How to Keep Your Customers Focused and Engaged

In a SaaS, measuring customer engagement allow you to get a comprehensive look at how your customer feels about your product. Most importantly, It also tells the likelihood of the customer turning into a long-term user.

Acquiring your customers is just a first step in the fruitful partnership process and retaining them is the next big thing.

In this scenario, it becomes essential for companies to help their customers continue using their products and renew their subscriptions. This is where a SaaS Customer Engagement model as an organizational process comes into the picture.

There are basically four approaches around which a customer engagement model is built to serve the customer.

1. High Touch Onboarding

The customer experience starts right from the moment they decide to purchase the product, if not before. If the product configuration is a complex process, it is owned by the Customer Success managers who take full responsibility for getting the customer onboard. In either case, they would either give the orientation by themselves or appoint an appropriate technical staff for getting the customer started.

2. Low Touch Onboarding

If the purchase and configuration of the product have been automated and don’t need manual intervention, then it is called Low touch onboarding. It is usually carried out by initiating the configuration through online links sent over mail or directly on the vendor’s website after the customer has made the initial payment. The training materials in the form of the user manual or video tutorials are enough in this approach for the customer.

3. High Touch Post Onboarding

This approach is mainly used for the enterprise customers who pay heavy revenue for using the product to cover the cost of one-to-one Customer Success Manager appointed to engage the customer on all aspects. In this SaaS customer engagement model, the CSMs act as customer’s peers rather than sellers in the journey of the customer’s usage of the product. It is the responsibility of the CSM to help their customer realize the value of the product and help them use it seamlessly until they adopt the product.

4. Low Touch Post Onboarding

In this approach, when the Saas customer has been onboarded, the seller maintains their relationship with customers through digital or online methods rather than manual. This is a one-to-many approach as the cost of assigning a single CSM to handle a customer account cannot be justified by the revenue generated by the customer. The communication happens through automated alerts and emails, and a need-based Customer Success Manager can be appointed only for the time being to a customer account.

A combination of approaches can be used based on the customer and vendor business profiles-

*High Touch Onboarding / Low Touch Post Onboarding *Low Touch Onboarding / High Touch Post Onboarding *Low Touch Onboarding / Low Touch Post Onboarding

Top 3 Customer Engagement Strategies

1. Build a Success Plan

   
   

   Building a Success plan is the first step towards driving customer engagement. Explain the action items and steps needed to make a vision a reality. There should be tentative dates against each milestone. Most importantly, ensure action steps from the customer as well. This will make them accountable, and together you can lead them to success. And if the customer is able to see success, s/he would definitely be engaged.

   
   

2. Enabling Customer segmentation

   
   

   As the company grows and the number of accounts increases, scaling a business without customer segmentation might lead to hitting roadblocks.

   The advantage of customer segmentation is that each segmented group of customers can be treated similarly as their requirements tend to be similar.

   Now, instead of managing every customer individually, you can manage segments. This ensures better resource utilization. And it helps the customer success team manage more customers efficiently and effectively.

   For example, in CustomerSuccessBox, you can choose various attributes such as health, usage, frequency, users, subscription, etc., based on your business requirements. You can even put multiple conditions to segment the customers more efficiently.

   
   

   If you want to get more information about the various types of customer segmentation and selecting the factors for customer segmentation, check out this blog.

   
   

3. Know the Data

   
   

   You need to consistently share data that has a direct correlation to the customer’s desired outcome. Sharing the adoption metrics and usage data helps the customer know where they are in their customer journey and keep them engaged. It’s a good practice to send the data well in advance before the scheduling meeting.

Driving Customer Engagement through community building

Communities are an important next step in the evolution of how brands connect with customers. It’s not about promoting the latest product or feature – smart companies use online communities to take their programs to the next level by showing customers there is something in it for them. This notion gives them a reason to not only open your emails but actually become active members of your community. They feel empowered to create more touchpoints and become brand loyalists. With the right tactics, the community helps the business save on technical support, as active members will answer questions and defend the brand’s reputation.

Leveraging In product feedback to drive Engagement

Conversations with your customers and feedback are crucial elements for the success of your product. Great products aren’t built in a vacuum. You need a continuous process of getting feedback from users to guide your product roadmap. Tweak messaging, and keep the pulse on satisfaction levels. Product feedback ensures that we aren’t going to build products without having an idea of the potential impact. It ultimately helps you to spend less time building things that people don’t need.

Support tickets are usually good at revealing repeating issues that need to be addressed. So, when an issue comes up multiple times, you know it’s bothering a large part of your customer base. Additionally, surveys like the Net Promoter Score (NPS) or customer satisfaction score (CSAT) are great sources of product feedback.

Final Thoughts

The best products are built based on continuous interaction with and monitoring of the user experience of the people who use your product day in and day out—your customers. The customers buy your product not because you’re a great personality but for the value that you bring to the table. As long as they get value, they would keep using your product and also be your trusted advocate. And to get there, customer engagement is the only way forward.

Also published on https://customersuccessbox.com/blog/how-to-keep-customers-engaged-and-focussed/.