Building Lasting Relationships with SaaS Users: 5 Key Techniques

5 Ways to Earn the Loyalty of

SaaS Customers in 2024

by Chip VonBurg, Chief Customer Officer

Not all loyal customers will eventually become advocates of your brand, but all advocates have to become loyal customers first.

A recent study by Zendesk found that 74% of customers will forgive a company for its mistakes after receiving excellent customer service.

It also showed that customers who are “loyal” to your brand are less likely to churn, more likely to make another purchase from you, and more likely to recommend your brand. So, we must continually ask ourselves: What makes my customer loyal?

I like to view customer loyalty as moments and events that lead to a customer giving us repeated business over time. Loyalty is never free; it is earned. To get it, we must successfully deliver the value to the customer that they are looking for; in return, they will renew their business with us and, even better, expand it.

So, how do you earn the loyalty of

your customers?

In the book Out Care the Competition , a customer experience model called C.A.R.E. outlines four key priorities that, when pursued concurrently, support an engaged staff and customers, a trusted reputation, and most importantly, loyal customers:

Camaraderie among employees
Authenticity in every circumstance
Reliability of action
Ease and simplicity for your customer

At every touch point in the customer journey, you have an opportunity for a customer’s emotional experience with you to be good or to be bad. That’s why you need to make them all count, being intentional about your interactions with the customer at each opportunity you have.

Here are five focus areas I recommend investing in to make each customer touch point count toward establishing and fostering customer loyalty.

1. Onboarding

According to that Zendesk study , 53% of churn can be attributed to poor onboarding, weak relationship building, and poor customer service. Taking action to inspire loyalty in your customers should start during onboarding, or even before. Onboarding that nurtures customer loyalty should offer a number of ways for them to engage more deeply with your products, such as instructor-led classroom trainings, on-demand e-learning trainings, and role-based certifications. The more trainings that your customers attend and the higher their course completion rates, the deeper their engagement with you.

2. Adoption

Take action to shift customer success from firefighting ad-hoc problems to proactive and predictive problem-solving, identifying issues before they even happen. Reaching out to customers at the right time, with the right message and the right action, from the right team, helps you shift your brand image from vendor to partner. Telemetry is key in achieving this. Understand from your customer data how customers are using your platform, and which industries use it most. Build triggers about what stage customers should be at in their adoption and have informed conversations with them about helping them achieve their goals.

Case study

Emerson Improves the Customer Journey with ABBYY Process Intelligence

3. Business outcomes

Focus on your value proposition to the customer and how the values of your products help your customer achieve their desired business outcomes. To trigger your customers to love your product, you need to show them how it plays a role in their success. Understand your customers’ objectives and help them measure their progress with those objectives by using your platform. Translate their business outcomes into metrics. This is what will make them continue wanting more. To do this, you must work closely and regularly with them. In ABBYY, we’ve seen that when we have a Customer Success manager assigned to an account, we have 14% more success in net retention revenue than when we don’t.

4. Proactive customer support

Many support teams function primarily reactively. Customers reach out when they have a problem and wait for assistance, often with an escalation in progress. Today, it’s possible to move to proactive support, utilizing predictive AI to analyze all of your support interactions with customers to extract sentiments, identify at-risk tickets, reduce resolution times, quickly identify the root cause of the support issue, and drive customer satisfaction.

Knowledge Centric Support (KCS) emphasizes knowledge as a key asset. Email and phone are the two highest cost support channels, while self-service continues to grow significantly year over year as the customer’s preferred channel of support. In the software industry, approximately 35% of support volume consists of how-to questions or questions related to product functionality, which should be able to be resolved via self-service. Identifying the gaps in your knowledge base and regularly improving its content will not only decrease your support volume but better serve your customers.

5. Renewal

Integrity is the name of the game when it comes to renewals. There is enough ambiguity in the world today; when it comes to renewing product licenses, customers want straightforward, clear answers to their questions: When does my license end? Who can answer my questions? What changes should I make? Upfront and early communication with customers about renewals is key. Understand why certain customers churn and use that information to retain others. Walk with them every step of the way. When you approach every customer interaction with integrity, they will come to expect that of your brand.

Customer advocacy vs. customer loyalty

Establishing a growing base of loyal customers is only the beginning of winning in Customer Success. Loyal customers will return to your brand, make repeat purchases, and continue to choose your business over the competition. Customer advocates take it a step further. They have an emotional connection to your brand and will promote your brand on your behalf to their friends and colleagues.

Not all loyal customers will eventually become advocates of your brand, but all advocates have to become loyal customers first.

Walt Disney summed it up best: “Do what you do so well that that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.”

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Building Lasting Relationships with SaaS Users: 5 Key Techniques