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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It’s no secret that attracting, satisfying, and retaining customers is becoming increasingly challenging.

The sheer amount of choice and demand for fast, flawless service demands businesses to formulate and execute effective ways to deliver excellent customer experiences.

Without acknowledging the importance of the customer experience at every touchpoint, companies miss out on great opportunities to develop a strong brand identity; opportunities that cannot afford to be missed in a business environment where first impressions are pivotal.

A slew of recent research studies provides us with the data to support this perceived demand to enhance customer experiences.

McKinsey research found that 70 percent of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated—and a large part of that has to do with showing the customer you (as the brand) care about them, and value their business.

It’s also been found that 58% of consumers are willing to spend more on companies that provide excellent customer service throughout the buying process.

To cap it off, the Digital Marketing Trends Report by Econsultancy and Adobe asked companies to indicate the single most exciting opportunity for their organization in the upcoming year – and, yes indeed, customer experience came out on top.

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A buggy Netflix account. A defective iPhone. Faulty B2B software.

There’s nothing more frustrating than when products and services encounter issues, or when they simply don’t work at all.

Consumers expect the products and services they buy to perform properly. After all, they’ve handed over their hard-earned money to the vendor in exchange for goods.

Who do consumers turn to for assistance? Customer support.

However, a customer-facing employee can only carry out excellent service if they’re onboarded correctly, fully trained, taught how to interact with customers, and given regular feedback on their performance.

If consumers aren’t impressed with their experience, they can churn immediately and leave negative reviews in their wake. Should the churn rate increase and harmful reviews accumulate, it could be the death knell of an entire business.

At Process Street, we know about – and strongly believe in – effective customer support. In fact, we operate a policy where each new employee must undergo a period of customer support experience, which amounts to a few weeks in total.

That’s why we created these 17 free templates for other teams.

The process templates featured in this free template pack will help strengthen any customer-facing team’s ability to perform successfully. From new employee training checklists to performance reviews, churn reduction checklists to a guide on responding to negative reviews, we’ve got your workflows covered.

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When it comes to running a business, particularly a SaaS company, understanding churn is vital.

There’s a lot to cover, so let’s cut straight to the chase.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• What is churn?
• How to calculate churn rate
• Churn examples: From Facebook to Twitter to HubSpot
• Why do customers churn?
• McKinsey’s 4 best practices to increase retention rates 15%
• 3 practical steps to reduce churn in your business
• The Harvard churn management algorithm
• Churn management resources to help you reduce churn
• Use Process Street to help you tackle churn in your business

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“We’re here for YOU“, the sign in front of me mocked as I waited my 22nd minute in line at the local store. We could all hear the staff chatting in a back room (a team-wide “lunch break”), discussing the weather while the rest of us silently fumed.

It’s horrible when a business doesn’t put their customers first.

That’s the problem that an omnichannel approach is designed to solve.

Following up from Whitney Blankenship‘s post about omnichannel marketing in e-commerce, we here at Process Street decided to tackle the subject as a whole and show what it means to be an omnichannel business in action.

From theme parks to banks, we’ve got a little of everything. Before all that though, there’s something we need to get straight…

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Retaining valuable customers is a necessity

In one of her hit songs, Adele famously sings the words “Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead”.

Minus the sentimental value, this also applies to the world of business. It is a simple reality that customers come and go and sometimes there is nothing you can do about it.

On the other hand, sometimes it lasts. Sometimes you can retain a customer for a long period of time and build a fruitful, trusting relationship that enables both of you to be more successful.

There has been some fascinating research done in recent years to highlight just how important it is to keep your customers happy.

Beyond the well-known Pareto principle that states 80% of a company’s revenue comes from 20% of its customers, Harvard Business School Professor, Sunil Gupta, has provided further evidence to show the importance of retaining customers that provide high levels of profitability.

Furthermore, Bain & Company have found that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%, and it is widely agreed upon in the SaaS world that the cost of acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5-25% more expensive than retaining an existing one.

