How Customer Success Managers Can Improve Growth In SaaS Companies
The customer success manager plays an important role in the growth of any SaaS company. In this article, you'll learn eight ways that a customer success manager carry out their duty
Closing a customer can be a great success indicator and it can be easy to think that the hard work ends there. However, the reality is that winning customers' hearts and retaining them is where the real struggle lies. Your business needs to continuously prove your product value to customers.
In this case, your chances of success boil down to the kind of team you have promoting your products, nurturing customer relationships, and reducing churn. This is where a customer success manager comes in. They ensure that every customer that your sales team closes gets a positive onboarding experience and sticks to your product for the long haul.
This article throws light on the key responsibilities of a customer success manager and how they can improve growth in your business.
Before we begin, let's explain who a customer success manager is in detail.
Table of contents
- Who is a customer success manager?
- Eight ways a customer success manager can improve growth in SaaS companies
- Wrapping up
Who is a customer success manager?
A customer success manager helps your customers to understand and learn your product inside out. However, note that a customer success manager is not in charge of tech support or selling.
They proactively look out for the customers' needs, ensuring that they get the best value from your product.
While Customer success management is a relatively new role in SaaS, it is the best revenue center in recurring revenue business. Studies have shown that there is a 34% annual growth rate in this role.
So, what is the customer success manager responsible for and how can they improve growth in your SaaS company?
In the next section, you’ll learn eight ways a customer success manager can drive growth in your business.
Eight ways a customer success manager can improve growth in SaaS companies
1. Promotes your product and brand in an efficient manner
One way the customer success manager can improve your company's growth is by helping customers get better acquainted with new product updates.
They can do this via regular push notifications, in-app messaging, and engagement emails highlighting the product updates that are beneficial to customers.
The customer success manager needs to get the customers fully onboarded and provide resources to help them learn about new product updates.
For example, with Engage, a customer success manager can send video tutorials for product updates, links to blog posts, and other resources via our email automation, push, or in-app messaging feature.
2. Collect and analyze customer data
If you aren’t making an effort to listen to what your customers are asking for, it’ll be more challenging to make them have a great experience with your product.
When you understand what your customers want, you can figure out ways to keep them satisfied.
The customer success manager can help in this case. They can improve the growth of your company by asking customers about the challenges they face, and how your company’s product is meeting their needs.
They do this by collecting as much customer feedback as possible. They often use NPS surveys, scheduled check-ins, customer satisfaction score surveys, and in-app surveys to measure customer sentiment.
They also pay attention to customer reviews on your product and use the insight to spot areas for possible improvement.
For example, the customer success manager can use in-app surveys to ask customers about their overall experience and how they feel about improved product version, just like Hootsuite did in its NPS survey.
3. Creates an onboarding process to set your customers up for success
Customer onboarding is a major milestone in the customer lifecycle. A bad onboarding experience can make your users have a bad perception of your product. They may think it is just designed poorly and unsuitable for their needs and may not stick around any longer.
With the help of a customer success manager, you can track customer engagement rates during onboarding and learn how they are interacting with your product. Is the customer clicking on all tutorial links during the onboarding process? Do they reach out for support if they get confused?
These are some of the important KPIs the customer success manager analyzes to improve the customer onboarding process and provide the needed support. Rather than teaching the customer all the product's features, they need to focus on features that will provide the most value to the customers.
Making customers take the shortest path to value is a great way to increase your company's ROI and make customers understand the value of your product.
4. Foster great relationships with customers
A great relationship with customers is the bedrock of long-term customer success.
A solid relationship with customers increases brand loyalty, makes customers feel comfortable with your business and reduces churn. A customer success manager can build a strong relationship with a customer through regular communication via regular check-ins and act on customer feedback.
This kind of strong relationship with a customer can pay off in the long term. For instance, if a customer changes his/her present company, they can bring your product on board with the new company.
5. Promotes upselling and cross-selling opportunities to customers
A customer success manager's job is to identify upselling and cross-selling opportunities to increase customer engagement and product usage. If the customer success manager identifies a specific product feature that will be a great addition, they can entice the customer to purchase it.
Similarly, the customer success manager can also encourage the customer to pay for a tandem product that's not necessarily part of the product base but will improve the customer experience.
While this strategy may seem hard to pull off, it's a great way to improve revenue and your company's growth. It'd be more effective if cross-selling and upselling are done when a customer has benefitted from your product after a few years.
This is because the customer is likely to be paying more for your product after a few years of product usage than in their first year.
6. Promotes customer subscription renewal and reduces churn
A part of the customer success manager's job is to build customer loyalty and retention.
They can accomplish this by tracking renewals–keeping track of customer account expiration dates and reminding customers when their subscription will be due via automatic payment notification emails.
When a customer success manager tracks your product's usage, they'll be able to determine the percentage of customers that'll likely renew their subscriptions.
If some customers aren't willing to renew their subscriptions, the customer success manager needs to quickly find out the reason to minimize churn.
Lastly, when a customer success manager finds out the barrier behind a subscription renewal, they need to inform customers what kind of support is available to solve their problems.
Even more, they can use customer feedback to get ideas to improve your product.
7. Keeps clients engaged and regularly using products
An Invesp study revealed that half of all paying customers log in to their SaaS products once a month or less.
This shows the importance of customer engagement and why you need to make efforts to keep customers coming back to your product.
In this case, the customer success manager's job is to create engagement strategies and maintain long-term relationships with customers.
Some engagement strategies may include offering customers a discount on their next subscription package, marketing automation, or starting a customer loyalty program.
8. Acts as customer advocates
When it comes to customer feedback, it can be a valuable insight for your company. However, if customer feedback isn't used to make improvements, customers may feel understood.
The customer success manager can step in and act as a customer advocate. Voicing the words of customers and ensuring that customer feedback is acted upon. Though there might be scenarios where customers' requests might conflict with each other or your company's vision for the product.
In this case, the customer success manager needs to be flexible and perform a balancing act—finding the best way to implement customer feedback in line with your company's overall vision and objectives.
Wrapping up
It's without a doubt that the customer success manager is essential to your company's growth. They make an effort to understand customers' needs, and preferences and identify areas for product improvement.
By tracking how customers engage with your product, the customer success manager can easily predict if a specific customer is likely to churn.
On the other hand, if a customer is having issues with your product, the customer success manager also finds out the root of the problem and provides the needed support to the customer.
Finally, the customer success manager does their best to share valuable resources with customers through messaging channels like emails, in-app messaging, and push notifications.
At Engage, we have made the job of customer success manager easier through our powerful messaging features like in-app messaging, push notifications, and mobile messaging.