I’ve talked at length in the past about the user onboarding process, the difficulties of first-time use and how empty states can solve some of these problems.

While this is all well and good when you’re trying to tackle user drop-off after the first session, what about the later stages?

Assuming that everything else has clicked into place for your user and they’ve made it all the way up to the purchase, you must have made a good first impression! Unfortunately, it’ll be all for nothing if your app is hard to use, awkward, inflexible or disappointing over the long term, or if your premium plan’s onboarding isn’t tight.

Post-sale UX optimization isn’t something I’ve looked at before, or even heard about. But writing a guide about SaaS customer success is not a small task and UX is definitely a big deal, especially because good UX makes it easy for Customer Success to do their job.

In fact, a good SaaS user experience takes the weight off customer support, too. Overall, you don’t want to put a barrier between your users and your app and most importantly for revenue, you don’t want to put a barrier between your paying users and your app.

Here are some SaaS user experience optimization pointers to think about which will make the lives of your Customer Sucess team easier.
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Customer Happiness is a metric unlike any other.

It’s not founded on principles of revenue, bounce rate or any other traditionally mathematical ideas.

Customer Happiness is based on emotions, not data. And while these emotions can be formulated as data, one of the first steps is to work out how.

In this blog post series we’ve already covered the definition of customer success, why customer success is important and churn for SaaS companies.

Have you ever received this email?

Chances are, you’ve got an email at some point that looks like this:

The outcome of this question is used to formulate your Net Promoter Score (NPS), one of the metrics that measures the health of your company and the effectiveness of your Customer Success strategy.

Some companies will ask for your response on a scale of 1-10, some in a series of phrases like the Microsoft example above. I’ve even seen 🙂 and 🙁 as options.

How do these responses translate to a solid representation of customer happiness?

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Churn is the enemy.

Churn is the sickness that will kill your SaaS company.

Redpoint VC Tomasz Tunguz showed us just how damaging churn is to the MRR of SaaS companies and how an adjustment of just 5% can make a massive impact.

Churn is the rate your customers are cancelling their subscriptions to your product.

One of the key outcomes of any customer success strategy is to reduce churn by helping disenfranchised customers continue to get value from what you’re offering them.

The pricing model of SaaS lends itself well to being extremely profitable. But as David Skok says in his post about achieving negative churn, there are massive risks.

The nature of subscriptions mean that your customers are paying you regularly which brings in recurring revenue, but also puts you in a precarious position.

Every time your customers get the bill for your product through on their statement, they’re asking the question: This month, did this product save me more money than it cost me?

Over the past two weeks, I’ve answered two questions: What is Customer Success? And Why is Customer Success Important? Today I’m going to answer the question ‘What is churn?’. It all boils down to one thing. Customer success teams and strategies are in place to stop customers cancelling.

They exist to reduce churn.

Let’s look at this in more detail.

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Last week I kicked off a new series of blog posts about customer success for SaaS companies by answering the question ‘what is customer success?‘. This week, we’re going deeper and examining why it’s important for SaaS companies.

Tomasz Tunguz, venture capitalist at Redpoint, says customer success is ‘equal in importance to sales and marketing and engineering and product within SaaS companies‘. But why? Technically, it didn’t exist 10 years ago, so why do we need it?

We need it because products are developing faster than our capacity to understand them, we need it because competition in the SaaS world is harsh and we need it in place to reduce churn and keep users sticking around for the long haul.

Let’s take a closer look at these points.

– As a free bonus, check out our podcast episode talking about customer success.

Customer Success connects promise to reality

Here’s a theoretical situation to explain.

Pretend I just signed up for an analytics product because I know I need to start tracking user activity in my mobile app. The landing page copy told me that’s what I can do with the app, so I bought it. I go in, and within 2 minutes I’m confused and wondering exactly how I can load it up with my app’s data or set conversion goals.

In an ideal world, the platform’s customer success manager should have been on the phone to me the same day of purchase, guiding me through the steps to get it set up and teaching me everything I need to know.

Analytics platforms and CRMs are just two examples of complex products that can be configured in numerous different ways — for these products, a user guide or support ticket system isn’t always the best thing to offer.

You don’t want your customer having to work harder to get what was promised by the sales team because your product should be easy to implement for all customers and deliver value from day one.

