How to Start a SaaS Customer Success Department?

Customer success is about doing all you can to help your customers succeed with your SaaS product. A well-functioning customer success department can improve customer retention and satisfaction and drive revenue growth. Therefore, having a customer success department in SaaS can help you succeed.

In the following article, we will explore key steps for starting a SaaS customer success department, from defining your customers and strategies to including the appropriate tools and hiring the right CSM team. 

What is Customer Success in a SaaS Company?

Customer success is a relatively new yet crucial aspect of any SaaS business that has the power to make it or break it. But what is SaaS customer success?

In the ever-growing SaaS environment, customer success is defined as the process of ensuring your users derive value from your product at the earliest stage of their customer journey to encourage them to continue using it for as long as possible. 

This is done through multiple effective CS strategies with the prime goal of turning new customers into satisfied, long-term ones. Above all, it involves understanding your customers’ needs and goals, so that you can guide them through onboarding and product adoption as smoothly as possible. In the end, the ultimate point of having a customer success department in SaaS is building meaningful long-term customer relationships and maximizing customer lifetime value. 

What Does a Customer Success Team Do?

Customer success teams are responsible for ensuring that customers derive value from the product and succeed with it. Their primary goals are to improve the customer experience, increase customer retention, and drive growth. 

Customer success team roles include:

• Customer onboarding
  • Helping new customers get started with the software.
• Customer training 
  • Educating customers on how to use the software effectively and achieve their goals.
• Customer support
  • Providing timely support, like answering questions and addressing issues and concerns.
• Customer engagement
  • Continually engaging and communicating with customers to understand their demands and needs and answer them accordingly.
• Renewals and expansion
  • Working towards ensuring customer renewals and recognizing and driving expansion through demonstration of the value of the software.
• Customer advocacy
  • Identifying customer advocates and encouraging them to promote the software by providing case studies and testimonials. 
• Account management
  • Managing customer accounts; tracking customer success KPIs, customer health, monitoring usage, and identifying at-risk customers.

How to Start a SaaS Customer Success Department?

SaaS companies usually have subscription-based models, which means their success depends on increasing customer acquisition while decreasing churn. Once you have a steady customer base, it is time to focus on customer retention. SaaS customer success strategies have the goal of doing precisely that, alongside ensuring upselling and customer loyalty.

Now, let’s see how to get started with building a customer success department in your SaaS company:

Define Your Ideal Customer

This step involves identifying the traits of customers who have a genuine need for your product and are most likely to benefit from using it. Focus on industries where your product fits, determine the company size, and consider demographics and behavioral factors like purchasing behavior and decision-making processes. 

Build a Team 

Building a successful CSM team in SaaS means you have to gather employees who have a unique set of skills and enough experience. Firstly, CSM team members must have excellent communication skills. They should always maintain a customer-centric approach, which means they must be empathetic towards customer needs and focused on ensuring a positive customer experience. Each CSM team member must understand the software to the core to be able to provide technical guidance to customers. In the end, look for people with high analytical and organizational skills who are willing to collaborate within multiple teams. Here is a final tip on how to build a customer success team – besides prioritizing candidates who are skilled in relationship management and customer service, make sure to select those who have a deep understanding of your company’s core values and products. 

Create a Customer Journey Map

This part involves determining the phases a customer goes through when interacting with your platform. From defining customer personals and identifying customer touchpoints, to mapping customer actions, identifying success indicators, and reviewing and updating the customer journey map, this step helps you understand customer needs better, improving their satisfaction and customer retention. 

Determine the Features your Platform has that Customers Need the Most 

This step involves understanding your customer goals, preferences, and challenges. Luckily, you can do that by gathering and analyzing customer feedback and data. Then, conduct target market research to identify industry trends and competitor offers to see whether the given feature offers something valuable to the market. If the feature you plan to develop will have a positive impact on customer success but doesn’t require significant effort and resources to develop, go for it ( high-impact, low-effort rule).

