Creating Desired SaaS Customer Experience

There are several aspects of financial growth resulting from a great customer experience.

Astonishment 🤩

The first and the most basic is you have to aim for astonishing your current customer base.

Too many SaaS businesses aim for satisfaction. Really? That’s the ultimate potential of what you can do? Do you want to simply ‘play’ or you want to ‘win’ in the marketplace?

How about astonish, that’s what fires people up. Champions do more.

How are you committed to astonishing your customers?

Loyalty 😌

The second is loyalty and that is really defined by shared requirements.

How big would your business be if you still had every customer that ever tried you?

Many companies are delivering shared requirements in 30–40% range. If you can double that, it is a fantastic incremental body of growth and it’s all based upon loyalty, getting the same customer to buy you time and time again.

Our problem in business is not with attracting new customers. Our problem is when we attract them, can we do something that causes them to come back? And to be become raving fans, to become addicts.

Advocacy 👍🏻

The third, probably the most powerful is advocacy.

Great customer experiences began at advocacy, customer talked to other customers and that has a multiplicative effect. Far greater than any advertising and marketing will ever do.

Customer Experience is Transversal

In order for customer experience to work, it has to exist ACROSS the organization.

When customer experience is just a marketing issue and you apply marketing like solutions to it, then you‘ll end up missing operations.

If it is just an operational issue, you’re going to get operational like solutions and you are going to miss the emotional connection, the purpose and all other things.

There are a couple of steps companies need to take in improving customer experience.

1️⃣ The first is idea of knowing who your customer is. The segmentation, the demand space work. A deep understanding of who is going to use your product is the very first thing that you need to do.

2️⃣ The second step is beginning of the mapping customer experience journey that exists today. The customer experience journey has many touchpoints in it. So on this stage you have to have a clear understanding of all touchpoints that you have.

3️⃣ The last step is the evaluation of those TouchPoints. What TouchPoints is really matter to your customers? Generally, there is a few. These TouchPoints are around 10% of all that you have, but you have to evaluate them against two dimensions:

1. Do I have to win this TouchPoint VS my competitor? So there is a competitive aspect to this.
2. Do I have the capability to deliver this TouchPoint?

Most SaaS companies today have designed their customer experience either ad hoc or from their capabilities out.

If you do those steps, you will be able to create a customer experience that is a step change difference from what you are delivering today.

✍🏻 Takeaways

• Aim for astonishment, not just satisfaction. Passion is everything. You want to boil water? You won’t get that at 100 degrees; you need all 212 degrees.
• The key to be successful in business is to keep the customers you’ve already got.
• Leading software companies have created their desired customer experiences by looking at the TouchPoints that really matter to their audience and designed it in the way that the customer wants those TouchPoints to happen.
• When delivering customer experience, if you combine satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy together, you will have a growth path unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.

Exclusively published for Medium.

Written by Alex Gilev, a user experience (UX) consultant with a focus on creating innovative software for SaaS companies who want big results.

Alex has developed and delivered strategies & design Fortune 500 companies (Johnson&Johnson, Compeed, PayPal), Bay Area companies, top US digital design agencies, and helped startups on the early stages of seeding.

He also studied ‘Disruptive strategy’ at Harvard Business School, ‘Business models’ and ‘Value proposition design’ at Strategyzer academy.

Thank you for reading!

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Creating Desired SaaS Customer Experience was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.