Your product’s initial setup, or even basic use, won’t be obvious to everyone. Not to mention how businesses grow and their needs change over time — every time the monthly bill for your product comes through, the customer is questioning whether they really need it.
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When you sell a coat or a bar of chocolate, customer success isn’t necessary.

Those are simple, self-explanatory products that everyone knows how to use.

Even with things like a new vacuum cleaner, customer success isn’t required. A user manual and a hotline is as far as most things go.

With your SaaS product, however, it’s not going to be so easy. Complex analytics platforms, SEO tools, and landing page creators can be set up and used in a variety of ways, solving different problems for customers from marketing agencies, e-commerce stores, factories, and farms.

For software companies, the golden days of unbreakable contracts and technical lock-ins are gone. The industry has diversified, and there are a lot of companies your customers could be choosing over yours, with more attractive branding, master salespeople or better customer success.

When your product needs follow-up and guidance to ensure the customer gets full value, that’s when customer success becomes a must-have.

This is because a customer who speaks to your sales team or reads your landing page is sold on the benefits, not the features.

The customer knows your product can solve their problem, but not exactly how to get that value.

(Click here to skip ahead and get a full high-touch customer onboarding process for SaaS companies)
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Hooray!

We’re pleased to announce yet another integration for Process Street. This time it’s a big one — Zapier. It connects us with over 400 different services including Salesforce, Mailchimp, Wufoo and the whole suite of Google Apps.

If Zapier was a physical object, it would look a bit like a universal remote connected to an unmanageable tangle of wires with ends that slot into every different kind of machine. Thankfully, it’s a clean-cut, user-friendly and genius SaaS app that has huge potential for creativity and workflow streamlining. It makes it easy for non-developers to connect their web services together, saving time and improving productivity.

If you’re already familiar with integrations and want to get stuck in straight away, click here for 50 ways to automate your workflow with Process Street.

To learn more about Process Street (what it does and how it works) check out our help site. For the help document on our Zapier integration, click here.

Let’s take a look at how Process Street and Zapier can work together.

Using Process Street Forms with Zapier Intro

Customer Success Integraton Explained

https://process.wistia.com/medias/frwvim9qtl

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Best Real Estate Apps to Close More Deals This Year

The real estate industry has come a long way since a long-dead entrepreneur decided to rent a part of their farm land to turn a profit. Down the line we’ve seen verbal agreements and contracts written in stone, all the way through to the mass of paper stored in unorganized filing cabinets we’re still unfortunately dealing with.

Even though computers have been widely used by agencies for over 20 years, paper documents are still around causing trouble. Maybe it was software industry’s fault for a long time, but now thanks to Android, iOS and the huge number of productivity tools at our disposal, there’s no excuse to be disorganized

Take a look at the 5 best real estate apps for simplifying your operations and closing more deals.

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I hate paper and I love Evernote. I use it to store everything. I automatically forward files from my email to my Evernote (including snail mail which is automatically scanned and emailed to me). I take photos of every document I sign and business card I’m given using their iPhone App and I even forward my Workflowy history to Evernote.

Some people may suggest using Dropbox or Google Drive, but Evernote has a specific benefit that makes it kick ass: Search.

Evernote is built around search. All documents, images and photos are scanned and made searchable. This means you can dump everything into one folder and Evernote will make it instantly searchable from any of your devices. No organizing, no tagging, just sweet, sweet search.

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[ Download our Free Ebook ] – Click here to download our free 111 page ebook on “How to automate the tasks you hate at work using Zapier“.

Communication is a crucial element to success for any business. But for businesses that have an outsourcing operation or runs on virtual teams, communication is life or death. Virtual environments do not have the luxury of being in the same room or building as their co-workers, so the natural communication benefits from working in an office disappear.

Poor communication can lead to lower quality, productivity, and morale across the organization.

Here are 5 tools that can get you and your team back on track and chatting up a storm.

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External Hard Drives suck. They take up space, USB ports and are far from a secure place to keep your precious photos and videos.

I used to have three external hard drives, now I have none. In this post, I’ll explain how I got rid of them and how you can too.

A while back I switched from Dropbox to Google Drive since they are now offering 1TB of data for just $10 a month. But the change had a few unexpected benefits, one of which was allowing me to get rid of my external drives.

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