Needless to say, making a concerted effort to retain your customers is just as, if not more important than acquiring new ones.

Execute account management processes flawlessly

Retaining customers, particularly high-value customers, is nothing short of essential for the growth of SaaS and other subscription-based companies, and to do so requires excellent account management.

That’s why we’ve gone ahead and created this set of checklists; to help you flawlessly execute various processes from conducting a thorough analysis of your competitors to the daunting task of preventing a valuable customer from churning.

Ever found yourself struggling with the sales-to-service handoff process or upselling? We’ve got those covered, too.

In this post, I’m going to provide a brief outline of each checklist and summarize why it’s a good idea to integrate them into your account management processes.

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There are so many layers to a modern support team.

Some companies will have countless reps working hard each day to champion the customer and empower them to do what they need to do.

On top of that, you might have members of the support team who double up as part of the product design team; looking for niche use cases or areas where customers don’t find the product intuitive.

Support teams may even have specialized roles which look to help customers achieve certain business goals, rather than just guidance with the software.

In this Process Street article, we’re going to look at one of the unsung specialists of the modern age: the customer support engineer.

With the rise of SaaS products particularly, the customer support engineer has become a meeting point for customers, sales, design, and development.

A Jack or Jill of all trades!

We’re going to explore exactly what a customer support engineer is, what they do, and when or why you might need one!

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The following is a guest post submission from Federico Pascual, co-founder and COO of MonkeyLearn.

Customer feedback doesn’t just come in through your site’s contact form – it’s everywhere.

You only have to search the Twitter handle of any product with more than a few hundred users to see that customers love to offer their opinion – positive and negative. It’s useful to be monitoring this and learning from it, but casually collecting feedback on an ad-hoc basis isn’t enough.

Startups thrive on feedback as their ‘North star’, and are constantly evolving based on what their customers request, break, and complain about. Enterprises also can’t overlook the fact that customers are what make any company tick, and must struggle harder than startups to stay relevant and innovate.

So, if you’re just collecting feedback ‘as and when’ it comes in, you’re missing out on data that’s just as important as page views or engagement. It’s like deciding not to bother setting up Google Analytics on your homepage, or not properly configuring your CRM; in the end, you’re deciding to not benefit from data that will have a transformative effect on your product strategy.

With a dataset of feedback – whether that’s from customer reviews, support tickets, or social media – you can dig into the words your customers are using to describe certain parts of your product and get insights into what they like, and what they don’t like. In this post, I’m going to show you how.

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It feels like certain areas of tech are booming at the moment.

Everyone and their nan seem to be incorporating the blockchain into their startup pitches, voice interface devices are sweeping the globe, and chatbots are popping up left right and center.

It feels like part of the rise of chatbots is predicated on the long term potential behind the idea of a smart assistant who can effectively communicate by chat. But the reality of a proper AI assistant is still some distance away.

Nonetheless, chatbots have real world uses already. For some use cases, chatbots are proving to be an effective and affordable alternative to previous practices.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• What are chatbots good for?
• How KLM boosted customer interaction 40% with chatbots
• What we do at Process Street with Intercom’s chatbot features
• How to set up a simple chatbot with Chatfuel
• 7 chatbot tools to check out today

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My doctor has the worst phone setup I’ve ever encountered.

Wait times are 30+ minutes, the phones are completely clogged after 10 am, and worst of all is the hold music.

A deafening din of distorted notes which at one point may have resembled “Clocks” by Coldplay. If it wasn’t for my own health, I would happily put the phone down and never ring them again.

However, unless you’re as vital to lives as a doctor, your callers won’t stand for the same treatment.

You need a solid game plan. The best hold music you can get your hands on. You need to entertain and hold their interest while they wait for someone to have the time to deal with their problems, or you can kiss that customer goodbye.

That’s exactly what this post will help you to do.

Read on to find out:

• Why you need the best hold music you can get
• Where hold music started
• How different music affects our emotions
• How to structure your hold system
• Some tips to get the most out of your phone system

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