The Soft­ware-as-a-Ser­vice (SaaS) indus­try, by its nature, was one of the first to tack­le the issues asso­ci­at­ed with dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion: rather than buy soft­ware phys­i­cal­ly on disks and man­u­al­ly install it onsite, SaaS cus­tomers pay to access soft­ware plat­forms online. As well as deliv­er­ing con­sid­er­able oper­a­tional sav­ings for the soft­ware ven­dor, the SaaS busi­ness mod­el offers a num­ber of advan­tages to the cus­tomer such as remov­ing many of the costs and has­sles of instal­la­tion, pro­vid­ing an extra lay­er of data secu­ri­ty and resilience to oper­a­tions, and updat­ing auto­mat­i­cal­ly, ensur­ing access to the lat­est ver­sion of the soft­ware. Giv­en the rel­a­tive matu­ri­ty of the SaaS indus­try, it pro­vides some use­ful point­ers on how busi­ness­es faced with the chal­lenge of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion can con­tin­ue to pro­vide great cus­tomer ser­vice. Here are five key lessons learned.

The Sale Is Just The Beginning

While the ideas of cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment and cus­tomer track­ing are hard­ly new con­cepts, many busi­ness­es tend to focus their avail­able dig­i­tal bud­gets almost exclu­sive­ly on activ­i­ty that will gen­er­ate online sales and con­ver­sions (e.g. search engine opti­miza­tion) and ded­i­cate lit­tle thought or resource to what hap­pens next, post-sale. In SaaS, it has always been assumed that a sale to a new cus­tomer is sim­ply the open­ing stage of an ongo­ing rela­tion­ship. In order to encour­age cus­tomers over to a new way of pur­chas­ing and con­sum­ing soft­ware, the SaaS indus­try pro­vid­ed cus­tomer train­ing and cus­tomer sup­port helpdesks from its ear­li­est days. As the SaaS mar­ket matured, account man­agers for indi­vid­ual clients became the norm, allow­ing ven­dors to gain deep­er insight into their clients’ busi­ness oper­a­tions and moti­va­tions on a one-to-one basis. Les­son 1: Any busi­ness trans­act­ing online should treat a first-time con­ver­sion as the begin­ning of a new rela­tion­ship and, from the out­set, resource their oper­a­tions to deliv­er ongo­ing cus­tomer com­mu­ni­ca­tion, track­ing and sup­port.

Every Customer Is Unique

Cus­tomers engage with your prod­uct for a wide vari­ety of rea­sons. Each cus­tomer has their own unique needs and pri­or­i­ties, and is often look­ing to utilise the soft­ware in a way that dif­fers from oth­er cus­tomers. By pro­vid­ing a ded­i­cat­ed account man­age­ment team, giv­ing cus­tomers a famil­iar, con­sis­tent face/voice to engage with over time, it becomes pos­si­ble to gain deep­er insight into cus­tomer needs, and tai­lor prod­uct and ser­vice deliv­ery accord­ing­ly. Les­son 2: Don’t be tempt­ed to treat all online cus­tomers the same. Embrace the poten­tial of dig­i­tal to tru­ly per­son­alise the prod­ucts and ser­vices you deliv­er to your cus­tomers.

Sweat The Product

Soft­ware plat­forms are often com­plex tools offer­ing a vast range of func­tion­al­i­ty that many users bare­ly scratch the sur­face of. Cus­tomers often pur­chase soft­ware to per­form a nar­row range of par­tic­u­lar func­tions and are unaware of the wider ben­e­fits the same piece of soft­ware could offer their busi­ness. For this rea­son, SaaS ven­dors pro­vide cus­tomers with a peri­od of ini­tial train­ing and then ongo­ing sup­port to ensure that clients are ful­ly aware of the full range of offered func­tion­al­i­ty and how it relates to their own indi­vid­ual oper­a­tions. Les­son 3: Keep your exist­ing cus­tomer base engaged and up-to-date with the lat­est products/service improve­ments. Estab­lish­ing ongo­ing two-way com­mu­ni­ca­tion pro­vides the oppor­tu­ni­ty to deep­en engage­ment and increase the life­time val­ue of indi­vid­ual cus­tomers.

Don’t Forget Your Existing Customers When Rewarding New Ones

A key cus­tomer ben­e­fit of the SaaS mod­el is that users receive prod­uct updates auto­mat­i­cal­ly and in real-time, remov­ing many of the tra­di­tion­al headaches asso­ci­at­ed with man­u­al­ly installing soft­ware updates. The SaaS indus­try rec­og­nizes that it’s impor­tant for every cus­tomer to have access to the lat­est ver­sion of the prod­uct – and their busi­ness mod­el facil­i­tates that. Giv­en the per­pet­u­al pres­sure to gen­er­ate new busi­ness, mar­keters are often tempt­ed to cre­ate offers and cam­paigns tar­get­ing new cus­tomers that, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, leave exist­ing cus­tomers out in the cold. This can alien­ate your exist­ing cus­tomer base and, in the age of social media, lead to a seri­ous PR back­lash. Les­son 4: Be care­ful that any cam­paigns tar­get­ing a new audi­ence don’t alien­ate the core of your exist­ing cus­tomer base.

Everything Changes

No mat­ter how much con­sis­ten­cy you pro­vide in terms of account man­age­ment, every cus­tomer will undoubt­ed­ly exhib­it changes over time (e.g., the peo­ple man­ag­ing the rela­tion­ship at the client side may move on, or inter­nal com­pa­ny changes may change the nature of your engage­ment). For SaaS ven­dors, this may mean that a peri­od of cus­tomer retrain­ing is required to ensure that the client’s team is get­ting the best from the soft­ware. Even if your busi­ness is sell­ing to indi­vid­ual con­sumers, their needs and tastes can also change dra­mat­i­cal­ly over time (e.g., the pri­or­i­ties of a young, sin­gle man change when he becomes a hus­band and father). Only by main­tain­ing an open two-way con­ver­sa­tion with a cus­tomer can you know his pri­or­i­ties. Les­son 5: Don’t pre­sume that your track record with a cus­tomer will speak for itself: con­tin­ue to com­mu­ni­cate mes­sages that demon­strate your under­stand­ing of their needs now and their future needs, and rein­force the rel­e­vance of your products/services in meet­ing those needs.