The following is a guest post from Sam Suthar, the CMO of Acquire.

Scaling your business is almost impossible until you know your customer’s value. Whether you’re going to scale a brick-and-mortar business or an online business, it doesn’t matter; it’s vitally important to understand what each customer is worth to your business.

Statistics by Unicom Group show that 50% of customers naturally churn every 5 years. Sadly, this number can increase if you fail to understand what the customer who signed up last night is worth.

Can you reduce your churn and increase customer retention rate?

Yes, it’s doable. Although very tricky. In the rest of this article, I will show you how to scale your business by first knowing the value of each customer.

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Now we come to the heart of our consultant’s guide to Process Street – how to document client processes and deliver them as efficiently as possible.

This is your bread-and-butter in any BPM software, and by weighing up the pros and cons of the various ways you can manage business processes, you’ll be able to see what best fits your company and customers.

I’ll be detailing the method, advantages, and disadvantages of:

• Documenting client processes in your own Process Street organization before handing them off
• Setting up a new organization in the app to later hand off the whole thing
• Accessing and working inside a client’s existing Process Street organization

I’ll also be covering the various options for actually documenting client processes (such as using new or premade templates), collaborating with clients to get the best results possible, how to hand off business processes, and when to set up integrations with other apps.

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The following is a guest submission from Teresa Millard, a passionate marketing strategist at Job Application Review. She loves crunching numbers and reading about the latest digital trends. If you want to get in touch with her, you can reach her on Twitter: @thea_millard.

Did you know: just by increasing your customer retention by 5% can improve your profits by 25% to 95%? There’s high reward for little effort. The challenge becomes finding ways to get that 5% increase…

The last couple of years have seen a boom in SaaS companies, with numerous startups competing with big brands. It’s a blooming industry that will continue to evolve and increase in popularity in the coming years for one simple reason: accessibility and reliability. With only a few clicks, clients can have access to incredible tools that mostly take care of themselves. SaaS software enhances business productivity and has an exquisite ease-of-use that makes lives easier for employees.

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The essential customer success book to boost MRR at your SaaS company

A SaaS company without a customer success system is like a lion without teeth. You can chase customers all you like, but when you catch them you’re thinking “now what?”.

If you haven’t got a customer success team or set of processes in place at your SaaS company, it’s bad but not the end of the world.

Some SaaS companies are more self-serve than others, but all need a way to retain important customers and start exponentially compounding revenue.

This book for putting the systems in place to retain customers, whether that’s by learning about their problems or by properly onboarding them.

Better yet, it’s completely free.

What’s in the ebook?

• What is Customer Success?
• Why is Customer Success Important?
• What is Churn?
• How to Calculate NPS with the Perfect Customer Happiness Survey
• How to Shape Customer Retention Strategies That Beat Churn
• A Smart Way to Manage SaaS Customer Support
• Enhance Your SaaS User Experience
• How (and When) to Automate Your Customer Success Process
• What Customer Success Managers Actually Do All Day

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This is a guest post from Rhiza Oyos, the inbound marketing manager at Spiralytics.

Customers relationships are the lifeblood of every SaaS business. However, regardless of their years of operation, there are moments when these relationships can — for better or worse — dramatically change

A customer’s experience is everything. It helps SaaS companies attract customers, retain them, and generate referrals

So, businesses who understand the importance of customer experience end up winning the race and beating the competition. In particular, winning companies are those that understand the human factors and emotions at play in experience, design, and production.

Harley Manning in a 2012 article for Fast Company writes:

“In other words, if you want that next sale, if you want good word of mouth, and if you want to keep your customers, it’s unlikely that anything else you do matters more than delivering a superior experience”

Experience is all about moments.

In designing an exemplary customer experience, businesses should know about the four moments of truth that can help them get ahead.

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Retail stores are a must for today’s essential items. Not every retail store is a success, though, many smaller chains find out that the retail business is tough. If you don’t have a plan in place to help you fight the problems then you will struggle to make your business a success.

With today’s ever-growing competition on the high street from bigger chains and smaller chains, you will find it difficult to win over customers if you sell similar sorts of products. Even if your business is making profits or continually selling products, are you sure on how to keep it going? Do you know the basics from cleaning the store to displaying it correctly?

Here at Process Street, we have created 6 retail process checklists to help you keep on top of your business. These retail process checklists can be used daily and are stacked full of helpful information aiming to make you succeed in the retail world. Continue Reading

The following is a guest post from Shayla Price. Shayla creates and promotes content. She lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology, and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter: @shaylaprice

In SaaS, customer experience is top priority.

Experts report that “customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator” by 2020.

So, it’s time to take a serious look at how you engage with your customers.

Are they completely satisfied? Or are you simply meeting your team’s quarterly benchmarks?

“At the end of the day, customer experience is about human interaction and creating a bond between the user and the brand. It’s about making a commitment to understanding how your product positively impacts the lives of your users, and actively seeking out opportunities to maximize those benefits” — Rob Carpenter, founder of Hitshop

Don’t fail the customer experience. Here are four ways you’re falling short:

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Customer success has the unique distinction of being both the #1 driver of revenue retention in SaaS companies and SaaS companies’ best kept secret. According to Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr, customer success is where 90% of revenue is. For such an important topic, though, the dialogue around customer success is terrible.

Most conversations about customer success tend to be very high-level, with little in the way of concrete, actionable advice. Too many think pieces, not enough case studies. With this in mind, we thought we’d take a different approach to the topic.

We talked to 5 SaaS companies whose customer success processes have lead to sustained growth, reduced churn, and improved customer relationships, and we asked them a simple question: What is the one tool your customer success strategy could not do without?
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People with ‘Customer Success’ in their job title haven’t been around for very long. They’re kind of like Sales, but not focused on selling. They’re a bit like support, but don’t deal with just any old tyre-kicker.

For products like a t-shirt, there’s no need to make sure customers get success. If they bought it, wear it and like it, that’s enough. SaaS, on the other hand, can be complex stuff. Customers are at risk of giving up on things they don’t understand, can’t figure out how to implement or can’t get the rest of their team using.

Customer Success teams are so vital for the health of SaaaS companies because, like Lua’s Jason Krigfeld says:

“We don’t sell boxes anymore. We sell services”.

That puts the customer in a position of power, and thanks to the death of vendor lock-ins, every day is an opportunity for cancelation.
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Customer Success isn’t something you do once or someone you hire to make magic happen. Unfortunately for those who are shy of putting in the effort, it’s a process.

A customer success process should include many of the functions we’ve talked about so far in this guide, such as customer support and NPS surveys, but also routine ‘check-ups’ on the health of your customer base.

There is, however, some good news about this. Since customer success is a process, it means a few things:

1. Part of it can be automated.
2. It can be rationalized and broken down into steps.
3. It’s easy to train a group of people to execute it.
4. It’s easily tracked and documented.

What does a customer success process look like, exactly?

In this final sprint of our guide, I’ll be telling you exactly that.

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