that a success team is more than just someone sitting around to field simple customer questions. They are actively engaging with customers to help them navigate their increasingly complex technology ecosystem so your SaaS offering can be successful within their business.

Outside of this technical role, however, a success team is also very important in building and maintaining strong customer relationships. They are the face of your business and the expert your customers will run to when something goes wrong. By empowering your customer success team in the future, you’ll see that they will be able to form meaningful relationships with the technology experts your customers employ and will even make a case for the value of your business.

Customer success in the SaaS industry is here to stay!