Şet KPIs

Key Performance Indicators in Customer Success include Customer Lifetime Value (measuring the expectancy of total revenue you can get from a single customer), Net Promoter Score (measuring customer loyalty via asking the question “ How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or a colleague?”), Customer Churn (showing the percentage of customers who stopped using your product), and Net Revenue Retention (measuring the revenue retained from existing customers over a certain period). 

Track Customer Health Scores

This step involves assessing certain metrics to evaluate the overall satisfaction and health of your customers. This is the best way to identify at-risk customers and prevent churn. Customer success software Akita integrates with various data sources like CRM, support ticket systems, and product usage data, gathering core customer information. Akita calculates customer health scores based on average metrics’ values, which ensures a 360-degree view of each customer. Also, it monitors changes in customer health scores, alerts you about the unpopular ones as soon as they happen, and provides recommendations on desirable actions. 

Customer Success Team Structure and Tasks

Although the structure can vary based on the complexity and size of the company, a typical hierarchy within a SaaS organization when it comes to the customer department looks like this:

• Customer Success Managers
  • The SaaS customer success manager is responsible for effective customer onboarding, building strong relationships with customers (relationship management), speeding up product adoption and engagement, driving revenue growth through expansion and renewals, customer advocacy, creating and executing customer success plans, and effective collaboration with internal teams. 
• Customer Success Technical Support Specialist
  • Tech specialist provides tech assistance and troubleshooting support to customers. He/she works with engineering and product teams to resolve the given issues and helps customers use the product adequately and successfully.
• VP of Customer Success
  • The vice president of customer success is responsible for overseeing each customer success process within a company. 
• The Chief Customer Officer 
  • The CCO role includes everything related to post-sale, but mainly customer renewals and expansions, onboarding, training, and communication. The main difference between a customer success manager and a chief customer officer is that the CS manager focuses on managing relationships with individual customers, while the chief customer officer is responsible for overseeing the entire customer experience and customer success strategy SaaS across the company. 

Again, customer success team roles can vary depending on various factors, but what matters most is that each role is crucial in ensuring the satisfaction and success of customers. Together, they form a unified team focused on ensuring the best possible customer experience there is. 

What Should the CS Department Focus on in the Beginning?

At the very start, the CS department would focus on building a strong foundation for good customer relationships and future success for both the customer and the company. Building an effective customer success program involves having a structured, well-defined approach, and knowing the right starting points is essential. 

A structured onboarding process should be designed in a way that helps the customers through the implementation process smoothly and easily. Make sure to first understand customer needs so that you can tailor the process based on them. 

Tech support is an essential part of customer success journey, with the aim of ensuring each customer a positive experience while effectively using the product. It helps the customers resolve complex and less complex issues rapidly and navigate each setup with ease. 

Having a well-organized customer success management system in SaaS is essential for customer retention and revenue growth. The system should function in such a way that each customer is ensured to achieve their desired goals with the software. This is why one of the main aspects of good customer success management is automation. If you wish to know how to get into customer success or are responsible for starting a CS department, it is more than useful to know that you can automate everything from onboarding, health scoring and communication to feedback collection and analytics. This is how you can free up your or your CSM teams’ time to focus on building strong bonds with customers, which is ultimately what customer success is all about. 

Customer Success Benefits

As a crucial aspect of SaaS businesses’ success, investing in the CS department offers more key benefits that include:

• Increased customer retention
  • Loyal customers are happy customers. If you manage to help customers achieve their goals with your software, there is a great chance they’ll stick to it for longer and increase your customer retention rates.
• Revenue expansion
  • Satisfied customers are more likely to renew their subscriptions or buy more products or features,  which all contribute to revenue expansion. 
• From Customers to Brand Ambassadors
  •  By delivering exceptional customer experience, engaging with customers on a regular basis, and encouraging users to share their experiences through case studies or testimonials, you are one step closer to turning customers into brand ambassadors. 

Conclusion

Starting a SaaS customer success department can have a significant impact on customer retention, satisfaction, and overall business growth and success. By maintaining a customer-centric approach at every step of the way, implementing adequate customer success software like Akita that can help you develop effective customer success strategies, and having a motivated and skilled CSM team by your side, you can build long-term relationships with customers and position your business better in the competitive SaaS world.