We have put together a list of the top 10 customer success best practices for SaaS companies.

#1 Share Customer Data across teams

Preventing churn is everybody’s job and the Customer Success team is not the only group in charge of retention and growth. CSMs should work to ensure that every important conversation, interaction, and engagement is recorded and shared across the enterprise.

#2 Build outstanding feedback loops

Feedback will help you to gather relevant information about your user personas and their opinion of your product. Listen to their opinions, let them know what you’re planning to do, always remember to circle back and close the loop. At the end of the day, you’re building the product for them.

#3 Maintain very high touch for first 90 days

The first 3 months sets the tone for the following 9 months. A customer’s experience in this formative stage when they’re paying the most attention to your product must go well, so be especially attentive and proactive.

#4 Excel in customer education

Make your customer better at using your product by educating them constantly, and share ways in which other customers are using the tool. Don’t keep claiming that “your product is so easy to use”, get to a place where at least some of your customers start saying that.

#5 Let your customers contribute to your backlog

Make sure your customers know their views on the product are important, and let them feel the partnership in improving things all around. As a result, customers will feel appreciated and invested in your product.

#6 Regularly review each stage of the customer journey

CSMs should regularly review all the significant stages of the customer product journey, from onboarding through adoption and renewal. Each stage should be assigned clear goals that relate to the effective use of your product, which should then be tracked regularly.

#7 Design an excellent product tour!

Instead of building one long and boring product tour across your entire product, try to build several smaller product tours (with 2 – 4 steps), that are triggered by a certain context/event. Build product tours for each of your features, but show them only when the user starts to use the individual feature. Not before.

#8 Personalise your interactions with each user

Ensure your interactions with the customers/users are personalized (In App, mail, text, etc.). In an age of hyper personalization, it creates a sub-par experience if you send out broadcast mails with no personalization on information, context and timing.

#9 Use a great Customer Success tool

Customer Success is tightly correlated with Customer Support, Product Marketing, and Development. Ensure you are using a great platform that saves your team’s time and efforts, automates a bunch of things, is easily accessible by all team members (across departments), and provides relevant information about your customers.

#10 Finally – Touch, Touch, Touch

Apart from the automated tech touchpoints, every customer should be touched at least once a month, big customers should be touched once a week, and your most important customers should be touched multiple times a week. A “touch” is not an automated email, by the way. It is a recurring meeting, sincere email or better yet, a well timed call.

Do read through and share with us on any customer success best practices we may have missed in comments below. Also, feel free to download a copy.

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